Polymaker is making a big deal of their presets, and so they should.
The filament maker is well aware of the problem: to get the best possible output from a 3D printer, that 3D printer has to know the optimal settings for each material being printed.
That’s quite different from past days when most people would use the same old settings for every spool of PLA that came into the workshop. Back then quality wasn’t as important because the machines simply couldn’t do much better even if they were tuned perfectly.
Nowadays things are much different. Modern 3D printers include dozens of sensors, AI algorithms, and closed-loop hardware to ensure perfect 3D printing. But the machines must know the settings for each specific filament being used. If they don’t, then all that extra hardware added for improved quality was wasted.
Filament profiles (or presets, as some call them) were the answer. Some materials manufacturers would produce and distribute them in order to encourage sales: buyers would know that they would get quality output if they used the manufacturer’s settings for their materials.
Since then, it’s been a bit of a race to get the presets out as fast as possible: if a new filament is released, it had better have a preset available for popular machines. Otherwise, it’s guesswork and unpredictable quality.
Polymaker announced that it has now released official presets for all their materials for BambuStudio, Elegoo Slicer, and Orca Slicer (but curiously not for PrusaSlicer?).
But it is an ongoing situation. New machines and materials appear constantly. In order to keep you up to date, Polymaker has set up a tracking web page. There you can see their progress on implementing new presets. For example, as of this writing, they’ve completed 22 of 51 presets for the new Bambu Lab X2D system.
You can also select your favourite slicer and quickly find the presets for the specific filaments you’re using. These can then be quickly downloaded and imported into your slicer.
Why not just download them all into your slicer? I would think that is not really feasible because there are too many of them, and most would never be used by many operators. Secondly, it’s a moving target. Polymaker has “open issues” on some presets, so they do change from time to time.
Polymaker also provides an email subscription so that you can be notified when new presets are available or updated.
This is probably the easiest approach I’ve seen for obtaining official presets. We are way past the years when you had to troll through discussion forums to find someone posting a possibly good preset for a random material.
Now you should get them directly from the manufacturer.
