Slic3r’s Spiral Vase setting: Print Perfect Vases!
It should be no surprise to anyone that I love Slic3r. Its an actively developed, open source slicing software for 3D printers. And it is packed with plenty of awesome features. Anyone who has browsed Thingiverse will have noticed a trend for making cool looking vases. There are vases is many funky shapes that normally are impossible to produce out of glass or ceramic. However, they can often be a pain to print flawlessly. Those problems stem from the way 3D printing in general works; a 2D layer is printed, then the nozzle is moved slightly upwards, and the next layer is printed. The time it takes to move upwards can allow just a little bit of plastic to leak out the nozzle, causing a seam to appear in the print. I take a look at a feature in Slic3r that aims to solve that: it’s Spiral Vase Setting.
What does the setting do?
The setting’s goal is to do just what it says; print flawless spiral vases. It does this by getting rid of the concept of ‘layers’ entirely. Rather, it will increase the height of the nozzle continously as it moves around the object. The entire vase it printed out of a single, unbroken strand of extruded filament, giving the vase a prestine finish. In order to do this, it will change your settings to make it a single perimeter, with no top layers, and no infill.
How does it work?
Perfectly. After printing the number of bottle layers it specifies, it starts the continuously rising z-height. Its actually very entertaining to watch, seeing your z-axis move so much is not something you normally see happening. The look of the final object is without any seam lines, as you would expect. Printing with thicker layer heights also changes the appears of the print, as the z-height will increase by that amount with each revolution. Thus, larger layer heights give thicker lines which can be visually appealing.
Possible problems to look out for:
A big problem for me was that it seemed like Slic3r was not respecting my speed settings. I’d tell it to print at 70 mm/s, but it seems to print super slowly, slow enough where I had to bump the feedrate to 600% to go the speed I wanted. It turned out the problem was the cooling settings for my selected filament. On the filament’s cooling tab, there is a setting to slow the print speed if the layer’s print time wasn’t long enough. The though is that if a layer prints too fast, it will not have time to properly cool, which would affect quality. However, with the Spiral Vase setting’s constantly rising z-height, every single movement is a new layer. Take means that, with the cooling setting on, all my vases were printing at 10mm/s. Simply removing that cooling setting fixed that problem!
Another problem to look out for is the temperature of your z-axis motors. Normally they do not have to work too hard, they are only active for a fraction of the total print time. The spiral vase setting will make them constantly working through, so it would be a good idea to keep an eye on their temperature to make sure you don’t overwork them and cause them to miss steps.
So hopefully you learned a bit about this setting in Slic3r, and give it a try yourself. I would love to see any vases you have printed, feel free to leave those, and any questions/comments in the section below!
