I have been testing the texture feature for a bit and it seems to work really well. I do have two ideas/requests/‘nice-to-haves’ at this point.
Adding texture seems to results in a TON of support needed most of the time. I suspect it has to do the many new ‘minima’s’ being created. Not sure if the Auto Support function is at this stage, able the really accommodate the new texture feature. I tend to just remove most of the new added (seemingly unnecessary supports) and they come out very nicely anyway.
If there was a way to exclude some areas (faces on the mode maybe) from being textures. This mainly (for me) affects eg. mounting holes with printed threads. Adding texture also adds it to the threads which completely destroys any thread.
An ability to perhaps “paint” the part where the texture should be? As in BambuLab Studio for FDM you can paint the parts in the slicer. This could perhaps apply here aswell. Not sure how good it would look tho. Just a thought.
The only challenge with ‘late binding’ of these features is how it might affect your PLM (product lifecycle management). If you are producing parts in a controlled environment, you will need to rev/release your .form files. I’ve hesitated doing this, but with all the cool features you can add at print time, it’s becoming apparent that we will need to start.
The alternative is to add textures to the model itself. This can be very time consuming for your CAD system depending on how it’s done.
Applied a leather texture to one area and knurled to another. It took the better part of a day for my CAD system to process this texture. A newer computer may cut that down, but it takes pretty significant resources to convert a texture map to faceted surfaces.
