Supports don't show up
I wanted to do some testing for organic supports, since I've never used them, so I made a simple table object and put it in PrusaSlicer and added 2 more orientations:
The foremost is with only a short space under the main part of the table, the 2nd one allows much more space under it, and the last turned sideways so the legs that end up the highest are overhangs. Then I turned on supports and specified organic for the type and it changes nothing (top and bottom are cut off by the forum software, so click for the full image):
I even added a support enforcer without any luck. I've done this several times and just did not get any supports to show up.
I did have ONE time where I did add supports to a project and they showed up, but, overall, they just don't show up. What am I doing wrong or do I need to do to make supports work?
RE: Supports don't show up
Can you save a project file from PRUSA slicer, zip it up and attach it here please. That way we get all your settings.
one thing to check too is to make sure you haven’t deselected the supports from the key on the slice preview, you just wouldn’t see them if you turned the view off accidentally. That’s one thing that wouldn’t be saved in the project.
RE: Supports don't show up
one thing to check too is to make sure you haven’t deselected the supports from the key on the slice preview, you just wouldn’t see them if you turned the view off accidentally. That’s one thing that wouldn’t be saved in the project.
D'oh! (And, really, I had to say that in my loudest and best Homer Simpson voice - what I did was THAT senseless!)
I was looking in the main view and NOT the sliced view!
Okay, now that I've got that working, a related question (and this is what I was trying to work out on my own with this test): If I need to print something like the foremost table, with an overhang that's only a few mm above the print surface, there are two issues I can think of with that:
* It's wasting a freaking lot of filament because it's basically filling in that entire area under the bridge or overhang, and
* What will that surface that had so many supports under it be like? Will it be rough from me having to remove the supports?
Is there a decent way to deal with a large area of overhang like that, other than supports?
RE: Supports don't show up
Unless you are using soluble support with 0 contact distance then the bottom of any flat surface like that is going to be problematic. Part of that is the support gap but another part is that the extrusions for bridged layers in PS tend to have a slight gap between them due to the bridging flow being set to 0.95 or similar on the default profiles. For an actual bridge you want to 'stretch' the filament a bit so that makes sense but for printing on a support you want it to be full thickness. I did some experiments with older versions of Super Slicer that allows more control over the settings and I did get some better results during tests but it was a faff with tweaking the settings. I still have a pic of one of the tests in the media library here -
Those were a sloped part with a flat overhang. So the picture is the underside and you can see the support block generated to the side for 2 of them.
In general though for PS there are a couple of general things to be aware of. Your first example where the surface to be supported is close to the bed can actually sometimes produce no support at all depending on settings. For example if the surface is say 0.4mm above the platter and you have a contact distance between support and part of 0.25 then that leaves 0.15, which is not enough for the first layer thickness, ergo no support is generated regardless of other settings. Usually its worse than that as support also has its first layer that it always has so practically about 0.5 is about as small a gap between the part and bed you can go.
Personally I wouldn't use Organic supports for large flat surfaces like your example objects. I'd always use snug. Organic works best for sculptural type objects like figures.
With snug one other thing I do is increase the interface layers to 4. I find that by using more the interface sticks to itself a lot more, becoming more 'solid'. This means that it generally comes off in one part (as long as your contact z is sufficient that it hasn't fused). You spend less time picking bits of filament off the undersides that way. That reduces support removal time but it also means you aren't hacking at that bottom layer as much trying to remove bits of filament which means less potential damage to it.
It just pays to design your parts to minimise supports from the get go. Sometimes that means cutting into smaller sections and pinning and gluing together others its changing the design parameters where you can and thinking about the print orientation ahead of time as you are designing the part.
RE: Supports don't show up
One hard part of the learning curve for me has been designing parts for no or minimal support. I'm hoping there are a few things I can do with organic supports that haven't worked as well with grid supports. In my example, I was just testing to be sure I could turn on organic, but I see your point about using grid supports.
What's frustrating is that there is a project I'm working on now that would be so much easier if I could do large overhangs, but I think I'll have to plan around that and do it another way.
RE: Supports don't show up
Very Helpful, for at least. I made an account just to thank you for this comment 🙂