Vase Mode is Great! 3D Printing Inspiration and Creativity

[Music] this doesn't work at all I love Vaz mode printing I love printing in bars mode I love designing for bars mode but it's not something I've always had such a passion for I remember getting my first 3d printer and discovering bars mode and it was really cool and so much fun to watch but it kind of fell into that category of things for which there isn't necessarily a specific use and so it fell by the wayside for a long time but I've come to appreciate that there's more to bars mode printing than just printing Bowser's and there are actually practical uses as well what's really got me excited things like things like these so twist boxes and storage boxes implemented in bars mode and I'll talk a bit later about why I find this such an exciting idea but let's talk about the advantages of bars mode the disadvantages were the limitations of Farr's mode and the design considerations that we can take when we're designing for bars mode but first what is bars mode basically the idea with bars mode is that the entire form of the print is rendered with one continuous line of extrusion that has winds its way around and up the form until it gets to the top and that's when the print completes so there is there's no stopping and restarting and the entire print is formed with just one thickness of you know one extrusion with thick of plastic and the whole thing is invariably hollow no infill no nothing now that's an idealized view because in reality we tend to have conventionally printed bases as well but that's the general idea so an important thing to bear in mind is that this is all implemented in the slicer so this is not something we necessarily do at design time although we definitely design with the intention of printing in bars mode but there's nothing in a an STL file that says this is a baz mode print it's something that's entirely implemented in the slicer and it's something that somebody who pointing explicitly chooses to use and that has some implications for design that we'll get onto now designs for VARs mode printing all have one particular quality and that is continuity and form so if we cut a plane through this design anywhere we would have one single outline that forms the entire thing we can't have holes we can't have anything else we can't have branches and islands and so on everything needs to be continuous so that the toolpath can just be one line that never starts and stops now that continuity is also required on the z axis as well all along that height because any discontinuities there lead to things just falling apart so for example if we had say this with just one object if we tried to print this conventionally that would be fine because the inside of this lower half would be full of infill and then we'd get the top layer and then this would continue above that in bars mode we would have only the outside perimeter here and then a sudden shift into here which would just fall straight through the middle and we just have spaghetti everywhere so continuity is a really important aspect of as mode design and it's probably the most obvious thing to that and the fact that everything is solid so advantages what are the advantages of bars mode and why do we even care that it exists well first and foremost it's fun it really is it's it's so cool just watching the hot end trace just this minimal path that defines this whole shape there's kind of a performance-art aspect to it where especially when you contrast it to conventional printing where the hot end is doing multiple parameters and infill and whatever else the toolpath might dictate instead you just have this purity of shape and it's it's glorious and wonderful so that alone is absolutely yeah a great reason to print things in Val's mode but there are some more tangible reasons as well and first speed it's really fast because again we're just doing the absolute minimum that defines this out of shape and what also comes along with that is a minimum of filament usage because again we're only laying down the absolute basic requirement that we have to form this whole outer shell now the other thing that's really great about vitamin ting in terms of the the outcomes is it's really neat it's really clean you don't get a lot of printer artifacts in avaaz mode print because you just have this one continuous line there's no stopping and starting there's no retraction issues there's no travel moves so a lot of the stuff that needs to be tuned in a printer isn't really relevant in VARs mode so just about any printer can render a really neat print in bars mode and who doesn't love that vaz mode does have limitations however let's call them constraints first and foremost strength and rigidity are heavily compromised in a bars mode print so VARs modes tend to be very flexible and they tend to be very weak because the entire strength of the print is based on how well these lines stick together so I had one of these twist boxes with me the other night when I caught up with friends and one of them looked at it and said hey this is a buzz mode print can I crush it but somebody else claimed it because there was a twist box and everyone loves twist boxes we'll get to these again later but yeah point is that Avaaz mode print is not your friend if you need strength or if you need durability it's light duty stuff only so one thing that we can use to address that is just use a thicker nozzle but you know nobody heard that crack did they even with a thicker nozzle we're still limited by the the adhesion between these lines so it doesn't solve every problem but vaz mode has other limitations as well like overhangs so you know this thing is pretty neat I mean it and you wouldn't think twice about printing this in the conventional print but I can see right through it I'm fortunate that I had two different angles that that form those ribs because each second one is holding the whole thing together if it was just this angle and a consistent rounded thing around the whole base it would just fall apart that that just would not be printable because the lines are too far apart horizontally to stick together with that kind of gradient so I generally find that I stick to about a 45 degree angle these are the finger hole in sets here at 45 and I generally won't push it much beyond that now I can't deal with that to some extent by using different extrusion widths but it's a definite limitation and there's only so far we want to go another limitation is around well let's call this a vulnerability actually around changing filaments now obviously it's entirely possible to do and you should do it because it's awesome however it's worth bearing in mind that every single part of a vast mode print is critical you can't afford to have under extrusion at any point because the whole thing will just fall apart so if you're changing filaments and there's an issue reap rhyming the nozzle and you end up with a bit of under extrusion for a few centimeters you destroy the print so every time you do a filament change you've got that extra little bit of risk so this was not my first attempt at this one and I it took me some finessing on the printer that I was using to get it to work just the way I wanted so that I would get that consistent reliable pre priming now there is a more subtle limitation which has really only become apparent to me recently with vial mode printing and that is that when we're designing for vars mode we have control over the outer geometry but we have no control over the inner geometry because that is in the head of the slicer we define the the outer form and the slicer takes that and it forms a tool path to render this thing such that we'll have a hollow inside and we'll have a wall and so on but that's all based on the hardware that you're slicing for as well so suddenly we will lose some of that decoupling between the design and the printing so ordinarily if we were printing say a regular 2 box let's pretend that these weren't bars mode we would define we would design such that there's a certain tolerance between these internal surfaces and these external ones so that we have a nice neat fit and everyone will be happy and we can do that generally because we have control over every part of the geometry but in bars mode with this lid here for example we can define this outer geometry and we can define this out of geometry but we can't define the internal geometry of this object and that internal geometry is going to be completely dependent on the settings in the slicer so when we're designing we're suddenly needing to consider the behavior of the slicer and the intended printer and the extrusion width in order to make a successful design so for example here you have somebody's out of the way here is the same model more or less printed on a one millimeter extrusion width so it's much stronger it's much heavier these two objects are the same model though they were the same STL file these two are different because this one was printed anticipating a one millimeter extrusion width and thus this whole thing has to be wider than this one so this should actually fit directly on here as it does because this internal geometry is the same in these two boxes but the external geometry isn't and what that means is we need to separate STL files to separate designs in order to cater for two different nozzle sizes and that's not normally something we have to think about when we're designing we think well we're designing to be sliced for an FDM printer and the slicer can work out the details of you know what the nozzles might be and the extrusion width and so on but we don't have that luxury with print width as mode because we're trying to intuit that internal internal geometry based on what we know about what's going to be printing it down the line so that slight loss of decoupling does actually get significant it's not ordinarily something we care about if we're doing something like a vast it's only when you start needing to fit things inside a bias mode printed object that this becomes an issue but enough about the limitations of VARs mode I mean we're here to talk inspiration and creativity in 3d printing and vars mode is all about that I mean vaz mode is just pure shape and it is great for exploring shape an exploring form so I love using VARs mode just to see how does something look when it's printed I mean maybe I'm working with a shape that might have a purpose for some reason eventually but for now is just something that I'm working through creatively this form for example was a combination of two different profiles it was this compositional thing I did an open s CAD and this trigonometric expression I was also doing in in open air scan and I combined them together with some twists and things to look cool just to explore you know how this thing looked and possibly because I wanted to watch it print because VARs modes are just as mode prints are just great to watch but it's great for that it's it's so quick it's economical on materials if that's a big deal but it's a great way to see how things actually turn out in reality so if you're exploring something say like iterated fractals and yes there's obviously going to be a question with detailed things as to how small you can actually resolve things and still have them print and vials mode is a quick and easy way to explore that kind of thing this for example is just tessellating fractals on a plane and it's it's really cool and I should get back to it and actually do something a little more refined but yeah ra's mode was a great way to just quickly put things together and see does this concept even make sense is it something I want to pursue further so it's it's both a means of exploring shape and a means of validating ideas that's really convenient and really practical so from that point of view it's wonderful but VARs mode has that big constraint where everything needs to be connected with no holes and no gaps and no discontinuity and that can be a limitation but it can also be a real creative driver so as an example I wondered whether I could do a hex array in VARs mode and how that would turn out and this this turned out really quite cool no I did this because I had designed a boardgame print they used a much more conventional hex grid design and I liked the idea of a quick vaz mode print as an alternative now I never did actually progress beyond this but it was really cool the idea of using VARs mode as a constraint really drove that idea and it also drove this thing which was this kind of skeletal vars mode design that's obviously limited to may have one single profile to trace around the whole thing so the question was can I represent something that looks like a skull and looks like you know a spine purely with this VARs mode outline because bringi Daddies that's vows mode in action there but this was so much fun to to work on it was a real puzzle to to come up with an approach that would work and I know since its kind of scaling and so on scales but this is a really good example of something that was purely driven by the constraints of VARs mode and that's something I really value now another thing that I really love exploring in bars mode is the idea revised mode assemblies so oh that's a horrible noise so VARs mode pieces slot into other vials mode pieces perform multi material designs and like this pinstriped bars where the actual stripes are in fact if I can get one of those out VARs made prints in themselves that happen to slot in and it's interesting the combined object is actually really quite rigid because these internal bits really brace it now it's interesting to consider the limitations we talked about earlier in terms of the internal geometries because it doesn't affect any of these in any way because the parts that are in contact with each other are all external geometries that happen to protrude into the interior but the actual insides of the prints isolated and don't touch anything else so not an issue for these and I've done more of these than I realized actually this shows off another benefit of vars mode and that is that if you're using translucent or transparent filaments it's fantastic it lifts the light through so much more easily Oh actually I've got a even better example of that so this is a clear filament and look at that I mean you can see straight through this because it's just one thin layer of filament now as well as those creative pursuits Barr's mode can be surprisingly practical as well so here's a tool caddy that I'm actively using for various print of related things which is just a vars mode print of a bunch of hexagons stuck together now this thing is printed with a a nice big nozzle sort of one millimeter extrusion with so it's pretty pretty strong pretty tough but we can also get really good results with a smaller nozzle if we do things like corrugations so this is when we get into the things that we can do that will affect the way a VARs mode print will come out so corrugations are hardly a new design tool I've been there are plenty of other materials that use corrugation think corrugated iron sheets or card or cardboard paper and so on corrugations give stiffness and rigidity at least on a particular plane now in a 3d print what it also does is it increases the material that's used in the wall so it's no surprise that the corrugations impart that extra-strength because they also give just a bit more substance as well now it's interesting that tight corrugations give a lot less flexibility and a lot more rigid rigidity than for exactly these very broad ones so I wanted this to be a lot more flexible but to still have this strength in this axis so I've got these nice big chunky square parts there and you'll notice that if you compare these sides to the ones that had this curve in here these are a lot kind of floppy err which is really interesting because curves and tight corrugations will give a much more rigid plane I guess than something that doesn't have any of that so you'll notice that this has a certain amount of it has a certain lack of structural integrity it's really the the corners here that hold it all together so by adjusting these profiles we can change the way that things come out by comparison so this twist box these sides that are curved all the way along are really quite rigid I mean there's there's flexibility to the design but so much less flexibility then than these flat sides because this constant curve through it gives it that extra strength which is really cool and it's it's great to know that we can control these things this is completely independent of how we're printing it I mean obviously there's a different level of rigidity in this versus this when we have much thicker walls but that's kind of a relative thing so despite the fact that where we've become slaves to the slicer and enter the the printer in designing these things we can fight back by using these design tools and these design techniques to control how things come out so another great example is this trace and this tray is just open tray with corrugated sides and it has a reasonable amount of stiffness and these these walls is wooden strong because this is intended to be stackable okay so if we compare this though to this version all of these internal partitions which are of course connected to the outside because it's one perimeter these internal partitions all become part of the overall structure so we can flex it on the actual slots themselves but overall this is a much more rigid and a much tougher design than this one but really the petitions are there for the sake of partitioning offer a storage box not because we're after some particular quality but it is important to remember that adding these sorts of features will affect the way that the print comes out so what's great about all of these trays and kgs and so on is that they're quick and easy to print and they serve a useful purpose but they're not quite as cool as the storage boxes with lids I love doing this I do love that it's the precision of printing is such that it's the air pressure that slows that down so why am I so enthusiastic about vars mode storage boxes of all things and it's because I never thought I would say that it's actually practical to print storage boxes on a 3d printer because economies of scale are what they are and it's almost certainly cheaper generally speaking to just go down the street and buy some kind of storage solution and it'll be cheaper and it'll be better than the sorts of things we normally print but this kind of turns the table on that because if we look at this thing it's so light this uses very little filament you could probably turn out a heap of these from a roll of filament they're quick to print they're easy to print I could print one of these more quickly than I could go and buy one if I had to go buy 10 maybe they that would win but the point is that these things are easy to make and it overcomes one of the limitations of VARs storage stuff in general which is these are fairly weak until you put them together and suddenly you have a lid that reinforces a base which gives you you know an enclosure but it also gives you that strength it's suddenly much more rigid it's much stronger and it's actually practical to use as a box I never thought I would say that it's actually practical to make storage boxes on a 3d printer that are actually worth having and that aren't ridiculously overpriced compared to the alternatives likewise with this one which is obviously much bigger we have these kind of flexi square profile bits on the side which we could I mean if you wanted this to be less floppy you just make this a much tighter corrugation and that would achieve that but this thing is quick to print it's sizable it's relatively durable I think it's noisy and once we put the lid on top it's solid it's really solid and it's actually practical to use which is why I have a few of them I have a few of these too so I'm just I'm really blown away by the fact that VARs mode is letting me do something that I wouldn't do normally on a 3d printer printing storage boxes I wouldn't do this for the conventional print except as a novelty but with vars mode suddenly I'm prompted to do this out of practicality and I never thought I would say that so I'm just really excited for exploring this whole Avenue so where to from here well you should print more stuff in bars mode whether it's exploratory shapes and things or whether it's more practical things now I've got a bunch of designs for regular twist boxes already uploaded but if you're interested in browse mode twist boxes which you should be now I will have a tutorial up for this very soon hopefully by the time you're watching this now you can also just download this object but it'll be a paid download but you don't need to pay because you can watch the tutorial and make it yourself and make it better you can improve it and do it the way you want to do it I would say that you could change it so it's not a hexagon but why would you do that when hexagons are so cool so until then I will see you in the tutorial and have fun with your Vaz mode printing [Music]

Channel: Clockspring 3D

Views: 21,719

Rating: 4.8644066 out of 5

Keywords: vase, mode, 3d printing, 3d print, 3d, print, printer, creativity, inspiration, storage, decor, spiralize, contour, outer

Id: tba6KHk4qRk

Length: 25min 7sec (1507 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 14 2018