So, I haven't posted anything in a while, but I thought I'd finish this thread off with one last 3D print discussion thanks to this quote from @gmrhodes13:
I've had a profile set up in Simplify3d that I've used for finer prints. It's essentially been the same as my larger prints, except I slow the speed down to around 60mm/sec and run layers at .100 or .150. The results have been good, but not perfect. Please ignore what I printed and take a look at the quality in these pics:
This a prime example of two totally different settings. First, on the helmet, you can see the results of .2 layer height at 180mm/sec. Lots of bondo, sanding and filler primer in my future. Next, the Snout Greeblies were printed at .100 and 60mm/sec. They're very detailed and will pass muster, but in the flat sections you can still see the line separation and on the "strainer" there's a lot of stringing. Also, the mesh doesn't look good at all. This is one of the primary reasons I'm going to be purchasing a resin printer; I'll turn that thing into a Greeblie Factory.
So, the hot bed heater cable shorted out on me and I had to bust out the soldering iron to fix it. When I was done, I ran one of the prints that's embedded on the SD card that came with the Creality printer. Here it is:
I thought it would be a fast print, but the thing actually took somewhere around 8 hours. However, when it was finished, I was absolutely blown away by the detail, the total absence of layer lines, and even more impressive, the thing printed on a raft that just snapped off with little to no effort at all, leaving a perfectly smooth surface under the cat. It was enough that I couldn't believe it was my printer that did it... stupid lucky cat.
This got me thinking about Glen's aforementioned quote, and since I don't have anything better to do while I wait for my BBB, I decided to print a few armor pieces off using the profile I pilfered from the cat file. By the way, in case you didn't know already, if you ever find a perfect profile embedded into a .gcode file, you can just upload the file using the upload FFF profile function in Simplify 3D. The Upload FFF function recognizes the FFF in the .gcode. Neat! Here's what happened:
Just like the cat, the level of detail blew me away. These are very small items (as you can tell by the 1" squares on my mat). But what happens when you print a larger armor piece like this?
Pretty cool. These will require no Bondo or initial sanding. One layer of filler primer should be all it needs before paint. Also, I'm either going to have to resize these greeblies, or fill in the gap with resin. If I do, the resin will likely be rougher than the print and that's saying a lot. The only downside is that these biceps took 34 hours to print and if I were to print a full helmet with the cat settings, it would take a week. That doesn't sound like fun, but maybe I'll try it when I run out of things to print.
So, Glen, thanks for the tip and thanks to Creality for supplying the amazing FFF file. If anyone is interested in how to pull a FFF profile from a .gcode file, check out this video:
https://youtu.be/SRQ-3nnSa-4
Lol. He even used the cat to do it.