Follow Along: Slice and Export

In this lesson, we will add to our print preparation file from the previous follow-along video and now add slicing to export this out of nTop. So, I have my parts to print in that transform object. I have that as a variable, and I also have my printer bounding box visualized.

And I will add a new section called slicing. If you don’t have your own print preparation file from the previous follow-along, you can also download it below this video. So, to view the different slicing options we have, we can look in our manufacturing tab. So, we have our different slicing options that we can Slice Body, Slice Lattice and Hatches, Merge Slices, Boolean Union, Subtract and Intersect, and then we can also export these slices.

So, I could just choose our Slice Body, and if I have everything above that build plane, that is good to go. We can also choose to include negative Z if you didn’t prep your part on that build volume and it’s not above zero on the Z-axis. I can also go to my additive manufacturing Tab, and we have some options as well under our build preparation, specifically our Slice on Build Plane and that offset and checkerboard slices. But I’ll choose our Slice on Build Plane from that build preparation on the added manufacturing tab. I will delete that Slice Body, but pretty similar layout as this one.

The body we want to slice will be all of our parts to print, so I can drag and drop that transform object in here. If you didn’t make it a variable, you can make that a variable now. For feature size, to keep this quick, I’ll make this 1 mm. Layer height, I’ll also use at 1 mm. And our origin plane, I could go into our part and printer information, or I could just type in build plane, select that one, and select out of that. And now I have our slices. So, I’ll right-click and make this a variable, and I’ll label this part slices. And if I turn off our part to print, we can see what that slice looks like.

So, note that I also had that higher feature size tolerance. So, when I’m looking at this with our parts to print, I don’t see those lines going all the way through for our torus and our cone, but if I look at this, it is there. Part of that is just because of that tolerance. It’s going to be solid inside. So, when you’re creating the slices, you want to play around with that feature size, that layer height, and I just kept those relatively large for this example video.

So, now that we have our slices that we want to work with, we can export them. So, some of our options to export are here in our added manufacturing tab or in our manufacturing tab. For exporting to an EOS, that’s the machine we used in this example, we can just place this as our slice stack, place that path where you want to save these, save it as ASCII or binary, and you can also choose to indicate if this is a support or not. So, these are not; I won’t have that checked, but you could also check that.

We also have other options as well. So, you can play around with based on your inputs for your printer. Maybe you need to export as CLI. You can place that in there. A lot of different options here. And if you don’t see the printer that you are working with or the export information, feel free to add that as a comment to the end of this course when doing the feedback form.

Along with exporting the slices, we can also merge these. So, know that this is five, these are five slice stacks that we’ve created. So, if I wanted to merge these all into one, I could go into my slicing section and choose our Merge Slice Stacks. This takes in a list, but we already have that list, so I will delete that and put in our part slices. So, now we’ll have them all merged as one.

You can also use our Boolean Union as well to combine multiple stacks into a single stack. So, same thing, we’ll delete that slice stack list and just place in those part slices. You can also choose to trim, a lot of different options, simplify different ways that you can play around with your different ways that you can edit your slice stack.

I’ll also show an example of a custom block that we can use for slicing as well. So, I’ll close this section, add a new section, and I’ll label this just custom block slicing. You can download this custom block in CLI Slice Body by Tiers, but I can go into our view imported blocks, import this block, and I’m going to use our CLI Slice Body by Tier. So, I’ll open that up. You can see it’s right into my notebook. If you haven’t gone through our entered automation course, or are not familiar with custom blocks, I recommend that you go back and do so, and I have that link below this video as well.

But we have this in our notebook now. So, for the body, I’ll close our placing parts and open up our part orientation. Let’s turn on that minimum support orientation. We’ll just use that one. So, I’ll place this in as our body. Our slice height, I’ll use as 1 mm, and slices per tier, I’ll choose 7. For our minimum feature size, I’ll use 1 mm, and tier number for export, I’m going to use a Sequence block. You can learn more about sequences in our in automation course. I’m going to just add this in here, and I want to start at one, have an increment of one, and a total count of 13. And this is a scaler list, but we need to have an integer. So, in order to do that, I can go into this block details under properties, and I can just have that rounded option. So, now when I place this in here, it would be fine if I tried to put in this scaler list, it wouldn’t let me.

And we can also export that. So, this custom block will break that Slice Body into multiple tiers that you can export, as that’s why we’re going through that tier number for export. We can see again that that slices per tier, that’s going to be an integer as well as that tier number for exports. That’s why we had to do that, and that’s why we also had to start with an index of one. It’ll just yield an error if we had that, and this would be one up to the number of tiers that we had. So, let me save this. I’ll just label this as CLI tiers. It’ll run through that, create those tiers for me, and then if I turn on this visibility, we can see it’s created those 13 tiers that I have asked for export from my sequence, and we have this sliced like so. So, that’s just an example of one of the custom blocks we have, and we have a couple others as well that you can play around with, create your own slice file, but this explains how we can slice our part with nTop as well as export to our printers.