Can you tie Print Settings to a filament?  

RE: Can you tie Print Settings to a filament?

As far as I know l, there's no way to specifically tie print profiles to filaments. Some print settings can be overridden by filament settings but not all. I created a few filament specific print profiles such as "0.2 mm PC Blend" but yes, the print settings drop down can get cluttered. 

RE: Can you tie Print Settings to a filament?

I think the only option if you want to restrict the visible list of Print Profiles is to create a copy of the Printer profile for your material.  You can limit the profiles displayed to certain printers. So if you created say Printer XYZ TPU and tuned the extruder settings for retraction etc there as a basis for limiting the profiles visible.

Under print settings>dependencies>compatible Printers you would use the Set button to define which of your printers it was compatible with.  Then if you make sure your Preferences for PS has under -  General>Show Incompatible print and filament presets = UNTICKED then it will only show you the compatible ones.  Without the preference option it will still be in the list but the flag icon next to it will be red instead of green.

You can do the same for filaments but those can be limited by print profile too.  Seems the tree only goes downwards unless you want to delve deep into manually creating your own vendor space with all its inheritance.

RE: Can you tie Print Settings to a filament?

Posted by: @crab

[...] But whenever I choose this filament, can it only show the Print settings suitable for that filament?

You can use dependencies to reduce the items shown in the preset drop-down boxes, but I believe you are restricted to making a Filament Settings preset dependent on either printer or print presets, or Print Settings presets dependent on a Printer Settings preset, but not make the others dependent on your selected filament. That means you could create a Filament Settings preset that will only be available when you've selected your TPU Print Settings preset.

That said, you can use Filament Settings->Filament Overrides to make some changes based on the selected filament (mostly printer retraction settings).

Otherwise, seems like I'll have to make .2mm profile for TPU (and different other ones for any other filaments I use and the Print Settings drop down menu will get pretty cluttered).. So I end up with a list of .2mm profiles for each filament.. and a list of 0.15mm profiles for all filaments, etc.. Seems they should be tied together somehow. 

It might be easier to create a "TPU Printer" Printer Settings preset, and make your custom filament and print settings presets dependent on that. With a bit of care, you can make greatly reduce the clutter this way. I do this to isolate settings between my 3 different printers each of which has very different characteristics. It's not easy to do within PrusaSlicer currently, so I maintain config bundle .ini files manually to do this. Here's an example if you're interested. This is a fair amount of work to set up initially, but I like reducing clutter as much as possible.

How do people manage these in Prusa Slicer?

 

RE: Can you tie Print Settings to a filament?

Thanks for the detailed reply.. I really like the idea of creating a TPU Printer preset and then developing and debugging both Filament and Printer settings based on the TPU filament I plan to use long term. It seems like print settings should be tied to a filament as manufacturers put so many different things in their filament that I'm finding PLA settings for Prusa stuff need tweaking for almost every other type of PLA I've tried.. PolyTerra PLA, PolyTerra PLA+, PolyLite PLA, etc. 

I don't think the filament over-rides really allow you to know what is happening to settings you might make in Print Settings.. seems overly complex.. I can see what they are attempting to do.. but if I select a filament setting that will over-ride a print setting, I want to see what value the print setting will actually have and I don't think that is what PrusaSlicer does.. so really can be tough to troubleshoot without a lot of experience.. 

As I get ready to print with TPU, its fine if it just works.. but if it doesn't it seems I will need to do/know a bunch to troubleshoot.. so want to try to learn as much as I can and create the profiles ahead of time and then debug once using some system that will track and evolve the settings.

RE: Can you tie Print Settings to a filament?

Posted by: @crab

[...] I don't think the filament over-rides really allow you to know what is happening to settings you might make in Print Settings.. seems overly complex.. I can see what they are attempting to do.. but if I select a filament setting that will over-ride a print setting, I want to see what value the print setting will actually have and I don't think that is what PrusaSlicer does.. so really can be tough to troubleshoot without a lot of experience.. 

It's far from simple, but last time I did a review of mainstream slicers (PrusaSlicer, Cura, ideaMaker, Simplify 3D *cough*) PS was by far the most sophisticated in terms of handling multiple printer setups without a lot of redundant settings. Maintaining those profiles by hand is annoying and a lot to figure out initially, but it helps keep me sane. The good news is that PrusaSlicer has these settings, and hopefully they'll get around to exposing more of these functions in the nice GUI.