OrcaSlicer
OrcaSlicer copied to clipboard
More robust seam drawing to imitate engraving effects
Seams are considered an undesireable artifact of the FDM process. However, they can be taken advantage of in a useful way. The slicer already allows you to draw where the seams will go, but you are limited to just drawing a line of any convex shape. However, a simple modification to this feature can allow you to draw on the surface of your models using seams. All that would be needed is the ability to have multiple seams per layer.
With this relatively simple modification, you will be able to write and draw anything on any non-horizontal surface of your model.
This would imitate the effects of surface routing/engraving, allowing for all sorts of things such as signatures, line art, text, etc.
It doesn't have to be limited to lines, either. Full-fledged bitmaps can be represented by using dynamic seam gaps, their value set based on how many pixels need to be drawn horizontally.
Taking it further, a more advanced separate feature could allow for importing vectors or 1-bit bitmaps and mapping them onto surfaces, like a surface texture being mapped onto a 3d model.