SuperSkein 1.x
I’ve started a project on GitHub for SuperSkein, the brand-new multiplatform slicing utility written in Processing. It’s not tuned up all the way yet (note the lumpy print above) but I’m convinced you could get at least decent results even with the current version with minimal tweaking, which is why it’s already gone public.
Right now the feature set is really really limited, but there’s a whole class of models that’d work with a single shell (although they’d be a bit fragile obviously) and which perhaps more importantly won’t slice in Skeinforge. Also, it’s quite fast and can slice even pathological (>800k triangles) meshes in a few minutes. It doesn’t do any infill of any kind at this time, so meshes with large flat surfaces will just quietly print as hollow shells, but for organic shapes such as scanned sculptures and 3D characters, this might be the new answer already.
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Dave Durant Said,
July 31, 2010 @ 10:28 pm
Something I’ve wanted in Skeinforge is the ability to have different profiles for different parts of the object.
For example, every Skeinforge profile has settings for raft that define the size/shape of the raft and, here’s the bit I don’t like, the feed/flow rate as ratios vs the feed/flow rates of the object itself. What I’d rather have is a set of raft-specfic profiles that are unrelated (except size relative to the object) to the object being printed. If I come up with one raft feed/flow rate I really like, why make me do the math to figure out the raft ratios on every object profile?
The same goes for things like support structures – as long as the layer height is the same as the object, this deserves to have a separate profile that you can (once the UI gets a bit more jelled) just drag in.
This sort of idea can even apply to the object itself. At a single layer height, you can get a lot of variety in the aspect ratio of the thread (“width over thickness” in skeinforge terms) and, sorta the same thing, how quickly a thread can be laid down. Wouldn’t it be great to have a gcode generator that could pick from a selection of feed/flow rates for a given height then chose the right one for a particular part of a print? Or, since that sounds like a ton of work, let the user say (via UI) how they want various bits to be printed? This part can be sloppy if it’s fast, that part needs to nice detail, this other one is a M3 bolt hole near a wall so it needs to be thin, etc..
Just some random thoughts..
Chris the Carpenter Said,
February 7, 2012 @ 8:59 pm
I have been using SuperSkein for a bit now and I truly love it. It works great, and I only had to modify a few things to spit out the code I need for Mach3 and the way I have things set up. The issue I am having is that no matter what I input, either a .stl from SketchUp or a .stl download from Thingaverse, SuperSkein thinks that it starts at -2.3. No matter what I run through it, I end up with a bounding box ending in Z -2.3 to height_of_project-2.3. When these designs are printed, they all have 2.3mm chopped off of them. I speak Processing fluently, and I have dug through all the code. I can not figure out where this -2.3 is coming from nor can I find the best place to add a “patch”. I would appreciate it greatly if you could give me your thoughts. Thanks bunches in advance. Chris rocketbrand (at) gmail (dot) com.