New "Quality" and "Material" presets are confusing.

[whosawhatsis]

I've just started looking at 1.1.0, and my initial impression of the new preset system for print settings is that it looks interesting, but it isn't very intuitive. I like that it appears to be possible to modify any setting for either print quality or material alterations (while those that are not included are left at default values, right?), but the menu is not very easy to navigate. A filter that would allow you to type a few letters to narrow the list would be useful. It's also not clear what will happen if these sections contain conflicting settings, but I'm guessing it's nothing good. It would be nice, for instance, to be able to set start codes in each section and have them appended rather than overriding one another, but this will obviously not work for other types of settings. I also foresee this getting pretty complicated when multi-extruder support is added. I think I like the direction these things are going in terms of functionality, but the interface could use some streamlining and clarification so that it's easier to know what effects your changes will have.

I'd also like to see an option to set raft/brim/support presets separate from print quality settings.

Also, there really needs to be a way to duplicate a preset so that you can make a modified version of it.

Will there be ways for printer manufacturers to pre-populate these preset lists as well as providing default profiles?

[kevinepope]

Thanks for the comments! We'll be taking a second pass at the preset UI to smooth things out. An important thing to understand is that the presets are meant to be small subsets of settings that override the base settings in a specific order [base < quality < material(1) < material(n)], think of them like the layers in Photoshop. Anything that is being overridden by a preset is then shown with a colored overlay.

• Raft/brim/support presets: In theory there are no limits to the number of preset layers we could add, but more than two seemed a bit confusing for the initial presentation. Might be something to circle back on for advanced users.
• Duplicating settings: You can duplicate/import/export presets, but only after you have saved them (have heard multiple comments along this line, so we do need to make this clearer).
• Manufacturer presets: Most definitely, if you send them to us we'll add them (or you could submit a pull request with the new files added to the static data). At some point would like to make this web-based.

[whosawhatsis]

Cool. Yeah, I figured about the layers thing, but it wasn't immediately apparent to me (which I find usually means that many people will never understand it). The order in which the layers are applied (what overrides what if there are conflicts) also isn't obvious.

I really think that being able to control Raft/brim/support separately from quality/material settings is something that's important to support. Our canonical profile set has two copies of every profile, with and without supports enabled, which is terrible, and I've removed it in our new beta profiles (https://github.com/whosawhatsis/Deezmaker-slicing-profiles/). IMO, this is one of the best uses for this selective profile modifier preset system. Perhaps there could be an advanced setting to allow users to add their own preset categories and change the priority order, with only "Quality" and "Material" available by default?

I'm seeing parallel's to the interface for setting up smart playlists in iTunes, so maybe this could give some ideas about what the interface should look like.