1 Topic by aed

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Topic: Forcing a printing direction

Hi -

For some reason skeinforge keeps printing my object in a direction which makes the object come out completely garbled. The object I have is an extruded rectangle with a hollow cylinder attached to the middle. I've attached the image so you can see what I'm talking about - for some reason instead of starting at the bottom rectangle it is printing it "from the side".

My question is, how can I force skeinforge to print on another axis? Please let me know if the question isn't clear as well.

Thanks!
aed

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2 Reply by elmoret

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Re: Forcing a printing direction

Rotate the STL with netfabb or meshlab.

Or, better, use repeater-host instead of printeface.

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3 Reply by cmetzel

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  • From: Solidoodle2 #0091
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Re: Forcing a printing direction

I use replicatorG for reorienting the STL file. 

A little education.  The orientation is stored in the STL file when it's created, skeinforge is just reading what you're giving it and creating the gcode from that.  If you don't like the orientation you have to reorient it in another software package before running it through skeinforge.  ReplicatorG is good, it's possible also in netfabb or meshlab, although meshlab might be a bit much for you to start off with.

4 Reply by aed

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Re: Forcing a printing direction

Thank you elmoret - you were right.

It is a little surprising to me that skeinforge doesn't automatically optimize for printing directions to reduce overhangs etc.

Thanks again

5 Reply by aed

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Re: Forcing a printing direction

Thanks cmetzel - I do use meshlab so rotating it wasn't hard (apply filters - rotate transform). But I had been under the impression that mesh direction doesn't matter since I thought the slicing direction would be optimized. I guess I was wrong smile

Thanks for the information!

6 Reply by cmetzel

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  • From: Solidoodle2 #0091
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Re: Forcing a printing direction

Try ReplicatorG if you haven't already, much easier to use than meshlab unless you're also reducing triangles at the same time and cleaning up.  Scale, rotate, center, set on bed, etc.  I love it for a quick setup on someone else's models.  On my own models which I do 95% of the time, I model them how I want them to print.

7 Reply by lawsy

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Re: Forcing a printing direction

Or use Repetier-Host which does everything in the one piece of software.

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