Friday 13 July 2018

Layer Height Test

From left to right: 0.16mm, 0.08mm, 0.04mm
This is the monthly Dragonlock newsletter freebie from Fat Dragon, printed three times at different quality levels. The total height of the figure from the bottom of the base to the top of the bardiche is 43mm, the figure itself from sole to crown is about 33mm. I chose it for this test because it prints reliably without supports, so there's a minimum of fussing about in the slicer.

They've all been printed through Cura on my Ender-3, using the SiePie Small Minis profile, altered in each case only to print at 0.16mm, 0.08mm, and 0.04mm layer heights. The miniatures are printed in PLA, and apart from removing the brim, they've had no post-processing of any kind.

At first glance there's really not too much visible difference, especially at tabletop distance. However, the close-ups below show up the improvement in quality with smaller layer heights — though at the cost of greatly increased printing times. If you're wanting a whole army of unimportant mooks, then exquisite detail probably isn't going to be that important, while a character figure might justify spending half a day to print.

0.16mm, 1 hour 11 minutes to print

0.08mm, 2 hours 25 minutes

0.04mm, 4 hours 30 minutes.

No comments:

Post a Comment