PLEC³ᵈ

Yaint
non-planar printing on your 3D printer

The last decades we have been printing layer-by-layer, focusing only equalness and flatness; homogeneous printing.
That forced us into adding supports under the print to avoid bridging and made the prints weaker in the layered axis, making orientation necessary.
But meanwhile your 3D printer’s tool head by itself can actually move in any direction anywhere and doesn’t have to print flat horizontal layers per se.
It can print the layers the way that suits the model best, avoiding the support and improving structural strength by doing so.
This technique that we are talking about here is known as non-planar printing, and makes your printer print non-flat layers. But what is non-planar printing and what can I do with it?

The technique of non-planar printing is explained well in this video —>

So.. as you see it is not a new technique or idea, in the previous movie the original Slic3r slicer (by Alessandro Ranellucci, link) was used, an important stepping stone in 3D printing. But, right now, the methods require a lot of tuning and are only working on the top few layers (detailed explanation).

NB. more extensive stuff on Non-Planarismologics (for the more devoted tech savvy) can be found here.

Well, now.. how amazing would it be if you could use your normal everyday printer and just from now on print non-planar with it?
Yup, that is exactly what Yaint is about!

Yaint is our subscription-based app; it is a locally run app, designed to upgrade your 3D printing experience by adding in an extra quick step in slicing your 3D model.
Yaint gives a few very significant advantages which results in much stronger, better looking and more economical results, summed up Yaint offers:

Support-free in almost all situations

Yaint eliminates the need for intricate support structures, saving you valuable time and effort. Saving you both significantly in material, and in printing time.
Gives prints a super smooth top

Say goodbye to visible layer lines on top and hello to flawlessly smooth surfaces on your prints.
Optimally strong layered

Yaint uses state-of-the-art FEM analysis to quickly automatically constraint your model and auto-optimize the strength and durability in every layer. For manual settings of constraints, and topology optimization, there is also an addon (optimization addon) that gives a lot of settings and precise tuning.

So, well.. you, yeah you!.. come on!

Get off that status-quo planar bandwagon!

You’ve been riding on that for way too long!

Go and start printing non-planar!
You fool!!

Thanks for the wise words BA!!! You are totally right!!

Sit back and relax, no flying going on here, let’s see how Yaint works.

(NB. all rights of previous footage lie with the A-Team and no contact was in reality taken up with BA for this and this is only for fictional uses and not in any case portraying realistic events.)

1. The software side

Yaint is a complementary app that can be used standalone or can be loaded from PLEC³ᵈ Iris slicer. It then gives some settings for you to choose what to optimize for precisely, this can be a combination of options. And then starts by reading the model file and doing simulations and calculations to find optimal printing form. Yaint basically thinks out how to print the part non-planarily and then transforms the model to an intermediate state which the slicer will use to generate gcode. The gcode is then still flat-layered gcode as it is sliced normally, but after gcode creation it is molded into it’s non-planar form using the original form and the optimized form back-translations.
All this happens fully locally without any network connection needed, only a login at startup to activate the app and you can get going.

2. The hardware you will need

Yaint can be used on any printer, no special printer is needed. The only necessity is a toolhead with enough clearance, so having a lengthy hotend is handy, which is becoming more and more normal these days with the newer high flow hotends sold today (think Goliath, or CHC).
Also, you need a non-planar nozzle, which is a very pointy nozzle on a long pike. We have manuals and extensive info on upgrading all sorts of printers, also for the bulky toolheads, of f.e. enders, prusas and vorons, don’t worry! Alternatively we offer our own toolhead, Yaint TH, with very nice advanced features (vortex duct, nozzle camera and layer heating options)

3. How to get started

You install Yaint by downloading and running the installer which also (optionally) installs Iris slicer (Cura will be supported also later). Yaint will automatically start up when you slice a model, it’s interface will let you finetune the non-planar printing settings.

Yaint is available only for Linux and Windows only at the moment. We are working on a MacOS version.

So, can you show me some prints Yaint did?

Sure, here you go!

Printing at a 45° angle makes support-free printing possible, and you can even do that with a normal 3 axis printer.

So there must be some catch or some downside, it cannot be so simple right?

Well, it takes a lot of work to make non-planar code work as good as Yaint does, so the only thing we ask is a small monthly fee of $2 p/m to keep PLEC³ᵈ innovating and improving on reducing waste and improving 3d printing quality; the real goals of PLEC³ᵈ.

In return you will always get the latest updates, which will introduce new features that are coming, improving printing further.

After subscribing you also get info and links on upgrading your printer to become compatible. And you will be registered to our support center for any problems you might find yourself in.

So subscribe to Yaint, you even get the first month totally free, so you can set it up and to try it out without any risk!

Subscribe to Yaint!

What data is being shared, can I safely use the app without risking my data to be publicized?

Because Yaint is all locally running code the only required network connection resides in sending your login data and receiving a startup token to start Yaint. Since everything is done on your computer, there is no risk of any data being lost in a breach.
Yaint does cache your model as intermediary file, but only in it’s own directory and they are deleted upon closing of the app after processing is done. If you, for example, sell your laptop/computer you can just uninstall Yaint, or simply delete it’s folder, and no data will be in findable in any way.

Will Yaint run with my XYZ slicer in the near future? Will it be supported?

For now only our home-made developed, PrusaSlicer-fork, called Iris is specifically made available to be used with Yaint. Iris offers all the newest features of PrusaSlicer, but with a lot of added features, and will be kept up to date with PrusaSlicer.
However, in the very near future, a plugin for Yaint for Cura will be released; we are expecting to have the Cura plugin ready by July 2024.

As for other slicers; they are not in the planning to be supported; the implementation of Yaint in Iris is fully open-source; and therefore it’s code can pretty easily be migrated to for example OrcaSlicer, BambuStudio, or even differently based slicers like SuperSlicer, IceSL or KiriMoto, or even Simplify3D. If you are, yourself, working on an implementation and require help please go to the PLEC³ᵈ discord (you need to be licensed to be able to register) and request help in the dev channel.

$2/m? Wow, will Yaint not be available in a free version? Or a one-time buy?

Right now, for the amount of work and on-going effort to make Yaint work well and improve 3D printing so much to make it a realistic sustainable practise; which is the goal PLEC³ᵈ has set to reach in the coming years, this is really a reasonable price. You get premium support fully included and have a hassle-free way that saves you enormous amounts of time and a lot of money; think of all those too weak and failed prints with lots of support..

Moreover, as PLEC³ᵈ is a SFS-82 subsidiary, 82% of those $2 (a little less after payment gateway deduction) go directly in efforts that work for making the earth a sustainable planet. So, you are almost donating those $2 to supporting the things that make making stuff possible; earth resources availability and good resource usage and management practice. Want to know more about the projects and goal of the SFS – Search For Solutions – fund? Click here

Where did the idea of Yaint come from, how did it come into being? How is it licensed?

Back in 2022, when PLEC³ᵈ was established, we were searching for ways to reduce the amount of waste 3D printing creates. Options for support-free printing using so called ‘arc overhangs’ (google it, it is a very nice idea) or the fullcontrol.xyz spiralling things were tested and implemented in the predecessor of what is now Iris Slicer (named Pleccer). Thanks to YouTube coverage of kind of simpler types of non-planar printing called conical slicing (cnckitchen has a nice vid), mostly on modified printers doing rotate tilting (rtn) or hexa printers (delta’s with extra rails for hexa movement), it became clear that you can do full non-planar printing on any printer with only very minor modification. There were some simple experimental attempts, best being a processor called ‘curvislicer’, but they were all based on projecting downwards of the top layer’s curves. This simplistic way was offering hardly any real advantages apart from a smooth top layer.
Next came searching for a smarter algorithm, to that goal we tried building an octree with a simplified version of layer-by-layer looking at wall thicknesses and positions and transforming recursively. But, to make a long story short, a research team with some very smart minds had come up with a ingenious approach: setting optimization goals and moving a tetrahedralized model (in small pieces basically) parts to increase the optimization sum recursively. This, we only found a lot later than the publication date, about a year after it, but you can understand the joy of finding it at last!
After that in about half a year Yaint was developed, bit-by-bit, to deliver the solid results and necessary chain of features for a tool to improve 3D printing.

The whole core of Yaint is written by hand based on code from an open research paper (S^3-Slicer:A General Slicing Framework for Multi-Axis 3D Printing, 2022, link), it is not based on any open-source licensed dependencies and will for the foreseeable future not be open-sourced.
The Yaint ‘frontend’ app is based on various open-source libraries and it’s source can be found on Github, the following is a list of most important core dependencies:
– VTK; a general 3d library used for mesh conversion and optimizing meshes
– FloatTetWild; a very fast tetrahedralization library
– PETsC; a library for simulation in topology optimization
– FEniCS; a library for simulation in stress analysis

So how did PLEC³ᵈ make non-planar work, is there any AI or robots involved in the processing in Yaint?

Nope, absolutely no AI or machine learning was involved. Although machine learning offers quite some new handy options for example for generative designing, it is not necessarily the best practice for precise understandable math, which is what Yaint is built with. And that includes a few very good simulation libraries.
To get an overview of what Yaint was built on and who you should acknowledge for making Yaint possible in the first place, please look at the previous question.

Yaint non-planar printing on your 3D printer