Material Profiles: What Changes for PLA, PETG, ABS, TPU

The most common slicing mistake is printing PETG with a PLA profile because “it’s only 20 degrees hotter.” Temperature is the most visible difference between materials, but it’s rarely the one that ruins the print. Cooling, retraction, and speed differences are what actually cause the failures.

A filament profile bundles a dozen interacting settings tuned for one polymer’s behavior. Copying one material’s profile onto another and only changing the temperature is how you get stringing disasters, layer splitting, and parts that snap. Here’s what genuinely changes per material — and why.

PLA: the forgiving baseline

PLA is the easy case and the reference everything else deviates from.

• Temperature: ~200–220 °C hotend, ~55–60 °C bed (defer to the spool).
• Cooling: 100% part cooling fan after the first couple of layers. PLA wants maximum cooling — it improves overhangs, bridges, and fine detail with essentially no downside.
• Retraction: moderate; PLA is forgiving of retraction settings.
• Speed: tolerates high speeds well, limited mainly by hotend volumetric flow.

Almost every “starter profile” is a PLA profile. The danger is assuming the next material behaves the same.

PETG: the stringing and adhesion problem child

PETG prints strong, slightly flexible, chemically resistant parts — and strings if you treat it like PLA.

What changes versus PLA:

• Temperature: ~230–250 °C hotend, ~70–85 °C bed.
• Cooling: reduced, often 30–60%, not 100%. Too much cooling on PETG causes weak layer adhesion and brittle parts. This is the single setting most people get wrong by copying a PLA profile.
• Retraction: PETG is prone to stringing and oozing. Retraction tuning matters more than for PLA; many profiles also enable wipe and slightly higher retraction. Dry filament matters — PETG absorbs moisture and wet PETG strings regardless of settings.
• First layer / bed: PETG bonds aggressively to smooth PEI and glass — sometimes too well, pulling chunks out. A slightly larger first-layer Z gap or a textured plate is common; some users add a glue-stick release layer.
• Supports: PETG fuses to supports more than PLA. Increase the support Z gap — see the tree supports configuration guide.

PETG with full cooling and a PLA support gap is the classic failed-PETG signature: stringy, brittle, supports welded on.

ABS / ASA: the warping and ventilation case

ABS and ASA are strong, heat-resistant, and the most environment-sensitive of the common materials.

What changes:

• Temperature: ~240–260 °C hotend, ~90–110 °C bed.
• Cooling: minimal or off. Part cooling on ABS causes layer splitting and warping. Some profiles allow a small fan only for bridges/overhangs. This is the opposite of PLA.
• Enclosure: an enclosed, draft-free chamber is effectively a profile requirement, not an accessory. Ambient drafts cause cracking and delamination regardless of slicer settings.
• Bed adhesion: brim or raft is common; first-layer warp is the dominant failure mode. Higher bed temperature and disabled cooling on early layers help.
• Speed: moderate; the limiting factor is usually warping, not flow.

ABS slicing is mostly about not cooling and not letting drafts in. The slicer can mitigate warping (brim, reduced cooling, draft shield) but cannot fully fix a cold, drafty room.

TPU: the slow, no-retraction flexible

TPU is flexible filament. It prints fine, but its profile is the most different of all four.

What changes:

• Temperature: ~220–235 °C hotend, ~40–60 °C bed.
• Speed: slow — often 15–30 mm/s. TPU is the one material where speed is a hard constraint: push it and the flexible filament buckles in the extruder and under-extrudes. This is the defining TPU setting.
• Retraction: minimal or zero. Long retractions on stretchy filament cause jams and inconsistent extrusion. Many TPU profiles set retraction near zero and rely on coasting/wipe and slow travel instead.
• Direct drive strongly preferred. Bowden setups can print TPU but need even slower speeds and near-zero retraction; the slicer cannot fully compensate for the extruder hardware.
• Cooling: moderate; varies by TPU shore hardness.

A TPU print failing usually means speed too high or retraction too aggressive — not temperature.

The settings that must change per material

If you remember nothing else, these four are the cross-material traps:

Setting	PLA	PETG	ABS/ASA	TPU
Part cooling fan	100%	30–60%	~0%	moderate
Retraction	moderate	tuned, higher	moderate	near-zero
Print speed	high ok	moderate	moderate	slow (15–30)
Support Z gap	small	larger	moderate	larger

Temperature and bed temperature also change, but those are the ones people do remember. The four above are the ones that get copied wrong.

How to manage profiles in the slicer

• Keep a separate filament profile per material and brand, with flow and temperature calibrated per the flow and temperature guide.
• Never edit a base “Generic PLA” profile to print PETG — clone it, rename it, and change cooling/retraction/speed deliberately.
• In PrusaSlicer/OrcaSlicer/Bambu Studio, filament profiles are first-class and stackable on top of a printer profile; use that structure rather than hand-editing per print.
• Re-calibrate flow when switching brands even within the same material.

Where to go next

For the calibration that every material profile depends on, see the flow and temperature calibration guide. For diagnosing defects that look like profile errors but aren’t, see troubleshooting print defects in the slicer.

For deeper material-science and mechanical testing, PrintLabGuide ↗ covers polymer behavior, and FDM Desk ↗ covers printer-and-material pairing.