How would you orient this to print this? Got three options.  

RE: How would you orient this to print this? Got three options.

Option 3  allow bridge supports, minimal contact distance, no interface layers, 4 to 5 mm spacing ... probably a few other tweaks.

Option 4:  set the solid rectangular side down, allow supports everywhere, same settings as opt 3.  But the bottom inside edge will be ugly.

The idea being to put all the nastiness of supports inside the part where it won't be visible.  

And I think Option 3 will be best, opt 4 has extra artifacts.

RE: How would you orient this to print this? Got three options.

By option 3,do you mean the orientation of the part with the text kweld pointing up?

And option 4, kweld text facing down, that is the first picture?

Thanks. 

RE: How would you orient this to print this? Got three options.

Yes - pretty surfaces up ...  there are pros and cons, but with all the exterior surfaces up, you force all the support to be on the back sides of the cover, away from angle of view, and makes for the "prettiest" finish.   How you handle the support interface will dictate just of rough the inside surface is and the amount of effort you'll need to remove and clean out the supports. 

Placing the one solid rectangle down, you get a good finish on verticals, but the top region is mostly unsupported, and supports everywhere will place supports on the bottom lip, and that type of support can leave pretty ugly residue. So it's going to be trade offs.

In the end, it's a small part: why not explore and print it each orientation to see what actually happens.  Once you have the printed part and see what the supports do, it will all make a lot more sense.

Here's an example I just played with: I eliminated the typical "interface" layers to limit the support contact to nice linear strips that remove easily, and depended on the bridging to do a fair job between ridges.   I think it worked out well considering how bad it looked unsupported, or with default supports.

Unsupported:

RE: How would you orient this to print this? Got three options.

Posted by: Tim

Option 3  allow bridge supports, minimal contact distance, no interface layers, 4 to 5 mm spacing ... probably a few other tweaks.

Tim, would you be willing to go into some more detail about your recommendations for contact distance and interface layers? 

In your experience, what do you use for contact distance and does it vary by layer height or not?   I've been thinking about contact distance for some of my recent prints, and the default distance in the provided Prusa profiles is always 0.1, and the tool tip suggests a larger distance of 0.2 was the original (Slic3r?) default.  But those values seem pretty large, especially if you are printing at 0.05 or 0.1 layer heights since it is effectively skipping one or more entire layers.  But if you go too small, I assume the bridge layer would fuse with the support.  So is 0.1 the best compromise, or did you mean something smaller?  

Regarding interface layers, I've seen you post in several threads suggesting to turn off interface layers, but conceptually it seems like interface layers would make for a cleaner exposed bridge surface above the supports so I've been turn interface layers on by default.  Now I'm questioning that.  Are there circumstances where you would use interface layers?

Thanks for your time! 

EDIT:  Just saw your most recent post, with partially answered the bit about interface layers...

RE: How would you orient this to print this? Got three options.

Ideally the extrusion being laid on to an interface layer will maintain the circular profile and contact between that layer and the support would be minimal.  In practice I've found that rarely happens.  Instead, the new extrusion droops and makes fairly good contact with the interface layer, bonding rather well, regardless of the desired spacing.  This is especially true if the part is flat. But I have to qualify all this: it might be my technique shooting myself in the foot.  

Based on personal bad experiences, there are cases where minimizing the random chance of full layer/support contact can be beneficial. Especially when trying to make a flat bridged layer.  I simply try to help control or eliminate droop so that random interface contact is avoided, if that makes sense.

The hole in my general logic is the Triceratops model included on the SD card. For whatever reason, and however it was sliced, it prints really well and the support interface isn't glued to the part like most of my own attempts tend to do.  What makes this fact worse is I have personally sliced the triceratops at 200% and used the default support settings - and the supports came off easily and without incident.  But the tri frill being supported isn't flat, and has a bumpy texture, making a difference in which approach works best.