Very new to the 3D print world, having purchased an A1 mini I’m really impressed so far!
On the whole my prints have been great and I’m getting to really know the software. An issue that’s come up twice now is a rough top surface on prints that are fairly tall.
Is this due to me reaching an almost max bed height? or just a setting issue.
Images attached are the top of my last print, one is after i used adaptive layer height and the other is the sliced image.
You can see the top after smoothing is still rough, I’ve changed the speed of the top surface as well but still no joy.
I’ve cut the top part off in the slicer and prints well so that’s what led me to think it maybe a height issue?
It’s definitely not a ‘reaching the top area of the printer’ issue, that is not a thing. These have to be perfect throughout the build volume to expect to get the results we see form these printers. 0.2mm layers has to be 0.2mm from the bottom to the top period (and it is given proper calibration etc).
It seems like you are getting to the proper settings. I’m assuming 0.4mm nozzle, 0.2mm layer height base with variable going down to 0.08mm in the green areas in your screen shots.
Include the .3mf if you can it will give users a better idea of what exactly might be going on but I’m pretty confident that its just the top of the helm is not a perfect circle, its flattened out there making it very hard to get a smooth result because ‘layers’.
Tilting it back or forward would move that layer apex and might give a slightly better result at the cost of a butt load of support, so that doesn’t seem like a good solution.
Based on the size of this helm your best bet is probably going to 0.2mm nozzle with variable layer height, unless you want to do post processing (sand, fill, sand, prime, sand, paint).
Sure, here the file. I do have a 0.2mm nozzle but haven’t actually tried it yet!
Post isn’t an issue with some prints but with this one i wanted it in the silk silver filament I used ideally.
I don’t know. I read again that you cut the top off and it printed well, it’s quite odd. The top in your photo does look more pronounced than the slicer preview but perhaps I just can’t judge the size properly.
What I would try is top surface pattern concentric. It looks better in the slicer and should remove the stitching pattern. And if that isn’t good enough you could go to the 0.2mm nozzle, with concentric pattern and variable layer height this would certainly come out cleaner.
id try manually setting the layer height to small as possible on the top there, or simply set the layer height to the smallest valeu you can tolerate (longer print times).
Also i’ve noticed that Matte filaments look way better in almost every way, like charcoal (matte black) looks almost like a resin print o.O
So maybe try Ash Gray Matte PLA for these kinds of prints
