MR2C280
commented
5 months ago I concur. Printing with foaming LW-PLA pretty much demands vase mode because of the massive oozing even at fast travel speeds (and retraction doesn't work). A model I was trying to print (an airplane wing part) requires solid top layers. Printing without vase mode makes an absolute mess.
It was, however, a simple (if laborious) task to slice the part twice, once in vase mode and once with the top layers. Using Notepad, remove, from the vase slice, the portion of the gcode from the appropriate layer to the end, then replace it with the equivalent gcode from the non-vase mode slice. It printed perfectly.
If it's that easy to do in Notepad, surely the clever boffins at Prusa Research can manage to add Vase Mode setting option to the Height Range Modifier.
Vase mode (or spiralize contours or whatever the other slicers call it) prohibits you from using any top layers. However, by manually fusing Gcode from a vase slice and a layered slice, I have confirmed that this works and prints exactly like a layered print with 1 perimeter and zero infill - with all the same issues of sagging when the bridges get too long, the delaminating and the pockets, because of the 1 perimeter wall bending progressively inwards the heavier the top gets etc!...
In other words: There's no reason why activating vase mode prohibits you from using top layers, when you can slice a layered print with zero infill and 1 perimeter without problems. I know it's not strictly a vase anymore then, but who cares about that? You can still set top layers to zero if you want and get the same result as before...
The most elegant solution would be to have vase mode as option in the height range modifiers, so you can print just a part of your object in vase mode!... This would be very useful for closed objects with zero infill that need to be light!