Detail Settings

One of the few choices you have to make about 3D printing is the print quality. The print times can vary widely between rough and high quality, so it’s natural to wonder what the difference is going to be.

With 3D printing, it’s easy to go for the best but then think of the road not taken—to send through a print at high quality and wonder if it really would have looked all that much worse if we had saved time by printing it at a lower quality.

Especially when starting out with 3D printing, it’s often difficult to judge how to make the tradeoff between print quality and print time duration. This page tries to illustrate what the different print quality settings on Orca really mean. At least for a small print.

The Jaguars

For our instructions on 3D scanning, we used a replica of a jaguar purchased at the museum store of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. We now want to demonstrate how changing the detail setttings on Orca Slicer will produce different outcomes.

We printed the jaguar three times, selecting three of the print quality settings:

1. High Detail at 0.08mm layer height
2. Optimal at 0.16mm layer height
3. Draft at 0.24mm layer height

The printer can extrude filament at different volumes. The print quality setting affects the level of fineness or coarsness for the model by altering the size of each layer the printer creates. Increasing the number of layers makes each horizontal slice of the model thinner, reducing the coarseness of the end product.

Why not always opt for the most fine print setting? You make a tradeoff in print time duration. For our jaguar examples below, the difference between Draft and High Detail was over an hour. Remember that as your model size increases, the difference in print time duration between the print quality settings also increases.

Notice the thick layers on the Draft print, more visible in the zoomed-in image below.