Bear with me for a moment, because I’m not sure how to describe this problem without just describing a part I’m trying to print.
I was designing a part today, and it’s basically a box; for various reasons I wanted to print it with all the sides flat on the print bed, but have bridges between the sides and the bottom to act as living hinges so it would be easy to fold into shape after it came off the bed. But when I got it into PrusaSlicer, by default, Prusa slices all bridges in a single uniform direction–which on this print meant that two of the bridges were across the shortest distance, and the other two were parallel to the gap they were supposed to span. Which, y’know, is obviously not a good way to try to bridge the gap.
I was able to manually adjust the bridge direction to fix this, but I’m kinda surprised that the slicer doesn’t automatically choose paths for bridging gaps to try to make them as printable as possible. I don’t remember having this issue in the past, but I haven’t designed with bridges in quite a while–it’s possible that I’ve just never noticed before, or it could be that a previous slicer (I used to use Cura) or previous version of PrusaSlicer did this differently.
Is there a term for this? Are there slicers that do a better job of it? Is there an open feature request about this?
Basically just wondering if anyone has insight into this, or any suggestions for reading on the subject.
Thanks!
Basically this: https://imgur.com/a/VjUTVaq
The blue sections have no support material below them and are printing as bridges, but in the default behavior, PrusaSlicer just uses the single, global “bridging angle” setting to decide which way to print layers on top of these sections. The perimeters on these sections are printed correctly to make the shortest path across the gap, but the rest of the lines making up those bridge layers are printed to match the “bridging angle,” which here means that two of the bridges are printed so they are supported only by those two perimeter bridges themselves.
Please ignore the details of the print itself, as I’m a little braindead today and this is a print that won’t actually fold together correctly as designed. But the issue of bridges orienting poorly is more general than this particular design.
Can you try to change the geometry so that the different bridges are not consecutive in their corners ? It looks like the slicer is just trying to make one big bridge (in one direction) instead of 4 bridges in 4 directions.
Oh, you’re totally right! I knew I was a little braindead today. Thanks so much! It absolutely already does the thing I’m asking for, it just got confused because the edges of the bridges were close enough that their anchors overlapped.
Bridging working normally: https://imgur.com/a/U7yqZU3
Thanks!