Seam Hiding Gap

[inventabuild]

Does anyone know how Seam Hiding Gap works? The hover pop up message says "Gaps on loops: 1 is the theoretical ideal". What does this feature do?

[Giovanni V.]

After you've sliced the part click on "Paths", look at the path on the seam area, change the gap slice again and observe the difference.

[inventabuild]

Thanks for the suggestion. Seam Hiding Gap is how much of a gap there is between the start and end of a loop. The values go from 0 to 2. Are these values a % of something like extrusion width or absolute values like 1 mm for example?

Also, if Depth (the slider next to Seam Hiding Gap) is set to 0 the loop start / end gaps are obvious in the Path view, but as soon as I give Depth any value at all, for example 0.1, all gaps between the start and end of a loop are eliminated. Why does a Depth value of 0.1 eliminate a Seam Hiding Gap value of 2?

[jaydie]

I'm interested to know more about this too, I can't see the difference between Gap of 0.0 and 2, maybe because I don't know what I am looking for. Anybody can post an image to show the difference please. thanks.

[dorbar]

The very important factor in hiding a seam is a Jitter! this moves a start-end point of the loop to another position, so you don't get the seam always at the same position, which gives you that ugly vertical seam-line. Jitter, jitter, jitter

[mhackney]

Here you go, a set of different gaps so you can see what's going on.

0 gap, .5 gap, [1.0 gap], 1.5 gap, 2.0 gap

0 gap.png (24.12 KiB) Viewed 4741 times

pt5 gap.png (26.39 KiB) Viewed 4741 times

1pt0 gap.png (20.85 KiB) Viewed 4741 times

1pt5 gap.png (22.81 KiB) Viewed 4741 times

2pt0 gap.png (21.89 KiB) Viewed 4741 times

[jsryork]

I have been having trouble with thin-walled objects (ok, modified stretchlets) having gaps. Some of this may be down to filament type/colour, or temperature of my workshop now we have frosty mornings in York, England.

I thought seam hiding jitter would help, as the part is breaking where the start/stop for each layer is.

I think that the seam hiding jitter does not work on layers for parts where the path is a single loop. I have made STL files for a simple hexagonal box with different wall thicknesses. When the thickness in my model is 1.6mm, I get two loops for the walls. I can play with the seam hiding settings, and I see the effect of gap, width, angle and jitter by looking at the paths at different Z-values. When I add another hex box with wall thickness 1.2mm, this slices with a single loop for the walls. These loops *always* start and finish at the same corner, regardless of the seam hiding settings.

I tried to post my _printers.ini and an STL for the two boxes, but the forum seems to reject .ini, .txt, .stl extensions - how can I do that ?

Thanks for any comments
John

[jsryork]

Hi, found forum talk which says use a zip file. Here are my printer settings and the two hex boxes.