9 Slicer Hacks You Wish You Knew Sooner - in 9 min

The Biggest Waste of Time & Filament when I started 3d printing there was basically no information on the internet to learn from so I had to figure out everything by myself by trying and failing and of course that cost a lot of money because I was wasting filament and not only that but it was even wasting me hours and because of that today I would like to share 9 things about slicers that I wish I knew sooner that either could have saved me a lot of time or failing with my prints so no beating around the bush let's get straight into it now I will be showing it inside of Bumble Up Studio Tip 1: Threaded Screw Connectors Inside Slicer (New Bambu Studio Feature!) but most of the slicers are the same but why I wanna show it inside of Bumble Up Studio is because they added an extra feature just recently that I wanna show you because if you select your model and then go on the top menu and select cut I think we all know that we can add connectors to the cut but what Bumblelap Studio recently did was that they added an option which is called fret which means that you can screw the connector in the part itself so as you can see you can create a fret connector completely inside of the slicer without touching designing which to me feels amazing of course there are other connectors as well which are amazing but I believe that most of the people that really didn't know how to design and only could use a slicer really wanted the thread added so Bumblebee Studio just did that so if you wanna try it out definitely check it inside of Bumblebee Studio and then you can just for example export the part and put it inside of your slicer and of course that that saves a lot of time because you don't need to go into designing Tip 2: Essential Slicer Keyboard Shortcuts (Move, Scale, Rotate, Cut, Face, Text) but another thing inside of the slicer that always annoyed me is that when you want to do anything with the model that you have you always have to search the top menu to find the thing that you want an amazing thing for this that can save you a lot of time is the shortcuts that you can use so the few simple ones that I use basically every single day is m for move which allows you to move the part that is currently selected then s for size which allows you to resize the whole part as much as you want then R for rotate which allows you to of course rotate the part then C for cut and there are many more for example like f for laying the part on a face that you want it to lay on or t for text and there are much more but these are the few most common ones that I use often and it saves me so much time because finding it over here in the icons was a hell Tip 3: How to Auto-Scale Models to Exact Measurements and in the beginning I would be wasting a lot of filament not on prints that would fail but on prints that wouldn't fit the part that I would want to have them for and so for example if I have this LED controller and I designed a small holder that was just made basically meant to hold it I needed it to scale perfectly to the size of the controller that I had and sometimes the parts just don't come ready to print so you just take a measure and you somehow measure the dimension that you need to fit for and once you have that dimension or the size you can just go into the top menu again and click on the measure and then select two points or just a single line and you can adjust it in the slicer because as you can see it shows you the distance which right now is 145 millimeters but I measured that I need 81 so all you can do is click the edit to scale and then just input your own number and once you input it as you can see the model was completely scaled to that exact number and because of that right now my controller actually fits in there and holds so that's amazing Tip 4: Fix Multi-Color First Layer Bleeding (Filament Sequence) then another one that cost me a lot of time to figure out and even filament because I was failing with the prototypes when I was making these business cards for guys that I knew and all I needed was a perfect first layer because I was printing these on the cool smooth and I wasn't able to get the first perfect layer because it would first print the black color for some reason and then it would print the white but because the black is so much darker basically it would inflect into the white and then I would have extreme color spill and of course you can increase the purge volumes over here on the left but a much simpler solution that I found when I was trying to figure out on the right side of the plate and you can click Customize Print Plate and over here in the menu you can see that the first layer filament sequence and you can sometimes see that it will select the black colour as the first one and so all you need to do is drag the drag the color that you want to go first as the first one and that's all you need to do and it does it for you and then you can also do it for the other layers as well but I needed it just for the first one and this solved it all Tip 5: Import & Extrude SVG Images Directly Onto Models and one thing that felt like complete magic when I discovered it was that you can turn any image into an SVG which you can do with an online converter that's completely for free and then you can right click on the part and click on add part and go completely to the bottom which is right over here and click on SVG once you selected it you can just search your downloads and put any picture that you turned into the SVG into your slicer just like that you can create completely custom 3D prints that look amazing with your own picture just like this one Tip 6: Stop Floating Parts From Falling (Merge Assembly Hack) now the next one I actually struggled a lot with myself and I even got comments so I knew I wasn't the only one who was solving this issue because sometimes when you have two parts and you need to place the second one on top of the other one so you obviously you move it to the top but then when you let it go it falls right back to the place and now the solution to this is quite simple but it took me a long time to figure out maybe I'm the only one and so what you do is you go to the left side and you need to first merge these two bodies because right now there are just two separate bodies that both have basically like gravity to the plate so of course they will fall so what you do is you select both and then you click on merge once you click on merge now they are parts of an assembly and now if you move any of the things a bit higher it stays in there so this is a solution that took me a longer time to figure out but now that I know it it helps a lot Tip 7: Use Modifiers to Increase Strength Locally (Save Filament) now the next one might seem a bit more advanced and difficult but trust me it is definitely worth learning how to do it which is something called modifiers and what an modifier allows you to do is to modify a section of your model completely different settings than the whole rest of the model for example when I was printing this body for my robot I needed a bit more strength on these pins right over here that will hold holding my motor just to make sure that they don't fall apart and because I didn't want to increase the strength or the volume for the whole body which would cost me a lot of filament I just added a modifier which you can see this yellow block right over here that just adds different settings to that specific part so as you can see I just added the modifier which you do as I said by right clicking and going to add modifier adding a cube and then you can position the cube anywhere where you want want it to change and once you position it in the correct place then you can just click on the cube either over here or in the objects and as you can see down here you can start changing the settings for that object just for the cube that you have selected so for example I change the wall count so that increases its strength Tip 8: Cut Magnet Holes in Slicer Using Primitives & Mesh Boolean now as you know today it's really popular to start adding magnets into your 3D prints do not have to go inside of a modelling software what you can do is use the primitives that the software allows you to have so you can right click and then select add primitives and select any of the primitives that you have there so for example for the magnet you will select a cylinder and then make the cylinder the exact size or scale it as you want it to have and then you can just join it together with this part that is there for the magnets to be applied to so to do that you will need to select both parts once you select both parts you will go into the top menu and click on Mesh Boolean once you click on Mesh Boolean you will go into subtraction you will first select the part that is the bigger one and then the second one will be the cylinder so just make sure you have it just like this inside of the a and B menu and then just click on execute and once you do that as you can see it created a hole inside of the body so this is a way how you can either add holes or you can even remove certain parts of a model just by using the primitives and sometimes you need to pause the print Tip 9: Auto-Pause Prints to Insert Magnets, Sand, or Weights because you need to add something either it's the magnets or for example I was adding back in the day some sand or clay to add weight to the parts so if you have that you can just slice the print and then once you have it sliced you can go onto the right side of the slicer and over here you have this slider now once you have that slider you can use it to basically find the layer where your hole is being covered by the printer so as you can see when I go through it over here it's being covered so I find the layer for me it's layer 88 so I need to go few layers below it for example 85 and then right click it and click on add pause and this will automatically pause the print but don't forget to again slice the plate and the printer will just stop automatically for you to put the magnets in there Outro & What Are Your Favorite Slicer Tips? and so these were just some of my own failures and how I managed to figure them out but if you have any of your own that I didn't perhaps share in this video definitely drop them in the comments or if you have any feedback and I hope that this could help