If you want to try this out yourself all of this is Open Source, and was developed by the ZHAW in Switzerland. During making this video and working with their code I created a fork of their project to make it in its current state easier usable, fix some bugs and add some features. Nothing really crazy but in my opinion, it works better.
Conical Slicing Scripts
So here’s the process and I’m using SuperSlicer for this demo because it has some additional features over PrusaSlicer and most importantly has a switch that lets you export GCode with empty layers, which is sometimes really handy for this method! I load my stl file into the slicer with a slightly adjusted printer profile where the bed origin is in the center. I move my part so that the global z-axis represents the axis of the cone that I want to use for slicing and save the part in this new location. In the transformation script, I set my slicing angle and run it which spits out the pre-deformed stl, that’s ready to be loaded back into the slicer. Now I make sure that the cone axis of the slt is again at the origin of the coordinate system and then simply slice my part and save the GCode. Then I paste the name of this GCode into the second script, make sure that the right cone angle is set, and hit run to start the back deformation. And that’s it! Ready to run conical GCode generated in a minute! I also wrote a comprehensive guide on my website through which you should go step by step to ensure that you get out nice GCode because some essential things need to be taken care of! One of the huge pain points of PrusaSlicer and CURA is, that they don’t position parts in their local STL coordinate system but choose one by themselves. There is a switch in PrusaSlicer that should get around this, but it seems to have been broken for a while, so please guys, fix that because currently, I need to use a ton of trickery to position non-symmetric parts properly.