Support often requires spacing rules but PreForm gives us no way to verify them.
One of the common recommendations from Support when diagnosing SLS print failures (e.g., layer curling) is to ensure parts are spaced 2–2.5 mm apart and 5 mm from chamber walls.
The issue is: there is currently no reliable way to measure or verify this when manually packing a job in PreForm.
The measurement tool does not cut it and to my knowledge Support doesn’t have a tool to make this determination either. This really impedes our ability to provide Support with meaningful answers.
One solution is to use Pack All Models, but I find that auto-packing is only useful to a point. I suspect that any Fuse users that are printing for production (not one-off parts/printing service) almost always manually pack their prints.
It would be a massive improvement to the PreForm workflow if:
Users could select 2 models and calculate the minimum spacing between them
The Overlapping Models validation respected the 3D Packing settings
I’m hoping to gather feedback from other SLS users to help highlight how common this issue is:
How often do you manually pack your SLS prints?
Most of the time
Sometimes
Rarely
0voters
Do you struggle to determine minimum part spacing when manually packing?
This certainly is annoying when packing multiple different parts.
Not so much when I have multiple same parts as the array feature lets you dial in the spacing.
I have found that the “auto-pack” feature never packs correctly for FUSE1, so I manually pack 100% of the time.
I haven’t actually manually packed a single print job here yet. In 99.9% of cases, I set the orientation for all parts, but I leave the exact placement—that is, the packing—entirely up to Preform.
In the early days of the Fuse, minor adjustments were sometimes necessary because Preform was very slow at packing initially.
For quite some time now, even large quantities or larger components have been no problem.
I’m quite obsessive about orientation, because when dealing with multiple components, I want them all to have the same orientation—both for consistent visual quality and to ensure that the layer orientation is uniform for mechanical stress. This applies both to our own parts—such as those with spring elements—and to customer parts, where it would be problematic if some parts held up well while others did not, simply because they were printed upright.
We also experimented early on with smaller distances than the default values. We’ve actually always printed with a 0mm wall distance and a 2mm gap between parts.
We even tried printing with a 0mm gap between parts once. That actually worked because the surface armor is still present between the parts.
However, this was before the speed updates for the Fuse1+. Since these settings now have a more robust surface armour, a 2mm gap between parts is an absolutely viable default setting.
Unless I have to bundle multiple multi-part customer orders with our components, it usually takes me about 10–15 minutes just to create the print file (excluding printer setup and uploading).
The larger of my parts are hollow cones, so these are nested to maximize production numbers and to achieve an acceptable packing density. Preform with array these parts but when collapsing the Z spacing preform will only go so far. I then have to grab the part and pull it down until it is within 1mm or so of the part below, which is time consuming. It would be nice if preform would automatically collapse the Z height on nested parts to within the 1mm minimum.
This is great feedback, thank you all for chiming in. Very cool to hear the different approaches everyone has.
@DL_Jon I completely agree, the array tool is nearly perfect when packing same parts. I find that packing different parts is where auto-pack is both needed and insufficient.
@SMute This is my only major issue with the array tool. If a parts bounding boxes does not represent its ability to nest with the same part, the array tool is useful but is not giving you the true model spacing.
@CARLAYERS Your print preparation sounds a lot more efficient than mine, and I bet you have a lower failure rate than I do! I’m also super picky about orientation and I tend to play around with packing for 30-45 minutes, but this is because I typically run the same print at least 5 times. I find that I can often get my packing density increased by ~5% by carefully adjusting things but this leads to my original point… I am trading off print success confidence + packing preparation time to maximize powder usage. I believe if there was a way to determine what my minimum part spacing is, I could decrease my failure rate and inform Support of my exact minimum part spacing during troubleshooting.