I spent some time last night and today creating a couple 3D models with Cheetah 3D v7b16 using primitive shapes connected together (I'm a total nubie at 3D modelling).


From there, I exported them to an STL file and opened it in Cura.
I haven’t been impressed with having to fudge Cura with 10x scaling and tilting the model to get surfaces. Cura has proven to be a total pain in the @$$ !! The missing surfaces problem plus bugs in/poor design of the drawing path have forced me to find a new slicer. I’ll get to that in a bit.


I have my Peachy setup on it’s mount over glow paper. I’ll slice a file and open it in the Peachy software and “print” it to the glow paper. This is proving to be a fantastic way to test the printer quickly with no mess or fuss.


I had to do numerous iterations between my modeller and the sliced file in Cura. Cura kept doing weird stuff to certain parts of my model. I had one spot where I used a boolean subtraction using 3 cylinders to cut a hole through three overlapping parts (1 cylinder per part. There’s probably a better way to do this). When opened in Cura, this hole would be mangled. the inner surface would look like it was a badly scanned point cloud. Not much of a surface !


Back to the modeller. I replaced a primitive, a boolean & a cylinder, with a tube primitive. I then set the inner surface of the tube to be slightly smaller than the other cylinders used in the booleans. Opened that up in Cura and I now had a nice smooth inner surface :-)


I exported this gcode file from Cura and printed it out. All I got was overlapping shells of each part (in their appropriate places). I forgot to tilt it in Cura so the surfaces were dropped. I reopened it and tilted it. Back to Peachy software for the print. WOW !!! Totally mangled !!!! 2/3rds of my model DIDN’T EVEN PRINT !!!! …and the routing was redonk-ulous !! Successive adjustments and rotation changes did not make this any better. That was it. I was done with this crap…. Time for a new slicer. (Remember....this is a BRIEF recount!! I F$@&$D with this a LOT !!)


Slic3r
http://slic3r.org
I downloaded a couple slicer programs and tried them out quickly. I didn’t do a print with them as there were things I didn’t like and tried another programs…. until I found Slic3r. It is free and open source. It also runs on Mac, PC and Linux. It’s interface is straight forward like Cura's.


Now I didn’t explore Cura that much but there were a few things i didn’t see in Cura that I wanted. My list as such: No more tilting!, Intelligent path routing, no more over scaling, Infill and adjustable Rafts. I got all of this with Slic3r and a simple UI too. As a bonus, Slic3r finds and auto fixes geometry problems with your STLs. Opening my file in Slic3r showed 64 errors fixed! Sweet !


Using the setup instructions for Cura on the Peachy forum ( http://peachyprinter.ipbhost.com/ind...-printer-cura/ ) I configured Slic3r.


Once configured, I opened my STL in Slic3r and exported the gcode. Opening it in the Peachy software worked as expected. I reset the scale option in the Peachy software back 1.0 rather than 0.1 as it was compensating for Cura’s goofiness.


Print Success !!!
As far as test prints on glow paper are concerned, this was the best test i did all day !!! And what a HUGE DIFFERENCE too !!! I had a properly scaled model, surfaces that printed, infilled spaces, a small raft for anchoring to the print base and REALLY Intelligent path routing !!! The best quality test I had ever seen so far AND it only took 6 minutes to print !!! There may still be settings to adjust but it’s looking really good so far !!

I'll have some pics up when I get to it.
More to come…