topic Re: "Alternating hatch cycles" missing from hatching menu in Netfabb Forum

"Alternating hatch cycles" missing from hatching menu

spraggdaniel — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 13:08:09 GMT

I want to use this option for alternative hatching cycles when generating a simple hatch fill to expose the layer in multiple interleaved passes. According to the help page and the default XML file this parameter should be an option, however for some reason it doesn't appear on the simple hatching or stripe hatching menus, only on the quad islands and checkerboard hatching options. I've been manually editing XMLs and importing the settings instead but this option still doesn't show, is there anyway of modifying these menus to include this option?

Simple hatch help page: https://help.autodesk.com/view/NETF/2025/ENU/?guid=GUID-7AA1F761-982F-4316-A44E-C968F3EC3F89

Simple hatching menu with "alternating hatch direction" or zig-zagging, but no "alternating hatch cycles".

Quad islands hatching menu with "alternating hatch cycles" and "unidirectional hatching" (aka alternating hatch direction) options. It would be helpful to keep the parameter naming consistent between these menus as well.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Danny

Re: "Alternating hatch cycles" missing from hatching menu

steffen_anders_adsk — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 09:39:26 GMT

Hello, Danny,

Welcome to the Netfabb forum!

Note that Netfabb has two slicing avenues. One, through powderbed-fusion-type machine workspaces using XML-based definition (or EBPA) of toolpath strategies, two, through manual slicing in the project tree.

The help article you linked is for PBF toolpathing, your screenshots show manual slicing. For historical reasons, these two use different implementation of vector generation. That is why you found them to not match. Help for manual slicing is here. Help for slicing and toolpathing in a PBF workspace begins here.

You are correct, hatch interleaving, or something to that effect, is missing from Simple hatching in slicing in the project tree of Netfabb 2025.1 and earlier. However, there is an additional filter that reorders hatches into interleaving passes: Convert contours/hatches > Hatch permutation Unfortunately for this purpose, this filter in its current implementation sorts hatches literally by their order, not their relative position or "inline-ness". Meaning, when you hatch something with holes in the island, such as a torus, the interleaving effect is lost for hatches "crossing" the hole because they now count as separate vectors that lie on alternating sides of the hole. As a workaround, you could

hatch a fully solid, convex, dummy contour first,
perform the permutation on the hatches,
then stencil the vectors with the desired contour from the original using Trim hatches.

(You could automate this with Lua, too, by effectively applying a script like a fancy, custom-programmed slicing filter instead of Netfabb's built-in ones.)

Either way, this is no longer an issue in Netfabb 2026 which will use the same logic as PBF toolpathing and which we expect to be releasing Soon™. 😉

Best regards,

Steffen

Re: "Alternating hatch cycles" missing from hatching menu

spraggdaniel — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 11:05:30 GMT

Hi Steffen,

Thanks for your response, this is really helpful. I look forward to having a go with the 2026 update but I'll look into this scripting solution in the meantime.

Best,

Danny

Re: "Alternating hatch cycles" missing from hatching menu

steffen_anders_adsk — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 09:54:38 GMT

Netfabb 2026 has been released; the parameter Alternating hatch cycles in Simple hatching now addresses your requirement. Values 2 and up produce as many passes of interleaved hatch drawing.