I can appreciate the sentiment that people want a tool that just works, but on the other hand, there are very few tools in this world that don’t require you to develop at least some base level of technique to be used properly. Even a pair of scissors won’t cut right unless you have good technique (that’s why left handed scissors are real).
I don’t find the difficulty in using multi material to be the fault of the machine ( I just don’t understand all of the material science involved in it yet. I’ve built a few 3D printers and other CNC machines over the years and the mechanics of the H2D seem solid. What remains is learning how to use it most effectively and honing various techniques using the smorgasbord of technologies at our disposal. That is filaments, software, and hardware, all of which perform differently in different scenarios. Unforeseen variables aside, there is still no one solution that will work well with all geometries. Technique is the ability to look at the task at hand, and applying experience to select the proper processes that create the highest chance of success. What the video shows is that this person is still experimenting and gaining domain knowledge. Learning things can be very emotional, this person is just expressing some of that in the video.
In regards to how much bambu can do to optimize their presets, they are a business, and so will only tune to what is going to be most useful for the widest range of scenarios. Extreme uses, like printing mini figs, well, usually falls on the users to come up with solutions and workarounds. If you watch this person’s other videos, they have honed a bunch of other techniques for using resin supports on A series printers to get excellent results with mini figs. It would be cool if Bambu released a bunch of presets for mini’s, and added “resin style” support to the slicer, but don’t hold your breath.
Back on the PVA, it is really a terrible material, but I am slowly getting it to work. The thing that has made the most difference is the nonstop drying. It just lives in my Sunlu dryer and I never turn it off. The filament only cools momentarily on the way to the printer’s bowden tube. At the end of a print, I unload the filament and spool it right back into the 70 C dryer (still running). I suspect PVA starts to rehydrate very rapidly at room temp, so even an hour out of the dryer (or in a dry box) and the print quality starts to degrade.
For print settings, I am using normal support, but greatly bulking out the support matrix by lowering the “Base pattern spacing (currently 2mm)” and turning up the “initial layer expansion (currently 8mm)” and the “normal support expansion (currently 5mm)”. Also set Top, Bottom, and XY distances to zero. I also increased the PLA print temp to 230 and the PVA print temp to 245. My last print went very well, but I continue to tweak. I would post photos of all of this, but the interface won’t allow me to do so (just throws an error messages saying I can’t embed media)
Someone mentioned ruining High flow nozzles with PVA, I probably wouldn’t recommend risking those. I doubt they would offer any benefit as PVA is kind of a slow printing material.
