Hello ,
A friend has asked me to print some pieces for him and wants me to add the Trademark symbol. (The Circle with an R in it)
I am printin with an A1 and filament is PETG
I am initially printing this at standard. 0.20mm Standard @BBL A1
no changes . and the print comes out terrific . Unfortunately the Trademark symbol is not printing very well at all. It is a 3mm circle so I understand that is probably outside the limits of my .4 nozzle.
I separated a design into a 3 separate STL files and introduced them into Bambu studio.
I was able to separate the colors in Bambu studio but experimented with changing the printing parameters only for the Trademark symbol. This did not work as the software would only let me make minor changes to the separated components.
I also changed my printing setup to 0.08mm Extra Fine @BBL A1 and that added quite a bit of time to the complete print which would normally be ok but my fried is wantin multiple pieces .
I’ve found “Arachne” as the wall generator to be able to handle finer details with a wider nozzle but honestly I would just get transfer paper or something similar or even just make it a regular label/sticker.
Changing layer height isn’t going to help here, that effects Z and your problem domain is XY. You need to change your line widths.
Easiest way to do that is with a 0.20mm nozzle. Doubles your possible resolution, more or less. If you’re stuck in 0.40mm nozzleville, try as flabby suggested and use arachne, and dial the "minimum"s of that generator down to try to make it emit smaller lines. Bambu extruders are great and can reliably do it, but you’ll run into physics problems eventually trying to lay a bead of plastic smaller than the aperture.
I also find “sinking” text into the surface to be more clear than “protruding” but your mileage may vary there.
What I am unclear on is how you are representing the symbol. Is this pre-rendered STL? If so, then you’re at the mercy of the technology which may not have the resolution you’re looking for.
On the other hand, have you tried using the text function and letting the slicer render the font? That might have more resolution and would be scalable over a much broader size albeit at each magnification you will have to scale to the next nearest point size.
Here’s how that might work. NOTE: not all fonts in the library have the “Registered Trademark” ® symbol. In this example Segoe(default) does.
In your use-case you would add the ® symbol to your trademarked logo as an assembly, but it would print at near-perfect resolution. Or at least as perfect as the printer can resolve it.
Here’s the 3MF file to see how that was done. Embossed text.3mf (81.0 KB)
I do have a .2 nozzle and will certainly try that but as my friend wants to make quite a few I was trying to avoid that because of the additional print time. If it was just a one off i would definitely make that the goal. thank you for taking the time
I will also give the sinking the text a try as well that does sound promising.
Thank you and I must say all things I had not thought of.
I had created the symbol in photoshop and then I used Lightburn to trace it.
I also tried originating in Lightburn with Lightburn text and in both cases saved as SVG files.
I do not have the skill set to use any high end design programs but I am very confident in Tinkercad and imported the SVG file into Tinkercad as well as creating from scratch in Tinkercad so I feel like I had exhausted my limited knowlege but I will now try your suggestion and print some test from your advice. Thank you for sending the 3MF file and I will try that tonight and let you know how that goes.
I appreciate every one responding so quickly
The challenge you’ll find when converting vector formats such as SVG, is that once you bring them into the slicer, the slicer converts them to a Mesh and that’s when problems occur when you try to scale. If you don’t scale the model before importing it, the results are much more faithful to what’s in your design system such as TinkerCAD but as you probably seen firsthand, that’s a lot of trial and error work.
Here’s what I might suggest.
Do all of your logo work is vector-based format you are most comfortable with. NOTE: If you’re trying to convert a pixel-based bitmap to a vector format(SVG) in lightburn, you’ll never get the same resolution as you would in the native file.
Once you have the vector format SVG file, import that as an independent object and then add the Registered trademark as a separate object.
Th advantage here is that you’re leveraging the vector scaling benefits of the slicer’s own font library for the registered trademark thus not relying upon external scaling and for the logo, you let the slicer scale that independently thus giving you the greatest chance of scaling without distortion.
There is a limit on how small text can be while still coming out good. Proximity to color swaps and how the top surface is laid seems to impact this quite a bit
Couple things to try:
Make the circle and the R independent, then raise the R a layer or two higher
Make the whole symbol slightly larger
Find an existing SVG for the symbol online
Take your PNG from photoshop and use free online SVG converter
Arachne wall generation + swap inner/outer wall order
Can you share pics or describe how the symbol is coming out? A picture of the sliced symbol from Studio would help as well
In my experience, its fairly easy to tell if a fine-detailed portion of your print will come out well. Look at the top few layers in the slicer and the travel pathing, if appears too messy, it probably is
I tried to redo the logo and I am assuming the reality is the circle is too small. I have manipulated it to a proportion that any bigger than 4mm and it is too big. I actually believe that 3.5mm is the better size for my project. as every one suggests that this ids probably pushing the limitations of a .4 nozzle and .2 layer.
I am close and appreciate all the advice. I will continue to try and at this stage I have a few other projects that have backed up on me so will put this aside for a minute. I will post any progress as I continue to see if this is possible. You are correct about not getting. the same resolution I just couldn’t make it work. So far the closet I have been able to get was creating the circle and the R in lightburn and then making sure before I save it to make sure it was at the size I needed wgich was a maximum of 3.5mm x 3,.5mm. When I imported that into tinkercad there was no need to resize it and that was the best result I have had. Havong said that , it was still not perfect. but of course I am looking at it extremely closely and when you realize that in its such a small part and people I showed believed they were looking at a Trademark logo. So I may be on the right track biut will continue to truy and I will add more information as I discover.
Thank you for your suggestions and I will continue
My friend took the only example i had before I had a chance to photograph it so sorry I haven’t got it to show but I will do another and explain what I di do along that way
The math is not your friend here. This simply wont’ work.
Just for Giggles, I tried rendering the trademark symbol and I was being generous. I used a 4.449mm diameter circle as opposed to your 3.5mm goal. I used 0.2mm nozzle setting and even changed the outer and inner wall width to the lowest setting the slicer would allow of 0.05mm and then I sliced the file.
The news here is not good. You simply cannot render this in the real world. This is at best, a 3 wall print and as you likely found out, that just does not work.
Thank you all for helping and yes it seems the consensus that it is just too small is correct. at the end of the day it did not work but I will say that the closest I got was in Lightburn making a circle and placing an R inside it as two separate pieces. Then I sized them so that the circle was 4mm. I exported the two components as SVG files. I imported them into Tinkercad and place them on a 8mm x 8mm square ( random and something that would print quickly).
In Tinkercad I placed the two pieces onto the square and set the square to 2mm high and the Trademark sign to 1.4mm and placed it on top of the square Then saved as 3 separate STL files. Opened them in Bambu Studio and selected 0.2mm Standard @BBL A1. Then all I changed was Wall generator to Arachne.
I am using an A1 and a 0.4 Hardened Steel nozzle. Otherwise I left everything standard.
It’s not the prettiest I’ve seen printed but when you look at it like this it seems pretty bad but when you place it on a part that is effectively 10 times bigger it puts it into a perspective that you actually see it as a clear and sharp R. Of course I am half blind.
I will keep at it and continue to try the advice from every one here .
Thank you to all who helped .
Truth be told, while I realize the output is not perfect, I would not have expected this high a quality that you were able to achieve. Considering how far you are pushing the boundaries, I’d say you should be proud of the is level of output.
Thanks for sharing your final results, your efforts help the community. I know I learned something new just now.
Thank you and as much as I would like the credit for this , I was only able to do so by asking and reading. Thank you to every one for the assistance and examples.
