Removing Layering from 3D Printed Bodies.

[Bainford]

46 minutes ago, Oldriginal86 said:

My wife tells me, “ it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it”.

My wife just tells me to shut up.

[StevenGuthmiller]

2 hours ago, Bainford said:

My wife just tells me to shut up.

And I just grumble under my breath and walk away.

Hmm, maybe we need more wives on the board. 😁

 

 

Steve

[stavanzer]

Only If the Wives Build Models, Too!

[Texas_3D_Customs]

15 hours ago, Mustang fan said:

I have been experimenting a lot with resin 3D printing lately, and like many others I have noticed these layer lines appearing on some rather "horizontal" surfaces. These are more or less pronounced, depending mainly on the layer thickness, a parameter you can adjust in the printing parameters of the slicing software.

Basically, the finer the layer setting, the less visible the lines will be. I currently use 20um as my default setting, and while not completely invisible, the layer lines are faint enough that a good coat of primer will make them completely smoothed out (I use Mr Surfacer 1000 for that).

For info, my printer is an Elegoo Mars 4 , with a x-y resolution of 18um. I do not use the anti-aliasing feature as I found it does not seem to be effective.

As for the commercial resin prints, it seems they are mainly printed using 50um layers, probably to save printing time (printing at 20um layer height takes 2.5 times more than using 50um...)

 

 

So the layer lines are not so much the XY resolution or the layer height it's the angle of the print and the shift of pixels per layer the become very pronounced when the steps are not consistent like if you were to build a staircase at an angle where every step was not the same height. Anti aliasing works best when you have the angle set correctly 

[slusher]

2 hours ago, stavanzer said:

Only If the Wives Build Models, Too!

My wife finds part I drop on the carpet, finds things I misplace and makes spread sheets..

[bobss396]

15 hours ago, Kayma367 said:

Thank you all for your responses and the education on using the correct verbiage (title line has been updated for posterity sake). I'll milk being out of the loop for 20-something years until I can find another excuse. Looks like Mr. Surfacer is the way to go and I promise my next project will be a plastic kit that will go together without the extra hassle. John

Well there are high-build primers and there is always stucco to fall back on.

[hedotwo]

12 hours ago, StevenGuthmiller said:

And I just grumble under my breath and walk away.

Hmm, maybe we need more wives on the board. 😁

 

 

Steve

After 52 years of marriage I've learned to do the same....  just agree and walk away 😉

[Rick L]

The higher the resolution on the printer the better the quality of the surface. Think of it like pixels on your digital camera or your tv screen the more dots per square inch the sharper it will be. 

[bobss396]

I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the topic but... why are some parts made on angled supports?

I see some smaller ones on steeper angles, some car bodies I've gotten were as much as on a 30* angle. Does this improve the surface finish?

[Matt Bacon]

19 minutes ago, bobss396 said:

Does this improve the surface finish?

Yes. If you imagine pulling the car body slowly up through the surface of bowl of water, each layer printed is the shape at the surface. Your design will be made up of smooth curved shapes joining at corners, but the 3D printer turns that into “slices.” If you print with the body “flat”, large horizontal areas like the hood, trunk lid or roof will be printed in only a few layers, and any subtle shapes will end up looking like the grain of a plank of wood. If you tilt the body 45 degrees nose up then all the surfaces are made of stacks of many more slices and the shape changes between slices can be more subtle and accurate. There’s some other stuff to think about like not having areas where you end up with voids in the solid printed parts filled with uncured resin, but you’ll find a lot of 3D prints have parts tilted up down and sideways…

best,

M.

Edited April 2 by Matt Bacon

[bobss396]

Thanks Matt. I have a body now with a wood grain look in a few isolated spots.

I bought some stock car bodies that are quite good. These came with the scaffolding, so I have an idea how it was grown.

We did a lot of printing at work. Mainly tooling work that was quite accurate dimensionally. Assembly tools for the most part.

I've been out of there for 5 years, but everything was done in the flat. We had one desk top printer, parts had to be pried off with a spatula.

Edited April 3 by bobss396

[Texas_3D_Customs]

On 4/1/2025 at 10:56 AM, Rick L said:

The higher the resolution on the printer the better the quality of the surface. Think of it like pixels on your digital camera or your tv screen the more dots per square inch the sharper it will be. 

Not really I produce very intrinsic detail models with great surface finish and here's a little inside I'm using three generation old printers some of them are newer but of the 36 printers I have only 10 are current generation printers. You have to consider that even first gen mono LCD printers were 50 micron pixels current ones are anywhere from 12 to 15 give or take I think there's some that are 17 that sounds all fine and dandy and it in theory can work but there's a lot more that goes on than just the size of the pixel. How the resin reacts and propagates from the exposure has a lot to do with it but 50 microns is extremely small in itself. More than anything it has to do with what material you use how you lay your prints out on the build plate how well you've tuned your resin and supports. I don't still have one but I was making very smooth finishes on the original elegoo Saturn. This is a 1/8 scale C6 for an FE engine. It was done on my Phrozen mega 8K which by today standards has horrible resolution it might be 8K but it's a massive screen so your pixel size I think is 50 micron but it's smooth very smooth. So while the new printers are capable of producing slightly better detail and that's only the limitations of the resin and how the curing works It's like a daisy chain you kick off a section and it does spread some from there I've done a lot of research and how resin works and why all these ridiculously small pixels don't matter as much as they make it out to be. What I will say for certain modern resin printers are some of the new features they have like the tilting vat instead of the build plate going up and down on the eligu ultra series and then you've got heated vets that's a nice thing to have Auto leveling little tossed up on it It's kind of good it's kind of bad You just have to work around it and rethink how you do things. Some of them now have pumps that will drain and fill your resin for you sounds good It's really good for draining but a lot of resins will settle and if your bottle is upside down then it's going to suck pigment before it does the other parts of the resin it needs to be mixed. So the whole point to my rant here is it's not so much the printer it's everything else that matters how good of a print you will have.

[stitchdup]

22 minutes ago, Texas_3D_Customs said:

Not really I produce very intrinsic detail models with great surface finish and here's a little inside I'm using three generation old printers some of them are newer but of the 36 printers I have only 10 are current generation printers. You have to consider that even first gen mono LCD printers were 50 micron pixels current ones are anywhere from 12 to 15 give or take I think there's some that are 17 that sounds all fine and dandy and it in theory can work but there's a lot more that goes on than just the size of the pixel. How the resin reacts and propagates from the exposure has a lot to do with it but 50 microns is extremely small in itself. More than anything it has to do with what material you use how you lay your prints out on the build plate how well you've tuned your resin and supports. I don't still have one but I was making very smooth finishes on the original elegoo Saturn. This is a 1/8 scale C6 for an FE engine. It was done on my Phrozen mega 8K which by today standards has horrible resolution it might be 8K but it's a massive screen so your pixel size I think is 50 micron but it's smooth very smooth. So while the new printers are capable of producing slightly better detail and that's only the limitations of the resin and how the curing works It's like a daisy chain you kick off a section and it does spread some from there I've done a lot of research and how resin works and why all these ridiculously small pixels don't matter as much as they make it out to be. What I will say for certain modern resin printers are some of the new features they have like the tilting vat instead of the build plate going up and down on the eligu ultra series and then you've got heated vets that's a nice thing to have Auto leveling little tossed up on it It's kind of good it's kind of bad You just have to work around it and rethink how you do things. Some of them now have pumps that will drain and fill your resin for you sounds good It's really good for draining but a lot of resins will settle and if your bottle is upside down then it's going to suck pigment before it does the other parts of the resin it needs to be mixed. So the whole point to my rant here is it's not so much the printer it's everything else that matters how good of a print you will have.

the auto fill on the anycubic m3 max is trash. I'm on my third unit and they never work for long

[Texas_3D_Customs]

4 minutes ago, stitchdup said:

the auto fill on the anycubic m3 max is trash. I'm on my third unit and they never work for long

That's actually not too surprising. I am not a fan of anycubic never have been it probably goes back to the proprietary slicing format everybody freaked out when Chitubox did an encrypt it format that was proprietary but people never really cared much about anycubic. I understand there's a difference between what happened between the community and Chitu Systems but any cubic has made some very questionable products and I think the autofill is completely worthless unless you're trying to print something that you're that cannot print without refilling midprint which I never have that problem but it does intrinsically put some challenges based on the chemistry and nature of photosensitive resin. The stuff is nasty it will eat seals like there's no tomorrow.

[stitchdup]

2 minutes ago, Texas_3D_Customs said:

That's actually not too surprising. I am not a fan of anycubic never have been it probably goes back to the proprietary slicing format everybody freaked out when Chitubox did an encrypt it format that was proprietary but people never really cared much about anycubic. I understand there's a difference between what happened between the community and Chitu Systems but any cubic has made some very questionable products and I think the autofill is completely worthless unless you're trying to print something that you're that cannot print without refilling midprint which I never have that problem but it does intrinsically put some challenges based on the chemistry and nature of photosensitive resin. The stuff is nasty it will eat seals like there's no tomorrow.

It suits me for the printing i do but its not fast. I'm using black resin just now and a set of small wheels took 12 hours. It was only a 32mm total height. if i get another i'll try something else next time but i only have the m3 to make bodies easier to print. a lot of the time i just use the mono though i'm tempted to set it up for doing light lenses and small clear. the biggest drawback with anycubic machines is they need a warmer area to work than others and the fep on the m3 is difficult to tension. i've taken to pressing it after install to put a little give in it which seemed to help. but i learned most of the little i know on here and spent a fortune on trial and error.

[iamsuperdan]

So back to the OP, personally I would reprint that, and reduce the layer height. I use a layer height of .02mm. Takes about 8 hours to do a full body, but it comes out of the printer with minimal layer lines, so not much cleanup in that regard.

This is a body that just finished printing yesterday. Elegoo Saturn 2 Pro using the Elegoo Water Washable resin and Chitubox slicer.

Lots of cleanup, but no deep layer lines. Nothing that won't disappear completely with a little sanding. 

[Rick L]

I vote for striations.

[bobss396]

I'd like to get into designing and making my own 3D parts, but I'm not willing to dive down that rabbit hole at this time. 

It would consume me without a doubt. My hat is off to those who have stuck with it and are doing amazing things with it.

My brother is interested in going in with me on it, but I don't think he fully understands what it takes. I do have a new i7 computer that should be able to handle it all.

Edited April 4 by bobss396