To reduce the waste from you BambuLabs AMS, you simply need to add a flush object. To do that you:
- Load your filament.
- Be sure the colors in the AMS settings are accurate.
- In Bambu Studio sync your colors.
- Add your multi color object to your scene and assign it different colors.
- Add a sacrificial object with fairly constant volume and at least as tall as the multi-color object. (I suggest PrintABloks!)
- Right click the sacrificial object and choose Flush Options->Flush to this object.
- In the per object settings increase the infill of the sacrificial object to 90%.
And that’s it. You will have less purge waste, but it probably won’t decrease it to zero… yet. The flush object works, but it’s not perfect.
Anyone still watching at the end may notice that the last of this video is just BRoll fooatage and time lapses. That’s because my camera stopped recording before the end, and all I had was the audio. This is why you record audio on a separate device. But people don’t actually watch my videos, so I doubt anyone really noticed.
I had to 2 cut rants for this for time. One of which I made into a short, but the other I decided not to document in video form at all incase Bambu Labs sees it, which I hope they do. But no one reads the blog post, so here we go.
I acknowledge that this feature probably didn’t come from Bambu Labs. It was a hold over from Prusa Slicer. Which means 2 things.
First of all, it means that Bambu will be fixing someone else’s feature. And while I acknowledge the way it feels to have to clean up someone else’s mess, no one else got multi-color 3D printing working like this, so it seems only fair that, if they’re the biggest user of this feature, that they be the ones to fix it.
But then there’s the second point that since this came from software with an Open Source license, they’d have to share the changes they made. And, again, I acknowledge that this might be hard for Bambu Labs who comes from a corporate mentality of “maintain your advantage”, but honestly no one is going to benefit from this more than Bambu Labs. So what if Prusa gets to use it in their MMU3, it’s the least you can do for all the features of theirs Bambu Labs has taken from Prusa without attribution.
Bascially, I’m saying there’s no excuse, and the pros far outweigh the cons for doing it. So do it, Bambu.
