Thanks! Much appreciated.
I find that taking a metal shears to the support every few inches breaks the base into parts. The base is brittle to the extent it will crack all way across.
And yes, it really helps.
@leonhart88 you can select “Mini Rafts” instead of “Full Raft” in the Raft Type dropdown to accomplish this!
Unless the implementation has changed, from my experience, removing large mini rafted parts off the build plate isn’t easy.
I can imagine it potentially being painful on the 3L. Maybe I’ll try next time though!
Ideally I’d like to be able to partition rafts in preform to make part removal easy, but also allow me to break of sections without power tools or hacking away with a saw on big parts.
Removing mini rafts on the 3L with the included scrapper is a breeze. I basically touch them and they pop right out.
I only prefer large rafts because they’re removed in a couple of seconds (just lift a corner with the plier and use one of larger scrapper sizes available from the manufacturer - using the supplied one also works but either the raft is small or you’ll have to work around to remove the vacuum) which is way faster than doing one by one.
Also, since it’s wiser not to clean the build platform to reutilize the resin left behind (which can be a lot sometimes) the mini rafts may require removing a few of those very tiny leftovers.
In the end both are extremely easy to remove so it all about (at least for me) faster print and slower raft removal for the mini rafts vs slower print and faster removal for the full raft. No need to mention the obvious cost difference.
Another thing is that full rafts may be pain to remove supports due to the large base beneath them and the part above them. It’s easier to have them loose on one of the ends. Obviously that depends on the part and also on the supports used.
Yes the difficulty of removing full rafts is exactly the problem I see with large parts on the 3L.
I’ll have to give mini rafts another chance then. I find that on the Form 3, they are rarely useful for me, and often lead to more cumbersome part removal…but perhaps for really large 3L parts they will be useful.
Thanks for all the suggestions everyone!
In my experience, the difficulty of removing Mini Rafts is dependent on the thickness of the rafts but more importantly the tool with which you do it.
1mm thickness and a sharp SINGLE beveled blade is working great for me. Tried with T1500/T2000/Durable/E50A.
I use this Blade LARGE SPECIAL PURPOSE BLADE NO. 702 | MARTOR
Hi!
I switched to Lychee : https://mango3d.io/
In my opinion the fasted and stable support editor out there.
But for sure just my pov.
Cheers
Chris
No problem that there’s no Formlabs printers listed among the compatible printers?
Hi!
Right - for submitting or better to say the slicing itself you still need Preform.
But to setup your object with supports it is just possible to do somewhere else.
One more important thing is that all setups done in Preform can not be exported if you want to use another printer.
So all you do in Preform stays in the Formlabs universe.
I prefer to be flexible in future. For sure this is more for production series an d not for just one time to print objects.
If you want to do a much more comfortable support setup Lychee is my suggestion.
Chris
Neat - can it create arched supports like I did here?
Edit: I gave it a quick test run - really not impressed with their onboarding process. The first thing it wants you to do is create an account, then it sits there for a while (phoning home?) before the software starts working. It feels way too cloud connected, and there’s advertising for the “Pro” version plastered all over. I wouldn’t mind paying, but the taste the test drive left in my mouth doesn’t feel good. Shame is it might be great software but some unprofessional choices by their product manager turned me right off. Feel free to comment on any of this and convince me otherwise :-).
Well, for sure you need to test the Pro Version to get all the power.
ChituBox crashed that often that I dropped it and even heavy geometry models run smooth in Lychee.
If your support editing is lost every 5min you are not getting lucky…
Lychee is my choice but just my opinion. I speed up my setup time a lot with Lychee and work crash free.
Thanks for those screenshots!
Next time I have need for something like this I’ll give it another go, and try to swallow my misgivings.
Hi, Do you maybe have profile files for Form 3L for this software available?
“ChituBox crashed that often that I dropped it and even heavy geometry models run smooth in Lychee.
If your support editing is lost every 5min you are not getting lucky…”
You must really be unlucky. I’ve been using ChituBox for the the last 2 years, and I can honestly say I don’t remember it ever crashing.
I can easily open multiple high-res scans of 8-10million polys each, and there’s no slow down.
No. You still have to use Preform to send your program to the Form 3L.
Hi,
How do you export to Preform? I like how Chitubox is flexible, but when trying to save files, I don’t see stl option.
Sorry, found it
Good. 