How do I make the interior of my prints solid?

[GregoryWilets]

I am less experienced than a novice and would like to pose to the community a couple of problems. I designed a cube to test printing on Qidi Tech One [2] Printer. I did this by making a 2d square in the work area and then extending the square to make a cube. I brought it into Slicer and exported it as a gcode file. Then I imported it into Simplify3d and printed. I had wanted to fill it 100% but instead ended up with a cube with no interior except for light structural support.

1. What could be the reasons I end up with an almost vacant interior?

2. What could I do to simplify my process?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Greg

[MaddieG]

Hi there,

In Simplify 3D you’ll want to change the infill to 100%, either by using the slicer at the top of the edit process area, or in the infill tab specifically.

Doing this may cause other problems, however, so unless your print needs to be truly solid I would recommending using 50% infill at most, and increasing your number of shells instead.

Best,

Maddie - 3D Hubs

[GregoryWilets]

Thanks so much for your reply. Unfortunately I have tried the infill setting at 70%, 90%, and 100% all resulting in a hollow interior. I remain perplexed. Any other ideas?

Greg

[jfield]

See pics attached.

[Urubo]

This is weird.

Are you sure that the cube that you designed is solid? Maybe it’s only a shell so your slicer make the wall with 100% infill but it leave the rest empty.

Here you can find a small 1cm cube, try to slice/print this with 100% infill, if it prints correcly probably your cube is a shell.

Also check spiral/vase mode, it must be disabled.

Hope this will help.
cube.stl (684 Bytes)

[GregoryWilets]

Thank you. The cube prints but the interior is not solid. I needed to convert the stl to gcode and used slic3r to do so. Could that be the source of the problem? When I printed a gcode test file supplied by the manufacturer the interior did fill. Could it be that I am using Mac OS?

[Urubo]

At this point it’s a slicer setup problem, check the gcode preview before committing the object to the printer, if the preview show up the infill but the object it’s printed hollow… change slicer, it’s plenty of free slicer, I use ideamaker but you can choose cura, craftware and many others. If the preview doesn’t show the infill, check your printer setup (if you’re using my cube for testing scale it up to 300% to see better the infill shape during the gcode preview), as showed in the image.

[MaddieG]

is it possible that you have “single outline corkscrew printing mode (vase mode)” turned on in the layer tab of S3D?

[wirlybird]

Why are you bringing it into Slic3r then into S3D? Just load the STL into S3D.

[GregoryWilets]

I did not know you could convert a STL into a gcode/std to be printed by S3D when using a Mac. Could you explain how this is done? Thanks.

[wirlybird]

I’m not on a Mac but I would assume you just load the STL using that function the same as for the Windows version.

On the main screen on the left upper side there are two buttons to add/load and remove a model or from the file menu also.

You may want to go over to the S3D forums for additional help.

https://forum.simplify3d.com/viewforum.php?f=1

Here is another page which hopefully may help out.

https://www.simplify3d.com/support/articles/importing-and-manipulating-your-models/

[GregoryWilets]

I have loaded the STL file into S3D. The Qidi Tech One printer only prints with gcode. The Qidi software is supposed to convert the stl to gcode and then print. (I use a SD card since the Qidi software apparently does not support printing directly from a Mac). I have been unable to accomplish that. Any other thoughts?

[wirlybird]

In S3D you will need to set the printer type to QIDI Tech-1. I am assuming that is the one you have and not the X-one!

S3D is already setup to export the proper files.

If you have the Tech-1 it actually uses an X3G file. When S3D exports the file to SD card you can look and see a gcode file and a X3G file. the X3G is what the TEch-1 will read.

When you put the SD card in the reader for the Tech-1 and select to print it will give an error. Hit the back arrow and select print again and this time the files should be listed.

Now, if you have the X-one printer then it does use gcode instead of X3G. Set S3D printer type to QIDI X-one and it will output the proper file to the SD card.

I have both printers from QIDI and use S3D regularly so I am happy to help if I can.

[GregoryWilets]

Thank you for your help. You have made my day, if not my week. All is working well.

Greg

[wirlybird]

Hooray - Nicely done!