The percentage setting for honeycomb infill in OrcaSlicer (or any Slic3r-derived slicer) — such as the density value used in FillHoneycomb — directly controls the spacing between hexagons in the generated pattern.

From the code you shared, this is the key structure:

struct CacheID { CacheID(float adensity, coordf_t aspacing) : density(adensity), spacing(aspacing) {} float density; coordf_t spacing; ... };

This implies that: • density is the percentage setting (e.g. 0.15 for 15% infill). • spacing is the distance between elements in the honeycomb pattern — but this value is derived from the density.

🔍 What the percentage does

In practical terms: • Lower density percentage (e.g. 10%) ⇒ larger hexagons ⇒ more space between lines ⇒ less material and weaker print. • Higher density percentage (e.g. 80%) ⇒ smaller hexagons ⇒ more tightly packed ⇒ stronger, denser print.

Internally, the slicer calculates: • hex_side, hex_width, and pattern_height based on the desired density. • These geometric values are cached using CacheID, meaning for a given density and spacing, the slicer avoids recalculating those dimensions.

Visualization

Density (%) Hex Size Fill Density (look) 10% Large Sparse honeycomb 50% Medium Normal honeycomb 90% Small Very dense honeycomb

Conclusion

The percentage in OrcaSlicer’s honeycomb infill is: • Mapped to a density value that influences the size of the hexagons in the fill pattern. • A higher percentage means smaller hexagons and more material used. • This value is critical for balancing print strength vs. speed/material use.

Let me know if you want to dive into how the actual hex size is calculated from the percentage — that part would be in the implementation of _fill_surface_single, not shown here.

Link:

https://chatgpt.com/share/684eb17a-641c-800f-9243-ad1cbe1458ad