weirdness in the infill

[curious aardvark]

So I stopped a mould print mid print as i needed to print something else
Also figured it's useful to have something showing infill, to explain it to people.
The print was set for 10% infill.

And then I saw this:

weirdinfillthing_800x299.jpg

Can anyone explain what the splodge of plastic is doing in the midst of the infill ?
This was a simple openscad design. With a stretched sphere removed from a cube.
I've never stopped a print midflow before, so is this kind of random plastic splodge normal ?
It's different both sides as well, which is even weirder.

It was sliced and printed from makerware.

[jimc]

I cant tell by the puc. If you preview the gcode does it show up?

[curious aardvark]

don't know - is that the same as print preview in makerware ?

I'll have a look...

No, preview just has honeycomb pattern.
I'll try previews different settings.

Okay, that's weird. It looks like it's some kind of hidden extra infill. You don't get it at 30% percent but you do at 10-15-20-25.

Maybe it's there to support the cavity. As the honeycomb infill gets thicker the other stuff gets smaller.

Huh - just goes to show, you never really know what's inside things :-)

[jimc]

yeah man i dont know since i have never used makerware. i use simplify 3d and it has a real nice gcode preview where you can exactly what is going to happen when you print.

[Geoff]

So I stopped a mould print mid print as i needed to print something else
Also figured it's useful to have something showing infill, to explain it to people.
The print was set for 10% infill.

And then I saw this:

weirdinfillthing_800x299.jpg

Can anyone explain what the splodge of plastic is doing in the midst of the infill ?
This was a simple openscad design. With a stretched sphere removed from a cube.
I've never stopped a print midflow before, so is this kind of random plastic splodge normal ?
It's different both sides as well, which is even weirder.

It was sliced and printed from makerware.

The mesh isn't manifold that's all, it hasn't intersected the meshes in Scad and just plonked them together, you did run it through netfabb yeah>

[curious aardvark]

nope never used netfabb.
The outsides of everything are always what i want them to be - never looked inside before :-)

[jimc]

usually when something prints very strange like that it ends up being errors in the model like geoff said. download netfabb basic or you can use their cloud service. either way it will tell you whats wrong and correct it.

[curious aardvark]

I don't actually care enough to spend time running perfectly useable models through yet another piece of software - was just curious what caused it :-)

So thanks for the info :-)

I also find that models print quite a bit faster than makerware tells me they will. Which as it sliced it and knows exactly how fast everything is going to go, seems weird.

Would that be something to do with the print acceleration thing in the firmware ?

[3DPBuser]

never looked inside before

Can't it be seen when it's printing?

[curious aardvark]

well not easily.

For one you have to look down on it. And for another I geenrally don't stand there watching a print till it's done :-)