Minimizing Filament Waste

In order to create clean, high-quality multi-color/material prints, Palette uses a Transition Tower. This allows your extruder to purge the filament in between transitions, creating precise breaks in your model. Without these towers, the quality of the print would be reduced due to filament bleed and other print issues.

The image above is our MRI Brain scan model with the transition tower to its left

Although necessary, these towers will create filament waste as a certain amount of filament is needed to ensure that all the transition splices are purged before your extruder returns to the model. This article provides options to help minimize the amount of waste used in a print. We recommend trying these only once you're found your optimal printer/Palette settings and have successfully printed models with exceptional transitions.

Adjust Transition Settings

The easiest way to reduce filament waste is to make adjustments to your transition length in Canvas. In Canvas, this is found in your Style Profile or Project Settings under the Transition tab.

Under this tab, you'll be able to adjust the "Transition Length", which refers to the amount of material used when transitioning between filaments. By lowering this value, your printer will use less material to transition, leading to a smaller tower. We suggest starting at around 130mm when first testing your printer and Palette, and if possible slowly lowering the value based on your results.

If you find that your prints are losing calibration with the lower transition length, it would be best to increase the transition length slightly and lower your Target Position (~30%).

Variable transitioning can also be used to control transition lengths between different color combinations. A lower transition length can be used when transitioning from lighter colors to darker, since these colors require less purging for clean results.

Transition in Infill

This feature will give you the option to transition material in the infill. Enabling this setting will not eliminate the transition tower completely, but will attempt to transition in the infill where possible. Infill Transitioning can be found in Canvas, in the Transition tab.

Printing Multiple Models

When applicable, printing multiples of an object in the same print will reduce the amount of filament waste as a percentage of a print. This is due to the number of transitions staying the same throughout the print regardless of how many objects are being printed at one time, meaning that the tower size would be constant whether you're printing a single or multiples of a model. This is also true for printing multiple different models which share the same colors/materials.

Photo below: Transition tower with one model

Photo below: Transition tower with multiples of the same model

Increasing Layer Heights

Depending on the intended quality of the final product, increasing layer heights can also effectively reduce filament waste. If you're planning to print intricate, precise models this may not be the best option, but if you have a print with large areas and faces, increasing the layer height to 0.3 mm can reduce the transition tower size by a large amount.

Photo below: Transition tower with 0.2mm layer height

Photo below: Transition tower with 0.3mm layer height

Model Placement with Transitions Near Beginning

If the model has colored regions in one area, and the rest of the model is only one color, the model can be oriented so that all of the transitions will occurs early in the print. This will result in a smaller tower height wise, as calibration will be unnecessary for the remainder of the print.

If you have any questions, please feel free to send us a message at support@mosaicmfg.com