unwanted support questions
1) Why are there supports crawling up the sides of my parts? They aren't there in simplify3d and I don't see any useful purpose. If it is because someone is worried about the support being hard to remove, then they shouldn't worry because this happens all over the place when a support needs to start on a base with no sides. Is there a way for me to get rid of them? I tried playing around with support settings I know of and I couldn't get rid of them.
2) Supports are getting into areas that I cannot tolerate. These areas are known to not need supports and when supports are there the extra plastic is sometimes literally impossible to remove (I just ran into some impossible to remove an hour ago). Here is the support painting and the results. Note the protrusion through the screw hole. The hole is not painted and it isn't needed for the support above.
.3MF file is attached.
RE: unwanted support questions
Clarification: I said "Note the protrusion through the screw hole". The actual problem is in the rectangular nut trap behind the screw hole. I double checked and there is no paint above that trap. So this problem is actually caused by the same problem in question 1.
RE: unwanted support questions
I can see that would be frustrating. Here is a different approach. You add your own supports instead of relying on the slicer. See
Mk3S+,SL1S
RE: unwanted support questions
Thank you. I already know how to do this and have done it in the past. I was hoping there was some way to disable this "feature" in the software. If not then this is a feature request that I strongly care about. Sometimes there are situations like this where it is a real pita. And in general it is a lot of work. In these situations I will use simplify3d.
RE:
I find that even when I paint on supports, the slicer sometimes creates additional supports around or near those supports to support the supports. It is as if the grid is created and supports go up regardless of what is needed. To tweak this I often paint red 'forbid supports' in areas that I do not want supports. I find that using the 'snug' setting or changing the closing radius for the supports helps as well.
I use the above two methods to also reduce the number of standing tiny unnecessary support bits.
So in short, my recommendations would be:
- Paint it red to forbid supports. Though you may need to do this above or below where it is placing the support for it to behave.
- Reduce the support closing radius.
- Use snug supports. Though be careful that the snug supports still give themselves enough support.
- Add a support blocker shape.
Let me know if this helps. I find that the prusa slicer almost always interprets a vertical plane as 'needs supports' or 'does not need supports' since you are diving the vertical plane, I think the 'paint it red' will work. I also think the support blocker shape may do the trick and be less messy than painting.
RE: unwanted support questions
Thanks. That sounds like good things to do when pre-designed supports are too much trouble or impossible.
RE:
I am not sure if you have used the options in the paint on supports for 'Smart Fill' and 'On Overhangs Only'. Then when you set your angle, you can just tag the areas with one click to forbid the support for a selected area. It goes very fast and is much easier/cleaner (in my opinion) than the paintbrush method.
I would agree that it would be nice to see the algorithm for supports get smarter. I think they did make some good innovations to that end with snug supports and some of (what I understand to be) the newer options. For myself, I do a lot of support tweaking because I do miniatures. Regardless of the slicer, none of them have a silver bullet auto support that will work in every scenario for my prints. I find myself happiest with a mix of Prusa slicer SLA supports, FDM supports, and (on rare occasion) manually tweaking supports in blender.
Good luck. 🙂