Joseph: Here’s an explanation of Vase Mode:
- Make a cylinder 20 units high and 20 units radius:
This cylinder has no thickness but it can still be 3D printed using Vase Mode. To do this you run the Rhino exported geometry (STL format) through a slicer program that produces the toolpath for the 3D printer. - The slicer, in Vase Mode, produces this toolpath for the printer:
A closer view shows that this toolpath is essentially a helix that is a single, continuous path from bottom to top; here is a section of the result that shows this better:
Note that the path shown in the image will be printed from melted plastic that is extruded through a 0.4 mm diameter nozzle, so it is very thin and quite fragile. I would never print something like this because of this fragility.
The concept behind vase mode is that it eliminates any surface imperfections caused by starting/stopping a print loop. - For a “real” print it is necessary to give the printed geometry some 3D thickness. This is easy to do for a cylinder, but can get quite tricky for more complex shapes. Here is the cylinder with 1 unit thick walls:
- And here is the resulting toolpath that the slicer creates:
Note that the cylinder is now comprised of many individual horizontal layers that are 3 loops thick. This is enough to give the print reasonable strength (although I typically make my prints a bit thicker.)
More importantly, there is a seam (vertical in this example) where each individual loop starts and stops. These start/stop points create slight imperfection in the print’s outside surface. Dealing with these is an issue of it’s own.
Konrad: Maybe what you should do is create a single, continuous curve that has the shape you want, Pipe it, and print that.