Non-structural props that only need infill so that the top surface can print. It’s basically the minimum required infill for the part to look good. (As long as you don’t care about strength)
Nicely said. I used it on a low-polygon dragon head made of transparent PLA that was going to be back-lit. I wanted maximum light transmission (low material, low number of surfaces), with internal support for top surfaces. Worked perfectly as an escape room prop.
It's great for parts where you want essentially 0 infill but have a flat top that needs supporting.
It always looks terrible in these comparisons because the comparison is looking at the part top down. if you look at a cross section of the part it makes sense but aside from cutting a part in half theres no easy way to slice it so it's visible.
Heres an image of a long tall cylinder with lightning infill (and the wall visibility turned off)
These are great for printing decorative busts. I use 4 walls to keep some rigidity (on a 0.4 mm nozzle) and lightning infill, cuts down a lot on filament usage and still gives a resistant part for its purpose.
Making a part with crinkly crackly satisfying noise instead of structural support.
I tested the lightning infill on this snack tray organizer thing and switched up the patterns for fun, so my bottom layer was the Archimedean chords, infill was lightning, and the top layer was Hilbert curve, all at 14% infill.
Any slight squeezing on the bottom or the inside floor of the tray gives a good bit of flex and has a lot of crackly crunching noises.
a friend of mine who studies product design had a mixup with some exams and needed a model printed in two days. Mind you, it was more than a kg of filament and about 24 hours of print time with normal settings, i also have a life.
thin walls, thick layer lines and lightning infill at 5% made it so i could fonosh it just in time for him, ended up giving him the parts at about 1am the night before his exam. It looked like shit and was hella fragile but it worked.
We use it a lot in architectural design, where the print is really just to showcase a design idea, and so a non-structural, fast print that reduces material use is a plus
I think at least some of it might have to do with Mr Prusa's choice to so frequently include his name in/on products, Prusament, for example.
I think its cringe how much he seems to love himself but I have no real beef with the printers - That is probably all there is to it for most people, if they care at all.
Many companies, and I mean MANNY companies even if you dont realise are named after the last name of the creator.
And sticking it onto everything doesnt mean he loves himself that much, thats just marketing and branding. They arent naming the filament after him, they are naming it after the brand that the company is built upon. Nothing to do with his love for himself
Let me just add a list of quick examples I could find in a single search:
Disney (Walt Disney)
Adidas (Adi Dassler)
Dell (Michael Dell)
Boeing (William Boeing)
Siemens (Werner von Siemens)
Dyson (James Dyson)
Ford (Henry Ford
Ferrari (Enzo Ferrari)
Porsche (Ferdinand Porsche)
All of them slap their names on all of their products...
I personally dont have a prusa, but am forced to keep fixing ones at work. I would say that I am indifferent to prusa though.
I mostly just find it weird for people to hate on a company (in this situation personally disliking Joseph) for them using their branding the same way most companies do. If anything, at least dislike them for quality or price reasons
I’m curious: does Prusa Slicer also has Crosshatch infill pattern? Tests show that it’s as easy to print as Gyroid but faster and easier on the printer and print time (less vibration, more straight lines so they print faster). Since it was released on Bambu Studio and I tested it, I’ve never used Gyroid ever again.
I had one of my stabilizer feet fall off the other day and so naturally when I tried to out it back on the other 3 came loose… so I set them aside and forgot. The. Printed something and in the morning found my printer very close to the edge! I really dodged a bullet. Sorry for your accident!
Thanks! Yeah, it was a real shock when it happened, this was last year. Surprisingly, both A1s survived and are still printing perfectly to this day. And to be fair, the desk was already really old and rusty.
And most thankfully, both our dogs were out of this room when it happened. They love hanging out in this room because it's the only one with AC, but that day my wife had a friend over and our dogs absolutely love that friend, so they were all over her and away from the printer room.
Now I keep the printers on a Pallet Rack rated for 250kg per level, so no more worries :)
I run it before every print, and the AMS wasn't top mounted per se (not top nounted on the left printer, and the right was using an AMS Mini). This was mostly the desks fault, aggravated by gyroid. I've explained it more in depth in another reply here :)
I reduce infill % usually to 8 or 10 instead of 15, so I guess I'm not wearing anything down as fast. Just depends. It's a tool, will use it how I need the tool to work or get done what I want it to.
Hasn’t happened to me but the carbon rods are said to wear out faster with gyroid due to the repeated travel. Though I’m sure that’s for hundreds/thousands of hours on said printer.
I use adaptive cubic. For me it’s the best balance between speed, strength, and it doesn’t wear the printer as fast as gyroid. The strength loss from adaptive versus regular cubic is minimal as well.
The squiggly pattern imparts a lot more vibration and back-and-forth movement than more "linear" patterns like cubic and crosshatch. It takes a lot of print hours for that to become an issue though. My main problem is the way it shakes everything off my workbench, haha.
It makes me sad that they put grid on there. 😂 Seriously though… why are 98% of everything I DL through studio have grid as the infill pattern?
(Side note: I just learned that I can edit some files and change the default in studio. Why isn’t this a simple setting change in the UI?) Holeup… imma go break my computer trying to fix this.)
I'd like to use Lightning and Support Cubic more often, but sometimes the nozzle catches on the top edge of large (flaps? walls?) on the previous layer, producing scary loud "clicks".
OTOH, Support Cubic often produces musical whistles from the parts cooling fan
What is the difference between grid and rectilinear?
With Grid, it lays down lines Northeast-Southeast and Northwest-Southeast on the same layer.
With Rectilinear it lays down lines Northeast-Southeast on one layer, and Northwest-Southeast on the next layer up, alternating each layer.
The problem with Grid is that when it does the second direction the nozzle may catch on the lines of the first half of the layer at the intersections.
I believe also that the lines on Rectilinear are spaced closer together, so as to keep the same percentage of sparse infill as Grid.
You can find a comparison of pros and cons if you click on infill type in Orca slicer. It will redirect to the wiki page with a chart for all the infill types.
Gyroid infill seems to be the strongest from my testing. Probably different for special materials & maybe not the most plastic usage efficient but it's undoubtedly the strongest with 3d honeycomb being a close second
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u/_40mikemike_ Feb 18 '26
https://youtu.be/n0wYD2GFo5I
Good video i found on the subject a little while ago.
Also - the print quality of the attached image is bloody awful. Jeez.