It’s a new year, it’s a new PrusaSlicer
release. This one is 2.6, alpha 3 at this time at the
time of me recording , and it brings with it some features that, each one on their own,
are just, nice, but when you put them all together, it makes for an overall well improved
package. Of course, this isn’t just for Prusa machines,
you can use PrusaSlicer with any 3D printer that speaks gcode, in fact, the 2.6 release
now out-of-the box has tuned profiles for the new Elegoo Neptune series, Creality Sermoon
and Ender-5 machines, the AnkerMaker, and even for Print4Taste’s food printer, a printer
I’ve reviewed here on the channel, too. Some of the new features we’re going to
look at are adapted from other open-source slicers and then fine-tuned for PrusaSlicer,
and, vice-versa, I hope that other slicers pick up the rest of the features, too. Open Source is pretty beautiful when it works! But enough rambling, let’s check out what’s
new with PrusaSlicer 2.6. Right after a message from today’s sponsor! Microswiss make high-quality extruders, hotends,
nozzles and heatbreaks for your 3D printer’s toolhead. Their new NG extruder has an ultra-short distance
from the dual drive gears to the hotend at just 41mm long, making for a compact and highly
precise setup. Microswiss’ nozzles and heatbreaks fit many
existing setups and they all come with a low-friction, wear-resistant coating that reduces printing
issues and enables you to use aggressive reinforced filaments. And right now, Microswiss are running a nozzle
sale - get 5 for the price of three! Upgrade your nozzle today and maybe make the
jump to .6 while you’re at it. All the info in the link in the description
below. Alright, before we start, this is a pre-release
piece of software, bugs aren’t just possible, they are expected. For me, it was working flawlessly, but in
any case, it uses a separate config directory, so in any case, it’s not going to mess up
your PrusaSlicer 2.5 profiles. Okay, first big feature - support material. This is the big one. You now get tree support! I’ve also seen it called “tentacle support”,
that works, too, so instead of building these sparse blocks just vertically straight up
to the area that needs supporting, these can now snake around your part from the build
plate, and reach into spots that otherwise would need to have support material printed
on top of the part itself. That can leave scars, especially on darker
material, and it’s pretty often awkward to remove from tight spots like holes and
little cubbies. Tree support just goes outside the part if
it can, but if it must, it will still fall back to anchoring itself to the part. These branches are printed with limitations
to how steep they can be, so that they still print reliably, they’re just one wall thick
for most of the time, so even though they are quite rigid, they weigh barely anything,
in this case using PrusaSlicer 2.5 vs. 2.6, it’s using almost 2/3rds less filament for
the support material. If you look at these branches, they do widen
up towards the bottom, so they don’t fall over, but they also branch out towards the
top, so one single printed column can actually support a good bit of area. You, can, of course, configure everything
about these supports to your liking. But the new supports actually work best with
another new feature, and that is automatic support painting. PrusaSlicer has long had support material
painting where it would only generate support material for the areas that you explicitly
marked. Now, thanks to new AI technology - no, it
doesn’t use AI, it’s just smart programmers, I think - it detects which areas need supports
and which don’t, and it does it a lot intelligently than the classic “support anything that
has an angle over 60° from vertical” approach. So for example, bridges, if they’re short
enough, get no support at all, and if they’re above a certain length, they get a bit of
support material every now and then, and then essentially print as a bunch of shorter bridges
between those. If you want to try the automatic support painter,
make sure you also set the support mode to “enforcers only” or you’ll actually
get more support material instead of less. So final thoughts on support material: This
is really cool. I didn’t see any improvements in how well
the tree support material worked with the auto painter, which I guess really wasn’t
the point in the first place, but the part also didn’t look worse - and I think that
is a huge win for using 1/3rd of the material, and being much easier to remove. I’ve seen speculations whether designers
are now going to start factoring this in and mechanical and organic parts are just going
to be printed with a bit of support from now on. Fewer design restrictions, more creative use
of the geometric freedom that 3D printing brings without having to spend half an hour
peeling your part out of a block of support material? Yes please. So there are a couple more headlining features
that you’ll see everyone talking about, but before I also talk about those, I want
to point out one easily missed, but really neat new feature that I think may have been
a byproduct of the new auto support painter. And that is these little messages down here. So when you’re trying to print a part that
probably isn’t going to turn out well without support material, or one that has too little
contact with the bed and might get knocked over, in those cases where it would take a
bit of expertise, a bit of experience to see that what you’re trying to do is probably
not a good idea, this now helps you with making better decisions for how to print your parts
to get a good result first try. I’ve probably not even seen all the different
ways that it can analyze your part and point you towards potential issues with the print,
but I like the direction this is heading. There was a bit of a glimpse of the slicer
trying to be smart in PrusaControl, that was an alternative user interface they did, I
guess as an experiment, and when that was scrapped, the features that had mostly got
carried over into PrusaSlicer. But anything that makes 3D printing more approachable
without being overzealous or limiting, I think is a good thing, and so far, the hints this
system was giving me were really on point. Okay, so the other headlining feature is the
new and improved text tool. PrusaSlicer has supported some basic geometry
manipulation for a while now, that is creating for examples cylinders or cuboids and using
those to intersect with the model, or even using other stls for that. Text is just another one of those modifiers,
where you spawn a new piece of text geometry and then add or subtract it from your model. This is something that you can do fairly easily
in CAD, too, and there are obviously use cases where that would be a better idea than doing
it in the slicer, but here, you can modify and personalize any already exported stl. Now, the new feature in 2.6, is that you can
automatically project your text onto the surface of your parts and choose how much you want
to emboss or extrude it. And that is, onto any geometry you want. And this is something that is extremely annoying
to do in CAD. It’s easy for some surfaces, but once you
have more complex surfaces, CAD tools start to struggle hard to do this precisely - that’s
what CAD is meant for. In PrusaSlicer, it just slaps it on there,
no questions asked. Right now, it only does a “straight” projection,
so if you try to add text around curved surfaces, it’s only going to look good if you don’t
go too close to the edges, that’s the big limitation it still has. Just like before, you can also use the text
geometry as a modifier, so if you want to, for example, just have the infill poking through
for your lettering, you can also absolutely do that. One concern I had here is that this would
be work you’d do on one iteration of your model, and when had to make changes to your
design upstream in CAD, you’d then also have to repeat the entire text adding process
in PrusaSlicer again for the updated model, but no, if you save the entire thing as a
3mf project, you can then come back to it later and simply swap your stl for an updated
version and as long as the origin, the relative position of the mode didn't change, it will
just apply all those modifications the the updated one. So I guess this is just a part of CAD that
you’re now outsourcing to the slicer. Huh. More thoughts on that once we sum everything
up. But on the topic of PrusaSlicer encroaching
on CAD, the cut tool. It’s actually usable now. Well, I mostly used it for trimming models
before, but it could only cut at a certain Z height, so I’d have to juggle the model
to align it, then cut it, then realign it to the bed. Now you can just change the angle. And you can add pins for alignment! The tool works in much of the same way as
the SLA hollowing hole-punching tool, you choose whether you want separate pins or ones
printed onto one of the halves, click the spots you want them, and it chops your part
in half and creates the pins for you. It’s so easy! Two use cases here, printing parts that would
need tons of support material otherwise, like figurines with arms, or just for printing
large models on printers that are too small otherwise. If you glue the seam with epoxy or superglue,
it will be just as strong as if you printed it in one piece - plus, you can choose the
layer orientation for every section separately so you get optimal strength for each one. Again, that’s something that you’d do
in CAD typically. Couple more things that they’ve added that
maybe aren’t worth spending a whole bunch of time on, but I think are still worth pointing
out: There’s now a measurement tool, it’s incredibly
basic at this point, it only measures distance and angle between two points, edges, or surfaces. It doesn’t do the length of a single edge
yet, you have to click the two ends, it doesn’t do surface area yet, it doesn’t do radiuses,
but it’s there, that’s something that I think only Netfabb really did so far, and
while it’s still clunky, it’s still nice to have. Plus, once you measure a dimension, without
doing any math, you can just say “hey, I want this to be 40mm instead”, and it will
scale your part accordingly. Just don’t use this for “calibrating”
your printer, please. Then, there’s a new feature “extra perimeters
on overhangs”, which I was hoping would work similarly to the circular overhang approach
Stefan made a video about recently, but I really didn’t see any difference in how
my parts turned out with it enabled or disabled. There’s now a “open in PrusaSlicer”
option on Printables, you have to enable it both in PrusaSlicer 2.6 and in Printables,
and then it’s literally one click to get designs from Printables into your slicer. The best thing is, this is just a URL handler,
at first I thought it would be some cloud service where now you’d need to log into
your account in PrusaSlicer and then it would somehow synchronize in the background, but
only if the servers worked - nope, it’s just an entirely local process that works
instantly. And lastly, PrusaSlicer is making the 3mf
format more usable - if you don’t know, 3mf is a much more feature-rich format than
stl, at its most basic, it can just be a wrapped-up stl file, but it also supports other, better
geometry formats and it can store metadata about those files, for example specific to
PrusaSlicer, what settings you’re using, the texts you’ve added, assemblies, all
that stuff. But when you’d open that 3mf and treat it
just like you would an stl, PrusaSlicer would want to import all that info and possibly
overwrite some of your print settings in the process. Now, it asks. Thank you. I think this is mostly about figuring out
what 3mf is supposed to be, whether it’s a format specific to, like, slicer projects,
the entire scene and setup, or whether it’s also supposed to be a better replacement for
the humble stl. Because, really, it can be both, but right
now there’s no way to tell which one you’ve got by just looking at the file, and therefore,
no way to tell what PrusaSlicer is going to do when you open it. Good thing it asks now. And that brings us to the final thoughts. A lot of these changes sort of put PrusaSlicer
in an identity crisis of sorts. On the one hand, yes, i absolutely love that
it’s implementing more features and it’s doing it in a way where it’s making them
super simple to use. The folks working on PrusaSlicer see that
there’s absolutely a need for features like the new cut tool or text or the other simple
geometry editing tools that have been available for a while. On the other hand, I don’t know if what
they’re adding is really still feature for a slicer, really, it’s becoming more of
a 3D-printer-file-preprocessing-suite. With the better support materia options now,
too, it’s sort of shifting the traditional approach of doing all the design work and
optimizations for 3D printing in your CAD tool or design tool or whatever else you’re
using to make files, where ideally, you’d get an stl that then, really, you would just
need a tool that converts that converts that geometry into gcode your printer understands. Now, the approach seems to move towards not
worrying too much about 3D printing specifically during your design stage and then having PrusaSlicer
or some other preprocessing tool as an integral and ultimately unskippable part of your 3D
printing and design workflow. I don’t know if all these tools are really
supposed to be in a slicer anymore, but this is what the PrusaSlicer team have to work
with, and I definitely appreciate them adding all this stuff in here. Maybe in the future it’s going to be PrusaCAD,
that would certainly be interesting, but hey, you can really use the tools however you want. If you want to try PrusaSlicer 2.6, again,
currently alpha 3, it’s of course linked below in the description, and if you do, I
would really like to hear what you think about the new tools and how they fit in in the comments
below. I’m sure someone from the PrusaSlicer team
is going to take a peek, too. Hope you enjoyed the video, likesharesubscribesupport,
most importantly, keep on making in whatever style you like the most, and I’ll see you
in the next one.
Nice video and alpha4 is already on github as appimage.