Transcript:
Today we’re going to open a can of worms by attempting to answer is simplify 3d worth the money, the certain questions that come up over and over again in community 3d printing groups and one of those is is simplify 3d worth the money over the free slices now. I’ve been a longtime user of this program, so I’ve seen it evolve and develop, and I’ve also seen the other free slices evolve and develop a lot as well so hopefully. I’m well-placed to give my two cents on this very opinionated issue and yes. The debate around this topic often goes downhill quickly and that’s because there’s people who already arrive to the discussion with their mind well, and truly made up. We want to keep this one as a motion free and as objective as possible to aid people considering this purchase we’re gonna break it down, looking at a range of different categories and a lot of the time. I’m going to focus on showing how simplify 3d works for those who haven’t given it a try. Let’s jump in. Let’s start with a little background. And also explaining the scope of our testing. Simplify 3d was first launched in 2013 and at the time. I applied to be in the Test program, delivering my feedback in August 2013 but while it looked promising, it wasn’t quite there yet. And at that stage it wasn’t for me. Simplify 3d did continue to develop and in May of 2014 I decided it had come far enough to earn my money and I’ve been using it ever. Since in this video we’re going to compare simplify 3d to the two most popular free slices. Kira and Purusha slicer. I’m using the latest versions available at the time of recording my to test printers are the Kree a Leticia tennis pro and the Purusha. I three Mark Three. They’re both popular print. Well, and in my case, both are close to being stock. Let’s start off with the obvious one, which is cost simplify 3d comes in at 149 Us dollars now! That amount of money is going to mean different things to different people, but if we compare it to the cheaper, really printers, it costs almost as much as one of those machines. One really good thing is that you have a two-week trial and I urge anyone who’s considering buying this to take up that opportunity. Schirra is perhaps the most popular free slicer at the moment. Not only is it free, but it’s also open source and you can modify land. Compile the code yourself from their Github pressure. Slicer is built on slic3r and once again is free once again, it is open source with everything you need located on their Github. One of the main selling features are simplified. 3d is the fact that it works with many printers. So let’s see how that compares in simplified 3d We need to come up to the help menu and then come to configuration assistant. All of the available printers will then be listed, although there’s no categorization and it does seem like there’s a lot listed here after we select our printer from the drop-down we click finish and then our default process will be set to that printer. Everything is already in place such as the scripts required, and we have Auto configuration for a range of popular materials. If you’re looking for an easy to access list to see if your printer is supported, I’ll link this in the description, and it has everything on the one page. You can simply go ctrl F and type in the name of your printer. In here. We come up to settings printer and then manage printers from here we can click add. The alter maker printers are at the top for all of our other brands. We can scroll down and then they’re grouped into manufacturer categories. We can then click to open those up. Click our specific printer and then click. Add like simplify 3d Cura has a list of printers available online, except this time on their Github in Prussia Slicer. We can come to the printer drop down and then select add a new printer now. Obviously this is. Purusha software. So it’s set up for Purusha printers, but there is a section called other vendors and there’s currently support for three manufacturers here. I’m going to add a Cree ality, and when I come to next, we can see that we’re set up only for the end of 3 and it is a beta release since I’m setting up for the CR Tennis pro. I’m gonna go with this and then tweak what I need to to make those changes. I’ll then have to select my printer. Updating as necessary. Most changes will relate to the build volume. We can now click on save, and I’m going to change the title here to BC. Our tennis pro. So currently pressure Slicer is behind here, but it’s worth noting them. In all three of these slices, you can create your own custom profile for whatever printer you own as long as you know, the basic dimensions of your printer and have some idea about slices, You’ll be able to find what you need and be able to make the appropriate changes. So how do these standard profiles print to find out? I printed a Ben Chi for all three slices on each machine on the pressure. Mark three, all three benches Look quite good. The first one you’re looking at here was done on pressure slicer on the 0.2 millimeter preset and the filament is PLA from X 3d when sliced in cura. We have a really nice print, but you can see a type of hexagon pattern where the infill is showing through the exterior walls this could be fixed with tweaking and otherwise it’s quite a nice print with simplified 3d We also produce a nice. Ben Chi, With all of the details in place, no stringing and no other blemishes of note on the Purusha mark 3 All three slices do a pretty good job apart from the infill showing from Kira, the only defect. Any of them really have is seeing where the new layer starts each time. The same test was repeated for the CR Tennis pro and the first one you’re looking at here is pressure slicer. This set the nozzle temperature at 215 compared to 200 and you can see. It struggled to cool on the underside, Although the rest of the bench, he looks quite good next up. We have the cuter version with the same cooling problem on the underside, which is strange because the nozzle temp was 200 degrees and the cooling fan kicked in at layer 2 We can also see the infill pattern subtly on the side of the boat, simplify 3d does produce the cleanest print. There’s no cooling issues on the underside, Although I would expect it to be easy to fix this in the other slices, You’d have to say that all three slices have pretty good base profiles for both these printers again. This comparison was done at point two millimeter layer height with black. Pla filament the results are quite close. So what’s it actually like to use each piece of software and for this one, it’s hard not to be subjective because we have inherent bias to what we’re used to in simplify 3d If we double click and on processes, we can switch between various printer profiles. There is a beginner and an advanced mode and all of the settings are visible at any time by switching to their particular tab. The shortcut controls up the top here for common changes like in feel adding or removing a raft as well as support. You can also save presets for each printer, for instance, various materials as well as various print qualities. I personally really like this layout because I can see all of the settings that I’m after and I don’t have to remember the names of them off by heart for manipulating each model. I can double click on it. I have the usual type of controls on the side. There’s no handles that appear, but holding buttons like control on the keyboard will give you a shortcut for moving and alt will let you rotate something That’s been in this software for a long time is the ability to hit a keyboard shortcut and then click a surface for the model to be automatically rotated and face. The bed. Making copies is straightforward. I can select something. Use control-c and control-v on the keyboard and auto arrange really quickly to delete models. I can click on them and press. Delete when I’m ready. I can click the prepare to print button. The model slices quickly and I have the usual type of preview and if I like I can change the colouring to reflect various types of data, it’s also worth noting that there’s a second dialog box it can come up and this acts just like pronterface, where we have manual controls for the printer and can send and receive G-code pressure slicer. I’m familiar with from my time in the past with slicer. We have three levels of detail that we can request for what settings to show and all of our print settings and managed via tabs across the top and then headings down the left hand side where we can bring up each specific setting. I find the classification of most of these things quite logical, and we can make as many presets as we like and save with specific names. I’m very glad that there’s now a button in this software to place a face on the bed, just like simplified 3d When we’re ready to slice, we can either click slice now. I’ll click to the lay of you, and we get the usual type of preview and its color coded with all of the various features hurrah. I personally find the most frustrating to use, probably because I’m not used to the interface. If we click on the upper right, we have our inbuilt presets with basic settings we can change, and then we can switch at the custom where we can click the little drop down headings to expand them and see much more detail one thing. I personally don’t like is the layout of this section, and if I’m trying to find something really specific, I need to know the name, so I can search for it and have it revealed. Alternatively, I can come to configure setting visibility scroll down, find what I’m looking for and ticket to have it show in this interface here. I do like the controls on the Left, where I can enter numeric values or drag the handles, and I’m pleased that Cura also now has the function where we can click a surface and have the model Aldo rotate. If I want to make copies of an object, I can’t select it and then copy and paste. Instead, I have to right. Click go to multiply selected model and know in advance. Exactly how many I want. It seems like a small growth, but compared to the other two where I want to print a full plate of something I can just keep on pasting until I run out of room. At least when removing copies I can simply click and press delete when I’m ready to slice. I can click the slice button. We get the usual type of preview and there are some options up to top for color coding. So if the interface is subjective, how about something that we can compare directly for support material simplify 3d was miles ahead of the others when it was first released, So let’s have a look how it works. There’s a range of settings here for support. We enable them by ticking generate support material. We can set the density if there’s a raft underneath and a very important one that probably won’t be turned on by default is to enable dense support layers. If we come through the slice preview, we can see the gray is a support material, and then you’ll see sections of dark grey and that something similar to a curved raft to match the underside of the shape more closely. You’ll notice that for this circle, no support was generated and that’s because we also have support pillar resolution by turning this down and Ries’s Lysine. It’ll change the sensitivity of the areas where support will try and fit and by lowering it to three millimeters in this case. It’s done the trick. One really nice thing about this program is the ability to manually add support. I can either click. The button for automatic supports then click remove and get rid of what I don’t want. I could clear them. All click the button for add support structures and then manually place them only in the areas where I want them. This can be a nice way to save filament as well as print time. I decided to test support material with this specialist piece from Thingiverse for the other two. I use the default settings, but it’s now worth mentioning that there are more advanced options, such as tree supports in Kirra as showcased wonderfully by chip here are the results and we’ll concentrate on the read prints because it’s easy to see first up. Purusha slicer and the majority of the support structures were easily removable by hand. A couple of the portions proved a little bit sicky, but still not very hard to remove the underside of the circle turned into a projectile, which was actually quite satisfying and there was a little bit of cleanup to do after that overall. Pretty good in cura, the supports were shaped more like a grid and once again, most of them could be removed simply by pulling with my fingers. The exception again was the inside of the circle, or a prying tool was utilized to pop it out of place again. This was quite good for simplified 3d The parts were a little bit harder to remove, but once a small amount of pressure was applied, they separated very cleanly. The flat surface was the hardest to remove, but left a very clean surface underneath overall. I’d say simplify 3d has the cleanest undersides, but was also the hardest to remove each slicer has a setting on how close the support material sits. And I’d say that’s all it was all three slices. We’re quite good and trust me when I say that support material has come a long way since I’ve been 3d printing. So what about special innovative features simplify 3d used to be a leader in this area, but as we’ve seen so far in the video for things like support structures that other slices have caught up if we look at the advertised Pro Tools, we can see it’s a similar case. They’re slicing speed did used to be faster, but now all three are quite good when printing with multiple extruders. I know from testing in the past that all three of these slices can do a good job. One feature that I do use sometimes in is very handy is variable print settings with these, We can add a second process and then change any setting that we want and then select which models we want to be printed with which process the other slices also have options like this such as Kuras per model settings, Another way of using this that I like is to come up to tools and then go to variable settings. Wizard, we can then enter. Heights and add locations where we want the model to be split after that we click split process and our base process will be copied and we can edit the additional processes to change any setting we want and this is a really good way to set up refraction or temperature towers to fine-tune your print settings. Unfortunately for simplified 3d the other slices have a bag of new tricks, for instance, the experimental settings in Cura, Here’s where we find options like our tree support, fuzzy skin wire printing and outside of that there’s also great features such as ironing pressure. Slicer also has its own innovations, such as Modifier meshes, finally, and perhaps, most importantly, development and updates. The last major update to simplify 3d was version 4.1 as you can see on this blog post that was launched in November of 2018 And you’d have to say that’s pretty typical. The last major update before that was July 2017 and before that June 2016 compared this to Cura, which has frequent releases And yes, all of these aren’t major updates, but it’s clear to see there’s a lot of development going into the software to improve it constantly pressure. Slicer is much the same. It’s getting frequent updates to improve its functionality, simplify 3d simply isn’t keeping up with this rate of development, But here’s where it escalates in February of 2019 I received an email setting that the next major release version five would be a paid upgrade, 20:19 came in and went, and then there was an update post at the start of this year, promising it in early 2020 Since then there’s been no communication, and if you go to the simplified 3d forums, there’s a lot of people upset over the delays, and there’s a lot of skepticism because nothing is concrete, including features timeline or the price, a lot of people purchase a software thinking that the update would come out within a year of their purchase, which means it wouldn’t cost them any additional money. But now the clock is ticking personally. I hope there’s something new and highly innovative to make the wait worthwhile. So there’s my summary, and I’ve tried to keep things brief because I think it would be easier to make this video hours long with back-to-back comparisons of every little feature. I’ve discussed the overall question with my patrons, and I think we’ve come to a consensus when I paid for this software Years ago, it definitely was ahead of the curve. But since then limited updates and aggressive development from the other software has mean everything has really caught up personally. I’m quite happy with it. I’m used to the workflow and I can achieve what I need to achieve what I recommended it wholeheartedly to someone else. However, probably not the future is too uncertain with the software and will probably need to wait for this paid update if it ever comes to see if this software can stay ahead of the others. If you’re someone with a balance and considered viewpoint now is your time to head down to the comments and leave your thoughts on this question. Thank you so much for watching and until next time, Happy, 3d printing. Gday, It’s Michael again. If you liked the video, then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click. Subscribe and make sure you click on the bell to receive every notification. If you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content, become a patron, visit my patreon page. See you next time.