Resin Print Profiles

Resin printing requires different settings per-resin and per-printer. This doc has both:

• Specific settings for certain resins on the Phrozen Transform 4K resin printer, and
• how to make and tune new resin profiles.

Premade profiles

These settings should be added to the PROFILE tab on the Transform’s web UI. You will then need to triple-check that you’ve selected the right profile for your print.

Explanation

Resin profiles have three main parts:

• Thickness (of each exposed layers of resin),
• Movement (how the printer moves the build plate), and
• Exposure (how long each layer is exposed to UV light)

Movement and exposure are controlled separately for normal layers and burn layers. Burn layers are the first few layers of your print, which are intentionally overexposed to be absolutely sure your model sticks to the print bed.

Thickness

Each resin profile is tuned for a certain thickness; changing the layer thickness will require changes to the other settings. The Transform can in theory go down to 10 micron (0.01mm) layers.

Movement

How fast and how much the build plate is moved affects the quality of your print. There’s ongoing debate about what is “best”, but our experience is that pulling the build plate up quickly pops the just-cured layer off the bed without bending it. Aside from that, all that matters is that the build plate is moved far enough away to fully pull the print off the film.

The delay between layers helps the resin cool down

Exposure

Arguably the most important part of the profile. Underexposing resin will cause your print to lose its shape and eventually fail. Overexposing resin will cause excess resin to stick to your part and stay behind in the bed, ruining the finish of your part and wasting resin.

How this fits together

The complete process of a print:

For the first # Burn Layers layers:

1. Build plate moves up by Thickness mm,
2. layer is exposed for Burn Cure Time ms,
3. build plate moves up by Burn Up Height mm at Burn Up Speed mm/min,
4. build plate moves back down by Burn Up Height – Thickness mm at Down Speed mm/min,
5. printer waits for Delay ms,
6. and repeat.

For the remaining layers:

1. Build plate moves up by Thickness mm,
2. layer is exposed for Cure Time ms,
3. build plate moves up by Burn Up Height mm at Up Speed mm/min,
4. build plate moves back down by Up Height – Thickness mm at Down Speed mm/min,
5. printer waits for Delay ms,
6. and repeat.

How to tune

From scratch

Creating profiles for completely new resins is difficult, as our printer is old enough that no modern resins offer a good premade profile. The movement settings (delay/height/speed) should be copied from an existing profile. As far as exposure, the Elegoo Mars (the original version) has similar UV-light strength.1 Copying the exposure settings from a profile for the Mars is a good place to start.

Dialing in

Much like filament 3D printing, you should tune in response to problems: either your print is failing, or the surface quality is poor. A list of common symptoms is given below.

Shortcuts

There are models specifically designed to quickly tune a resin profile. The one we’ve had the most success with is The Cones of Calibration. This model has a series of columns, consisting of a cone, a narrow cylinder, then an upside-down cone. Each column has a progressively-smaller cylinder.

When the cure time is too high, all ten of the columns will print successfully. The five smallest columns (on the side labeled “Failure”) are intended to fail, and will only succeed if excess resin is being cured by a too-long Cure Time. On the other hand, if the Cure Time is too short, then the five larger columns (on the side labeled “Success”) will start to fail.

If the Cure Time is just right, then all five of the “Success” columns will print correctly but none of the “Failure” columns will.

Small changes in the Cure Time will make a difference. If the result is close, then changes of as little as 100 ms will make a difference.