I’m finishing up a model for the upcoming ‘cozy Christmas’ contest. Part of the model has various ‘Happy Holidays’ messages depending on the preference of the user (Merry Christmas, Season’s Greetings, etc).
I’m trying to decide if it would be better to just add these alt options as separate plates in a single profile, or upload completely separate profiles with each of the options.
I would prefer to just do plates, however the major issue there is that it artificially inflates the displayed print time because it assumes that all plates are needing to be printed, and I don’t want to turn off people from printing.
In this situation, do people just do different profiles typically?
According to Print profile upload guidelines They do want options on separate plates, but do not prohibit variants as separate profiles.
Given what I’ve seen and my experience so far (and also previous discussion starting from Is this cheating? - #26 by Johnny_Bit) it seems that the best way to do it would be to have a main profile with the recommended option on it and then separate profiles for different options that do make sense. Best of both worlds I think.
Until MakerWorld enables direct links to specific objects within a profile, creating additional profiles is the best workaround. Also MW needs to rethink displaying overall print time of a profile. Who is going to actually click on a profile that says 100+ hr print time?
Yes, they really do. Ones with multiple variations/plates get skipped, with users instead printing the same profile, the only change being the profile author deleted some plates. This definitely makes me want to do separate profiles on more stuff, which just adds more clutter.
I think one solution could be within Bambu studio, indicate which plates are ‘required’ and which are ‘optional’. Then calculate the print time based on only the required plates.
I don’t have enough experience to say one way or the other in case of rafts but I always thought a profile should represent the optimal way for printing the model. I had a bit experience with setting up supports where I did enable them in situations where they’re not strictly necessary but do improve things A LOT. On the other hand, I disabled them when slicer suggested to enable, but enabling improved the situation by very little and you lost material for supports. Is it the same with your situation, then do what you think is optimal.
One option to include all designs in the same file is to just have the optional designs/models outside of the plate. In this way all designs/models are included within the same profile, but the calculated time shown i MW is for what is on the plate only. Hence reflecting a more realistic print time. This is not a good option for directly printing from the app, but if the user opens the profile in Studio they easily can move the desired design onto the plate.
Just make sure that you have done a test print for all designs/models in the profile before you move them of the plate and save the profile, also naming the objects properly to ease selection for the user.
I could not find anything for or against this metode in the guidelines…
So I did experiment with this solution for this model: 18650 Battery Protection Canister
However, I have also uploaded separate profiles for each design to allow for direct printing via the app…
I would provide two profiles. If not someone else might come along and add a second profile, specifying the option. It is a rather common occurrence on MakerWorld.
