Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “4 support tips for perfect 3d prints”.
Supports love them or hate them. They are absolutely necessary when it comes to desktop 3d printing. Today, we’re going to share four tips, along with our sponsor prusa 3d, to make sure that you get absolutely beautiful, perfect prince whether you’re an absolute beginner who just got a 3d printer or whether you’ve been extruding plastic for years. Let’S jump right into it.
There are thousands of people this time of year that are just getting their first 3d printer and they have never played with supports before, and so, let’s start off extremely basic you’ve got something that prints out hanging out in the air and your 3d printer just isn’t Magic, it just can’t print out there in the middle of nowhere. So you have to print a structure to be able to support those features. That’S what supports do and the easiest way to get started is simply to turn them on, but this one part confuses a lot of people. If you select turn on supports, it will automatically detect everywhere that you have an overhang. That’S an area, that’s sticking out into the air that won’t print right and it will just add, supports there, no matter where it is on your model. One thing you can do is select from build plate only, and that makes sure that your supports are only on the build plate of your printer and not on things like internal structures or internal cavities. You really have to experiment with this, but this is where you get started now that we’ve gotten the most extremely basic feature out of the way. Turning on your supports, let’s start tweaking them. The first place that you should look to tweak is the support angle, depending on your 3d printer. It can actually print at angles much more impressive than what the slicer is set to by default by default. Prusa’S slicer is set to anything over 55 degrees. It’S going to add support to, and that’s just to ensure that absolute beginners are going to get a successful print, but once you’ve got a little bit of experience and you’re ready to start tweaking things, you can adjust this number changing that to a smaller number makes It so that your printer is creating fewer supports.
It’S supporting fewer surfaces. This is going to mean less support material, which means faster prints. This printer right here has been known to do things all the way down to like eight degrees. This is the prusa mark 3s, and it is a beast when it comes to printing these extreme angles. So i actually turn my supports way way down to about 8 degrees, or i leave them off and just see what it does.
As you saw in my video, where i 3d printed, the sculpture that i did this printer was able to print things that i thought were going to be impossible, but it carried them out the next one on the list is z, distance. That’S the distance between the support material and the model, so you have a little gap there, so that your supports don’t stick to your model. This is probably, in my opinion, one of the most important aspects, because you get it wrong and your prints are stuck fused together with your support material and you can’t break it off. This was a problem i used to have years and years ago, ever since i got the mark 3s, it’s not anything.
I’Ve had to deal with, but it’s something to look at and consider, there’s always a trade-off, the greater the distance between your support and your model, the lower the quality of that that lowest layer of your model. That’S going to be on the supports, because your printer is basically printing into thin air, the tighter that distance, the greater the chance those two are going to fuse. So you really need to kind of explore and experiment, but i wouldn’t tweak these things unless you’re ready to actually get in there and and try it out and experiment on your own because they tend to work pretty well as they are. This would be for more advanced users who really really really want to dial in that bottom layer and final area to tweak your supports for perfect prints and the one that i’m personally enjoying the most right now is manual placement of your supports.
There are a couple ways of doing this: let’s start with support enforcers. Simply right. Click on your model choose add, support, enforcer, and now you have this piece of geometry: you can select, you know a block or a cylinder or a sphere or something like that and wherever you place this on your model is where the supports are going to happen. There are support, enforcers and support blockers, and you can guess what the blockers do they block supports.
This comes in especially handy if you have a model that needs supports in maybe just one spot, or maybe you want to avoid putting supports in another spot. For example, if you’re printing a skull, you can put support enforcers to make supports happen under the jaw, but you could put blockers in the eye sockets, so you’re not trying to dig support out of the eye sockets. This allows for so much customization and it has saved my prints on so many occasions now. I absolutely love it and get this.
If you save your project at a prusa slicer as a 3mf file, those support enforcers go with it. You can share that to other people and they can print it without having to manually place those enforcers on their own, but the prusa team is pushing this even further. Now, instead of having to manually place the support enforcer geometries, the latest beta release of prusa slicer has an incredible tool that allows you to paint on where you want them. This granular fine control is for the experts, of course, and it is allowing people to get such incredible results.
You can dig into your file dig into your model, hide parts of it so that you can see it better and literally paint on where you want. Those supports to be or not to be, it’s fantastic, they’ve put out a video exploring this feature in depth. You should check out that video on the prusa youtube channel to find out exactly what each button does and how to apply it. I will put a link to that video down below a link to the latest version of bruce’s slicer, and you should definitely check that out.
I really hope you enjoyed this video. I hope you learned something be sure to check out the prusa youtube channel for constant updates tips, tricks and tutorials and give us a thumbs up. It really helps us out i’ll see you next time. You .