Brave Astronaut

Below you can find how to get good quality printing, based on Brave Astronaut model available on DesignFutures.

Let’s begin. Start your Voxelizer software and click “designfutures download” button. Find Brave Astronaut model and click “open stl”. Wait for the model to finish downloading. Using sliders in “mesh transformation” menu, change the size and orientation of your model and click VOXELIZE.

When the progress bar reaches the end you will be automatically moved to voxel editor where all the features of upcoming print will be set.

First of all, choose preset appropriate for toolhead you want to use (1.75mm plastic extruder would be used in this tutorial), and then expand advanced options by ticking “show advanced” box. Let’s stay in general sub-menu for now.

Most important setting for every print is “layer height”. The lower layer you use, the better quality of the print you will get. But also the print will take much more time to finish. For a simple figurine like this default value of 0.2mm should give very good result.

Next attributes you should adjust are those responsible for retraction. Since the model we are gonna print doesn’t have any separate parts, the toolhead won’t move over empty spaces and the retraction amount doesn’t have to be high. The basic value of 3.5-4mm and height of 0.1-0.15mm is enough for this particular model but remember to adjust settings according to model you will print.

Switch to outline sub-menu. The only parameter which interests us is “outline count”. When printing models that doesn’t have to bear much loadings, this attribute can be set to 2. In future, for models that would need to be strong, increase outline count.

Now go to infill tab. We are interested in “infill ratio” attribute. For figures such as this one, the infill can be low, around 10-15%. Lowering infill ratio accelerates the printing process, lowers amount of filament that would be used but also lowers durability of the print.

Last tab that we are interested in is project sub-menu. As before we are only interested in “bottom layer base” function. This parameter is dependent from material you would like to use. If you want to print with ABS, set it to power raft ABS to ensure the print will stick well. However if you want to print with PLA, you can set it to power raft PLA or box (PLA sticks very well to printing bed and doesn’t require power raft in most cases).

Now when you decided which material you will use, look to the top of project settings toolbar. Change fan preset according to material. If you will use PLA, set fan PLA (default) but when you want to print with ABS, set fan ABS or off (to avoid cracks and warping of material).

Now you can inspect layers of your print using slider on the right side of the screen.

Last step to do is to click GENERATE GCODE, and when the software finishes working, print your file either via USB cable through Voxelizer, or from internal/external SD card of your machine.

NOTES:

• You can also download project or .gcode file from DesignFutures or from the bottom of this website.