We back last year in April reached out to Bambu via the facebook group and suggested the idea of “Ironing Patterns” they came back and actually released 1 other option which we know as “Concentric”. Although we wish it could’ve been a handful of options like maybe gyroid or grid we were thankful since it helped quite a bit on top surfaces of small print models.
Now were back suggesting what we think could be another huge implementation since we find ourselves pick and choose this option quite a bit recently. How’s the idea of being able to select a flat surface to be ironed sound?
So say you’re printing a figurine that has a base attached, now your only options are to iron the top, every solid surface, or all layers. Every option other than top surface only adds a large amount of print time depending on size…
Now say you have “Selected Flat Surface”, you’d click the top of the base and in return only ironing that surface will occur and the model will print at nominal speed the rest of the way.
I could definitely see this being implemented on OrcaSlicer first but having to use Studios for our MakerWorld profiles feels like were going back to the stone age… The lackluster amount of features and user customization to print models is OUTRAGOUSLY different…
I find ourselves never using studios unless were uploading to MakerWorld, which honestly should open the door to allow OrcaSlicer profiles at the very least to support 3rd party software devs…
Lets see where this goes. If I had the time I’d fork studios and attempt this ourselves but coffee can only do so much
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An option for selecting faces would be convenient, no doubt. For now though, modifiers can do this well enough, I believe
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Could you elaborate how modifiers work on this? Are you saying add geo to the model “Base” in this example and have iron top surface active for that?
After loading your model you can right click a blank space and add a modifier. You shape the modifier and move it to cover the top surface you want to have ironing. In the slicer settings globally you put no ironing and then in the object settings for the modifier you put ironing. Now only top layers of your base model that are within the modifier object will have ironing.
The slicer is very advanced and can do an insane amount of work with modifiers. Adding a convenience button likely isn’t worth it for every possibility since modifiers do it more then well enough
Okay this is what I thought. This isn’t a common method though or standardized when your speaking to novice users which I’d confidently say a vast majority of bambu users are.
To an experienced user yes but this also might add ironing to a face or surface that you might not want as well because the slicer wont let you modify a polygon but only standard shapes. (square, cone, triangle, cylinder) now if you could pull and drag say points along the shape to contour around a model then I wouldn’t see the need for my suggestion.
But the ability of simply selecting a face/surface you want iron and right click selecting facet/surface to avoid would be pretty seamless to any user. Only reason I bring this suggestion up is because the coding is there already just like ironing patterns. The task to implement is how the slicer will generate a stop or bounding region.
Modifiers can be custom shapes, you can import an Stl as a modifier to do very unique and powerful stuff. Also, the simple shapes are easily manipulated to precisely cover whatever top layers you need.
Your initial post about outrageous lack of features is still a bit ehh to me. Modifiers are real powerful and fulfill quite a lot of different needs and I suggest looking more into using them as they’re not hard to use and novice users should be fine to learn and use it.
Maybe something like the support paintint tool can be made for ironing surfaces?
Iron painting?
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The shape is still simply that object… there isn’t any form of translating the geometry of it only scaling… I’m not trying to create an argument but I like a solid debate.
If you’ve sat down and compared side by side the advanced features of OrcaSlicer / Bambu Studios… it’s a day and night difference and BL is completely able and competent enough to add these or simply a couple main ones yet they haven’t. Seam Gap should’ve been implemented v1. It’s a prusaslicer standard feature. Our latest model released on MakerWorld could be seamlessly sliced on OS with 1 active feature but on Studios it’ll fail (make overhangs printable) another prusaslicer add in. Given I’m also revising the first rev to make it error free for studio users.
Basically users wonder why failures and errors are occurring with their prints and I completely am on the fact that studios does the bare minimum to help achieve the best results.
This is all besides the fact of my post though. I understand you use Modifiers to achieve this or use for CAD, we use Autodesk Fusion so I’m not wasting time tinkerCADing within a slicer. Modify is ment for exactly what its title name is, modifying. So if i need to add 100% infill in a region ill use that or add a simple hole that sounds good. But studios lacks the measuring feature also which is even more so proving my point of how far behind studios really is yet they forked prusaslicer…
This is my 2 cents but I just don’t agree with modifying being the end all solution when we should want to move forward in the industry not settle.
This is what I’m talking about!! I love that idea, obviously there’s some areas you wouldn’t be able to iron but this would work! 
Yeah we should be able to use the exact same tool available for color painting - for ironing and also for fuzzing. It’s doable with modifiers but would be easy and elegant with painting.
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