I have seen print files that allow you to calibrate the amount of purge so even if you cant cut down on the color swaps, you can still cut down on the amount per swap
One way you can end up with a lot of unnecessary waste with AMS is improper orientation of your object. The purge tower on the prepare page might show the purge tower going to the top of the build area, but after slicing, it only extends to the last filament swap, so if you can keep those filament swaps as low to the build plate as possible, you minimize how much filament must be used to build that tower. If you're designing your own parts, you can either design them to work this way, or cleverly split the model into interlocking parts to take advantage of this. This one is a little bit niche, but another option that I've found somewhat useful is setting the "interlocking depth of a segmented region" under the advanced settings in the others tab to something near your desired shell thickness. It doesn't reduce waste, and can even increase it, but that may also result in a small reduction in the total amount of filament used. The plate I'm printing now went from 138.09g to 137.20g of total filament used, despite a tiny increase of 0.03g of waste (number of filament swaps was unchanged). I find it helps on otherwise single color models that I've used the color painting tool on, because Bambu Studio seems to extend those colored sections pretty far into the model, replacing parts of the sparse infill with several more perimeters. This option restores the sparse infill on alternating layers by limiting the depth of the color by what you specify here, which helps a bit. I think this option is intended to help with problems with adhesion between different colored materials, which I've never had a problem with, and the filament reduction is an unintended side effect.
Thanks for this video. It's very helpful. I don't have a Bambulabs printer yet, but I am keen on getting the A1 Mini with AMS lite. The only thing that was troubling me about it was the amount of wasted filament. You've offered good solutions. Thanks!
@bhartissimo Glad this was helpful. One option I didn't cover that you can also use is changing the amount the printer purges each time by changing the flushing volume multiplier. Something some people play with.
Awesome! I though I saw a print go by object the week I got the printer, but somehow missed the print by object option in the settings! Will definitely be using that in future after seeing you point it out.
Purge into infil barely makes a dent unless you really crank up your infill percentage. And at that point, it's basically the same waste for a heavier print
While purge into infill in theory is a great idea and can make a difference if the other model is big and has a lot of infill or the infill percentage is high it's not that big of a game changer is saving filament for many situations.
It would be nice if there were an auto-adjust of infill density tuned for each filamnet swap so that the wasted plastic is used for up to 100% infill rather than being pooped.
What do you think about flush to infill combined with reducing the purge amount at each swap? Maybe it will be okay for filaments that are not too far apart like two shades of the same base colour.
With the freedom to optimize a design, is it possible to modify the volume of different colors in the objects so that there is near-zero waste? For example, make each area/volume slightly larger (or smaller) as necessary to absorb the waste. Like trying to make the fill volumes an integer multiple of the maximum waste-change volume. Or even simpler, is it possible to completely flush the waste into the next layer (if color accuracy isn't critical) so that there is zero waste?
