Viewing slices

To view slices

• Use the mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out, and click and hold the middle mouse button to pan.
• Use the menu options in View for changing visibility of all or selected slices.
• From the main menu, choose from All slices, Selected slices, or Selected area as needed.
• To toggle the visibility of the background grid, choose View > Show grid.

To modify display color and name of slice stacks

Select the slice stack or stacks to change, then choose Edit > Rename and Edit > Change display color to change the stacks as needed.

To view slice bounding box, path corners, slice filling, and path directions

You can switch these elements individually per slice stack. As such, their display toggles are only available through the slices' context menus.

• Bounding box

  A rectangular frame conforming to the summed maximum expansion in X and Y of all vector information across all layers in a stack.

• Points

  Points mark locations where the toolpath changes direction, or where hatches begin and end.

• Interior

  Highlighting the interior fills the area enclosed contours with a placeholder pattern but it is not actually a toolpath. The highlighting style can be configured in Netfabb's settings.

• Directions

  Toolpath directions are visualized by a coloring the toolpath between points with a gradient from black (beginning) to the slice's display color (end) as well as a small (approx. 0.4 mm) arrow.

1. Right-click the slice stack you want to change the display of.
   Tip: Have multiple slice stacks selected beforehand to change the visualization for all stacks at once.
2. From the appearing context menu, choose any of the options Show bounding box, Show points, Show filling, Show directions.

From left: Bounding box, corner points, highlighting, and hatch directions. Note the scale. The gradation figures always remain in view even when the axis origins no longer are.

To scroll through the layers

The context view holds a vertical slider along its left border. Use it to scroll through the layers, or use the Play button to scroll up and down automatically.

While dragging the scrollbar, the display is not updated if Preview calculation is checked. To watch the result of preliminary calculation while scrolling, uncheck the option. To see the actual result, choose Apply calculations from the context menu, then uncheck the option. However, note that this removes the parametricity of the derived slice stack, meaning that it becomes its own, new slice stack, and if you need to change the settings of its creation, you must generate a new stack with the new settings and delete the one you generated earlier.

To animate the toolpath

Animating the toolpath draws the individual contours and hatchings across all involved parts in the current layer in sections instead of drawing the entire slice layer with all contours and hatchings at once.

Hidden slice stacks are skipped during animation.

In the context view, tick Animate toolpath, then click the Play button.

To view area statistics over all layers

Once the Slices section contains slices you can display a graph showing the distribution of area occupied by closed contours. It shows the same value as the context view for Area.

Toggle the statistics view in the main menu through View > Show slice statistics.

The areas of the individual slices, graphed across all involved layers, for the Cartoon House part from the part library

Some actions change the total amount of area covered, such as scaling, adding or removing a slice stack, or point reduction. In such cases, a recalculation is required. However, as this can take a while, it is not done automatically.

Exporting the slice statistics to CSV produces a listing of each slice with its area.

Note: This graph is available in certain machine workspaces. The graph is called and updated only from the respective button in the machine workspace's active context view.