Book Image

3D printing with RepRap Cookbook

By : Salinas
Book Image

3D printing with RepRap Cookbook

By: Salinas

Overview of this book

A systematic guide consisting of over 100 recipes which focus on helping you understand the process of 3D printing using RepRap machines. The book aims at providing professionals with a series of working recipes to help make their fuzzy notions into real, saleable projects/objects using 3D printing technology. This book is for novice designers and artists who own a RepRap-based 3D printer, have fundamental knowledge of its working, and who desire to gain better mastery of the printing process. For the more experienced user, it will provide a handy visual resource, with side-by-side comparisons of the two most popular slicers, Skeinforge and Slic3r. A basic understanding of designing and modeling principles and elementary knowledge of digital modeling would be a plus.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
13
Index

Generating G-code

G-code is generated by your slicer. The slicer is a program that takes the file of your 3D model and slices it up into many layers. A model created for 3D printing is constructed by a contiguous surface of triangles. This forms the entire skin of your model, without any gaps or overlapping.

The following image is a model created with TopMod.

Generating G-code

When the slicer program slices the model, it generates a perimeter of each Z layer. A sliced layer is illustrated in the following image:

Generating G-code

In order to create a perimeter for the slicer, some or all of the triangles that intersect the XY plane for the Z height may be used. In the following image, we can see the places where some triangles may be eliminated due to size or redundancy:

Generating G-code

This is one reason why different slicers may produce different results. As shown in the following image, we can see a difference in the 39th Z height layer of this model:

Generating G-code

The narrow undercut of the perimeter is sharper in the Slic3r profile as opposed to the...