Saturday, January 2, 2021

Textured grips with Cura's Fuzzy Skin

Back to my PSG-None project for a bit.  The real PSG-1 pistol grip has stippling textured onto parts of it.  I could come up with some sort of bumpy surface to replicate this in Solidworks, but the face count would skyrocket, and it would seriously drag down the speed of my whole system.  Solidworks hates high face counts. 

Fortunately, there's a very simple solution: Cura has a "Fuzzy Skin" option buried in it's settings.  What it does is generate the skin of the object with random jitters so that it ends up looking rough and fuzzy looking instead of nice and smooth.  But, I don't want my whole grip to have this fuzzy skin, I want to replicate the asymmetrical texturing of the PSG-1 grip.  There's a way around it with another seldom used Cura feature: Per model settings.  This lets you place several models on the print bed and use different settings for each one.  

Basically, we're telling the machine to print two parts in the same place, at the same time, but with different print settings.  One part is the normal grip and prints like anything else would.  The 2nd part is set to only print the outer layer, using the "Fuzzy Skin" option.  It works because the plastic from the normal part melts in with the overlapping plastic from the "fuzzy" part.

That's what we're going to do here, create two models, one of the complete grip, one of just the grip section that we want textured.  To make the fuzzy grip section I just copied the grip, then hacked away the parts I didn't want.  Here are the two parts in Solidworks:

Once that's done, both models are loaded into Cura.  We set the settings that we want to use, then merge the models so they print as one piece.  I'm not going to go over exactly how to use the Per Model settings here because there are some great Youtube how-to's that can do it faster and better.  The important thing is that on your fuzzy grip section model, turn on Fuzzy Skin, set it to 1 wall, and 0 top/bottom layers.  This will print a fuzzy skin outer wall on top of whatever your main model settings are set to.  When it's done printing, here's how it will look, textured where we want, smooth where we don't:




6 comments:

  1. Is there any chance you would share the .stl's and .sldprt's to thingiverse?

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    1. As I said in my most recent post, STLs will be posted on Thingiverse, I just haven't gotten that far yet.

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  2. How do I align both models? I've been searching for hours....

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    1. For reference I'm using Cura 4.4.1. Assuming you're using my grip files(it's important that the Fuzzy section be made from a copy of the original part to locate properly). First, in your General Settings make sure that "Ensure that models are kept apart" is NOT checked so that it will allow the models to overlap. Then load both models and set your per-model settings. Then highlight both models in the Object list, right click and select "Merge Models."

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  3. What values did you use for the fuzzy skin?

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    1. 1 wall, 0 top/bottom layers, 0.3 Fuzzy Skin Thickness, 1.25 Fuzzy Skin Density

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