Answer to Print Prep and Slicing Test Problem

In this video, we will walk through the answer to the print prep and slicing optional test problem. So, it began with the starter file that you downloaded that had the first three sections: the starting geometry, where I just created three of the geometry that we’ll use for placing and slicing. If you want to learn more on how these were created, you can check out our lising course.

Then I have our geometry to place on build, so that gear lattice bracket and bracket are all in one implicit body list that we’ll use for our 2D nesting with our requirements here. And we have our torus as well, which we will use our Orient Object to place on the build plane. We also had this printer information section, but the starter file only contains this build volume.

So the first thing that I did was use our Centered Plane from Box Floor and made that a variable labeled it build plane, using that build volume. You could also have used our Corner Plane from Box Four for that as well. To begin placing our parts, I used our Bounding Box 2D Nesting first. So let me open that up. For the bounding box, I went into our parts for 2D nesting and chose that bounding box from there, with all three of those in there, our build volume, same as we were given in the printer information, and that 10 mm part-to-part offset, 0 mm platform offset, and a 1 mm perimeter offset.

Because this is a transformation list, I have to use this in a Transform Object in order to actually have this happen to my part. So if I turn on that visibility, we can see that they are now all placed on that build plane within our bounding box. So these three are placed, and then the next step was to place my torus using an Orient Object, and I placed mine around here. I saw there was some space. You could also have something that maybe looks a little bit different on how you are orienting your parts and placing them in different locations.

For our torus, I’ll isolate that view, and if I use my source plane, which is going to be at the minimum point of that torus’s bounding box, and the destination plane, I just did this visually looking at the options we had available. So if I show that build volume, our Plane from Normal I placed here, and the reason I placed it here is while that center of the plane is in my latest part, because that’s the minimum point, we’re going to see that that’s placed well. So I just had a starting plane that was 0 0 and moved this around to a spot that I thought made sense. You could have also used a different plane, maybe you defined that origin instead of being the minimum point, it was just the minimum in the Z and the center in the X and the Y by defining each of those values individually for the X, Y, and Z. But this works fine for our application. So again, if yours looks a little bit different, that’s okay too.

Now that my parts are placed on my build volume and on my build plane, I can slice them. So I did this in two ways. You again might have something slightly different than me, but I used our Slice Body for all three of those, bracket and the gears. And if you look here, you can see I have that sliced. Now, something to note is I have my frame used, which was an optional input. If we look at our Slice Body, I double-clicked to add that frame. And the reason I have the frame is if we do this at the origin of 0 0 0, you can see I have some noise at the top of my part. And the reason for this is that when some sliced planes coincide exactly with the horizontal surfaces of a part, you will get this type of noise. And we can see this pretty clearly if we turn on those three parts, you can see that that’s about right at that horizontal surface, and so it has some issues with that.

So one thing that you can do is choose the centroid of your part as that frame. If you’re using this one part, and usually that will be fine. Another option that we can do too, and this is what I’m doing in this option, especially because I have multiple different parts, is I added that frame and I just moved this up to 0.5 mm in that Z direction. And the reason for this, and I have this in our note as well too, is that we’re doing half of our layer height, and by doing that, while it was hitting it originally, now because it’s half of that layer height, we’re going to get something that’s nice and clean and it won’t hit that portion. So something to think about also when you are creating these designs, if you’re getting that kind of noise, you might need to change that frame. Also, you might want to have a, for instance, a lower, you might have a different layer height, different feature size when you would actually be printing these. But I just kept with those to make this relatively quick to run.

So that’s our Slice Body, and then I also used our Slice on Build Plane to create our torus, same feature size, same layer height, and I just placed in that build plane in this example. And that’s why I needed to have that build plane, that Center Plane from Box Floor originally as well too. Because I have these four different slice stacks, I’m going to merge our slice stacks. I could do a Merge Slice Stack of these three and then merge them again with a Slice on Build Plane, or what I did in this example is used Concatenate List. So if I look at our Merge Slice Stacks, you can see I have two items I want to place in the slice stack, but one of them is already a list. In order to actually place this, I’m going to create one list, so concatenating them together with that torus slice and all our other slices. And to learn more about our Concatenate List, you can go to the lesson linked below this video in our intro automation course. But now I’ve merged them, so they are all going to be in one slice stack.

Then the last step is to export these slices, and we’re exporting them to Renishaw and using that ASCII format. And that’s the answer to our print prep and slicing optional test problem. There’s a lot of ways you can create something in nTop, so maybe your workflow is a little bit different, but hopefully this shows one example of how we can go through that test problem and the answer for that.