Slicer Intro
In 3D Printing, when we take model files, either ones that we create or that we buy or download from websites like Printables or Makerworld, they are in the form of 3D shapes just like a sphere or a ball you could hold in your hand. This is a foreign language to the printer and its motors. It simply cannot comprehend the model file in itself. It needs something to give it help to a language it can understand. This is where the Slicer comes in.
Imagine you have a food that you’d chop into slices, such as a potato. Now, when you go to cut this food you cut it into slices that are then easier to eat than the food normally would be. You would never eat a potato whole, you would slice it first. This is exactly what a slicer is doing, except vertically and on a much smaller scale.
An example of a food being chopped, similar to the function of a slicer.
The Slicer Program preforms these functions vertically, slicing your model just like a potato sitting upright. In 3D Printing, the individual slices of a 3D Model are called layers. There are hundreds of layers for every model and they are always extremely thin. In fact, the width of a layer is just .2mm which is roughly the thickness of a grain of sand. However, even though they’ve been sliced, they still form a complete, connected, coherent model when it is finished. To continue with our analogy, it is just as if you reassembled the potato after slicing it!
In addition to producing these incredibly fine layers, the printer generates the movements needed to accomplish each layer. For example, it tells the motors how to actually move to print of the layers by moving the printhead and extruding plastic at just the right times. This new language is effectively a code capable of using movements to form geometry. Therefore this code has been adopted as .gcode with the ‘G’ standing for geometry! Not complicated at all! These files are essentially just text files that contain all of the movements, motor code, and instructions to move the printhead around. This movement forms our layers which combine to form our 3D Model!
A complete demonstration of the layer by layer stacking done by the slicer, and how the layers combine to form a finished product. On the right sidebar slider, you can see the layer numbers steadily increasing. This is Bambu Studio Slicer, a fork of Prusa Slicer.
All in all, the basic function of a Slicer is to chop up the model into layers, and generate the instructions for the motors that are needed to produce the layers as well as a finished model!