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OrcaSlicer released its 2.0 version last week, with the highlighted “scarf joint” beta feature generating ample interest from the community for its ability to hide seams on curved and organic shapes.

Release notes are spread around this release, pre-release, and beta, but scarf joints stand out as the update’s key feature.

Simply put, scarf joints improve seams by ramping the flow rate at a joint. The name references a woodworking technique used to hide joints by using a diagonal cut on two mating surfaces. Here, the feature’s outcome has a printed wall wrap over itself while maintaining the layer height with a throttled flow rate.

These seams appear best for curved shapes, which can complicate things where hard corners exist elsewhere in a model. Fortunately, the OrcaSlicer implementation has a “conditional” option that allows users to set an angle threshold – ensuring seams better hidden by a standard joint on a corner don’t get the scarf treatment.

There are already plenty of very detailed breakdowns of the feature if you’re interested, including a detailed guide on Printables by Adam L and a video by Teaching Tech that highlights the open-source contributors who made this feature possible.

Though scarf joints are the release’s major feature, plenty more has changed. “Small area flow compensation” has been added to combat over-extrusion on the surface of small areas (another issue tackled with dynamic flow rates). The 3D Honeycomb infill pattern got a “revamp” that reduces bridging to improve strength and make it a better option for high-speed printing, says the OrcaSlicer release notes, which compares the pattern to Gyroid infill “but prints faster”.

Many quality-of-life and compatibility features have also been added, including the option to toggle the Bambu network plug-in and hide the user login panel on the homepage, and expanded networking that allows the previously incompatible Flashforge 5M 3D printers to work with Orca over the network.

There’s plenty more where that came from, so be sure to check OrcaSlicer’s release notes over the recent release, pre-release, and beta for all the details.

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License: The text of "OrcaSlicer 2.0 Released, Improves Seams with ‘Scarf Joints’" by All3DP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.