In the New Material Settings interface, all materials are connected with their respective printers. This means that if you want to set up new material, you first have to set up its printer.
Let's say you want to set up a recycled PET filament. You start with selecting the printer you want to print on. The material is a filament, so probably the printer is of the FDM type.
Choosing FDM will preselect the most popular FDM printers for the next field:
If your printer is on the list that's good, because we have already filled in a number of parameters, the most basic of which are these:
The system will work with these settings, i.e. will warn about models being too big for the print envelope, but you might want to try the Advanced settings:
The settings here will influence the pricing of models of all the materials you connect to this printer. Running ahead a little, I've noticed that I tend to forget these settings and start to look for them in the material (not printer) templates themselves. So it's probably worthwhile to take note of the parameters set up here: Horizontal printing speed, price per hour, price per cm2 surface area, and price per cm3 bounding box. There are no rules on which parameters to use in which combination, all results of all calculations will simply be added up for the price of the model, from both the printer template and the material template.
The next page of the printer page is called priority: You may want to give your customer the option to jump the print queue, for an additional cost:
What to do if your printer is not on the list? Easy: Fill out the printer name, the build envelope size, and whatever other parameters you want to use:
Fill out at least one lead time and your printer is ready. When you click Save, you will see this screen:
By clicking on the X+Y=Z printer, you get this screen:
When you click "add a new" you see this:
The drop down list will show all FDM materials in the database, but "recycled PET" is not one of them.
Like with creating a new printer, you can simply start writing the name of the material:
Clicking next to the input field will save the name of this material.
Now you can add additional parameters, in Basic mode Price per cm3 of the model, material typical density, and price per gram of the model including supports.
Choosing the density/price per gram combination will lead to more accurate calculations since it will take into account the used filling level and material used for support.
Through advanced options, you can add technical limits to the material, based on your experience with it, like shell closeness (minimal distance between two parts of the model if you want those parts to move independently, like hinge and axle), minimal wall thickness (the thinnest wall you can print without it getting deformed) and minimal hole (if you need around, unobstructed hole). The rest of the pages of the template are filled out as usual.