¶ What is the elephant foot?
In FDM 3D printing, the material is extruded layer by layer through the nozzle to construct the 3D model. So during the printing, the first layer of extruded filaments is pressed onto the heat bed and has not yet fully cooled. In addition, the compression from the upper layer of gravity may cause the printed first layer to expand, which is called elephant foot. When printing larger models, the elephant foot is usually more visible.
In most cases, the slight elephant foot at the bottom may not be significant for most models. However, when the printed model needs to have precise dimensions and tolerances for assembly, you need to do some post-processing on the elephant foot.
¶ Adaptive elephant foot compensation
Instead of having to sand this slight edge off, this setting will scale/shrink the first layer.
You'll find it under Print settings - Advanced - Elephant foot compensation. To access this setting, QIDISlicer must be in Advanced or Expert mode.
Values around 0.2 mm usually work well for the default 0.4 mm nozzle.
¶ The conflict between Brim and elephant foot compensation
When you enable Brim and set the "Brim-object gap" to 0mm and find that Brim is still not fully connected to the model, it may be caused by the elephant foot compensation. If you want Brim to fully fit the model in the preview page, you need to disable elephant foot compensation(turn it to 0).
