Pushing the detail level

[Cymon]

Quoting myself here so I get the best chance of finding someone who clue me in.

From http://joesmakerbot.blogspot.com/2012/07/pushing-detail-detail-pushed-back.html:

As soon as I saw pocket tactics I knew I was going to be printing it. And what a great opportunity to dial in my printer settings to get the best possible prints of very small details as fast as possible of course.

Quarter for scale. The fire mage on the left was printed at a feed rate of 60mm/s and a layer height of 0.2 mm. The result was pretty good except for that blasted seam where the perimeter starts and ends (not pictured). 

 So when I printed the Druid in the middle I rotated the model 180 degrees so the seam would be up the back. I also decided to push things a bit by turning on the skin plug-in so I printed perimeter layers 0.1mm. (Also at 60mm/s). The result was crap all over. 

I tried again but only slowed down to 40mm/s and increased the filament diameter by .02mm. The result was much better, but still rough on the staff and around the edges of the robe and around the sleeve. The staff is understandable since the original model has a ton of detail in the staff. But the edges of the robe and sleeve shouldn't be that rough. But it's good enough that I want to move on to a different model.

The next try I may adjust the filament diameter up ever so slightly and turn the speed back up to see if that's the problem. Only I don't have the filament I want to try it on yet so this experiment may be on hold for a little while.

If there are any experts out there who can clue me in to any tricks I'm not trying I'd be very grateful.

[Dan Newman]

On 24 Jul 2012 , at 9:17 PM, Cymon wrote:

> Quoting myself here so I get the best chance of finding someone who clue me
> in.
>
> From
> http://joesmakerbot.blogspot.com/2012/07/pushing-detail-detail-pushed-back.html

Make sure that you have the Cool plugin enable (active) in SF. From your pictures,
I think you might, but figured I'd mention it. It makes the print go a little
slower so as to give the prior layer a chance to cool a bit. Pretty important
when your layers are very small. You don't need to worry as much if you print
four or so of those figures at the same time (e.g., with Multiply in SF enabled).

Dan

[Cymon]

I do have the cool plugin enabled, but I'm not sure it's doing anything. I tried again, this time printing the archer and another piece from the set. Nice and fine details but printing 2 should give the layers more time to cool, right? But no dice. Result is more or less the same.

I'm running some experiments this morning to see if it's the skin plugin causing me grief. I have a theory that the skin plugin isn't letting it cool between halved layers.

[Jetty]

Is this Replicator?

Try 20mm/s, and if you have acceleration on, try it off. If you see a
difference, please
post a closeup of 20mm/s v 40mm/s.

[Cymon]

I am running that test right now, Jetty. I'll have a result at the end of the day. 

Meanwhile, here's the results of this weekends fiddling: http://joesmakerbot.blogspot.com/2012/07/continuing-to-push-detail.html