Adaptive slicing for the FDM process revisited

Abstract

Adaptively computing the layer heights for 3D-printed parts has the potential to achieve high quality results while maintaining a reasonably short printing time. The basic concept, several error measures and variations of the algorithm have been around in the literature for two decades now, but never showed significant impact on widely used slicing software. Users of our early test implementations reported two major drawbacks of the existing approaches: the control measures are not intuitively usable and the resulting height distribution in many cases is not optimal for an object, requiring extensive post-editing. In this paper, we propose a more intuitive control measure and implementation based on the volumetric surface error and a subsequent manual refinement of layer heights by manipulating an interpolated height-curve. We describe the efficient computation of adaptive layers by analyzing the model surface over the full layer height. All implementations are available as ready-to-use open source software.