The current version of the interleaved prime tower still prints a lot of material that is only required for supporting the upper layer. However, by priming always the same extruder at the same position in the tower, the required support amount is quite high and can be reduced a lot when priming each extruder on top of each other:
This also allows for reducing the diameter of the prime tower, which can save room on the building plate.
In case of multi-color printing, this also allows for decreasing the required amount of support when the number of used extruder decreases. Thus we can end with a very thin tower at the end of the print, reducing wasted filament a lot:
Type of change
[ ] Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)
[x] New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)
[x] New setting in Cura: "Prime Tower Minimum Shell Thickness"
How Has This Been Tested?
[x] Sliced multiple models with multiple extruder configurations, for multiple printers
[x] Tested on UM S5 dual color
[x] Tested on own printer with single nozzle dual color
Test Configuration:
Operating System: Ubuntu
Checklist:
[x] My code follows the style guidelines of this project as described in UltiMaker Meta
[x] I have commented my code, particularly in hard-to-understand areas
[x] I have uploaded any files required to test this change
Other improvements:
This PR also provides a few other improvements along the way:
Add a class called LayerVector which helps safely storing values by LayerIndex instead of size_t. This removes some redundant but necessary check and values conversion warnings, and helps make the code more readable.
Fix the start positions of the prime tower when using a base (they didn't take care of the base extra size and could end up inside the base instead of around it).
Fix the raft with interleaved prime tower (which has been cherry-picked into 5.7 already)
Splitted the PrimeTower into a base class and two implementation PrimeTowerNormal and PrimeTowerInterleaved. This makes it easier to work on one or the other without breaking each other. Also, it helps computing only what is really necessary for each of them.
The prime tower object now provides an "occupation outline" and an "extrusion outline". The occupation is an approximation that can be calculated at the very beginning and can then be used by otherparts of the engine, e.g. support calculation. The extrusion it the actual occupation of the extrusion, which may be slightly smaller than the occupation (depending on line width), and can be calculated only later in the process.
Description
The current version of the interleaved prime tower still prints a lot of material that is only required for supporting the upper layer. However, by priming always the same extruder at the same position in the tower, the required support amount is quite high and can be reduced a lot when priming each extruder on top of each other:
This also allows for reducing the diameter of the prime tower, which can save room on the building plate.
In case of multi-color printing, this also allows for decreasing the required amount of support when the number of used extruder decreases. Thus we can end with a very thin tower at the end of the print, reducing wasted filament a lot:
Type of change
How Has This Been Tested?
Test Configuration:
Checklist:
Other improvements:
This PR also provides a few other improvements along the way:
LayerVectorwhich helps safely storing values byLayerIndexinstead ofsize_t. This removes some redundant but necessary check and values conversion warnings, and helps make the code more readable.PrimeTowerinto a base class and two implementationPrimeTowerNormalandPrimeTowerInterleaved. This makes it easier to work on one or the other without breaking each other. Also, it helps computing only what is really necessary for each of them.Comes with https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura/pull/19249/files