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Variable % Infill From Center To Skin
Posted: 06 May 2016, 23:11
by inventabuild
Jonathan,
Can you give KISSlicer the ability to generate low % infill in the center of the part and high % infill at the skin interface with the infill transitioning from low % to high% and the user can define these low / high values?
I'm thinking it will save print time and filament without sacrificing strength.
Re: Variable % Infill From Center To Skin
Posted: 07 May 2016, 02:38
by Davide Ardizzoia
I believe it could be quite difficult to implement.
Preserving strengt is a very difficult argument. Nature itself has animals with hollow (but weak) bones like the birds ones, or massive (and heavy) bones like the elephant ones...
There are many other ways to speed up printing time (i.e.: stacked infill) !
Best Regards
Davide Ardizzoia
Re: Variable % Infill From Center To Skin
Posted: 07 May 2016, 14:03
by inventabuild
Actually I think you proved my point. Bird bones are stronger and stiffer pound for pound than the bones of similarly sized mammals because bird bones are denser even though they are hollow and thinner than mammal bones (
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 112103.htm). Furthermore, similar to 3d printing, bird bones do have struts ("infill") as supports for their bones...most people are printing bird bones they just don't realize it because they make them look like lizards or some other cool object

- Bird Bone
- Bird Bone.jpg (10.36 KiB) Viewed 2446 times
Clearly 3D printing a solid object will be stronger than an object that has infill less than 100% assuming the layers are rotated to give equal strength in all directions, but my hypothesis is that if we are going to print with some % infill (as most people do) then it is better to have denser infill near the skin of the part rather than a less dense infill evenly distributed throughout the part.
Furthermore, assuming you are going to print 100 gms of infill for a part, I hypothesis it might help improve the cosmetics of the top layer especially on flat surfaces if lower density infill (say 10%) is used in the center of the part and denser infill (say 90%) is used closer to the skin at the top of the part instead of using 50% infill throughout the whole part.
The issue is how hard would it be to implement such variable % infill in KISSlicer to prove or disprove all this.
Wow, I never thought when I got interested in 3d printing that I would be talking about bird bones

Re: Variable % Infill From Center To Skin
Posted: 08 May 2016, 03:24
by EddyMI3D
Makes me remember this Voronoi stuff.
Maybe this could be a task of the 3D design program to create this voronoi filling in 3d...
Re: Variable % Infill From Center To Skin
Posted: 08 May 2016, 13:47
by Davide Ardizzoia
Voronoi infill sounds interesting, but surely not time effective.
Slic3r has 3d hex infill that could be a bit more effective.
Best Regards
Davide Ardizzoia