I am fed up with resin slicers.
Chitubox is about as stable as a drunk on a tightrope, Lychee is bad for engineering models and over-priced if you just want some basic support functions and PrusaSlicer is under-developed. All of these solutions work for different things based on the goals of the user. (For some, Lychee is an excellent value so my distaste is likely not universal.)
What really pissed me off is that support painting shouldn’t be a paid feature. You hold the mouse button down and drop a support at specific distance from the last. It doesn’t take massive cloud computational clusters or huge storage requirements but yet, money. Fuck. That.
I want a completely FOSS tool that is stable and includes functionality for auto-positioning models and has a full set of knobs and levers for support generation, support painting included.
So, I spent the morning getting a dev environment setup for PrusaSlicer to use as a base for resin-only tools. Over the next month or so, I’ll take some time to strip out all the FDM support and get the slicer into a bare-bones state with only the existing resin features. Of course, it’ll be on GitHub.
Back to the main subject. I was hoping that y’all had references in regards to anything resin printing: Support placement methods, model rotation optimization, resin strength data, FEP peel force data or anything that could be coded and implemented into a slicer. Hell, even discovering different methods for hollowing an STL would be nice.
Data and strategies for various tools would be nice to have at this point to at least start forming a roadmap for development. (One of the first goals is to integrate UVTools as a snap-in, somehow.)
FDM tools are plentiful because of wide spread adoption. Resin printers still seem niche so printer manufacturers naturally gravitate to writing their own tools for their own hardware in their race to the bottom.
With all of that said, I am actually curious if others would even want to see a project like this kicked off.
You can’t really. Advanced display technology is proprietary and locked down by NDA. There is no documentation about how they work. The reason the Prusa SL1 is so expensive is because they had to pay an insane amount to get the display documentation open sourced against a market where digital theft and manipulation are standard practice.
As far as I’m concerned (personally/not speaking as a mod), the only resin printer that exists is the Prusa SL1 and it is simply too expensive for my use case. All the other printers look like a subscription software scam to me. I’m aware of the workarounds, but I see no value in these for my use cases.
I don’t care about each specific printer, TBH. Specifically, its about mesh positioning and support generation which is what Lychee and Chitubox have locked down at the moment.
An STL is just an STL. You can use whatever software you normally use to slice it.