I’ve had a few cases where I wanted to use automatic supports in preform but the part I was printing had a few critical areas where I didn’t want supports to attach. Ultimately I had to solve this by manually editing the supports.
It occurs to me that preform itself might provide a method to “mask off” or deprioritize areas of a part where supports should be avoided. The interface could be similar to the manual editing, but instead would “paint” an area with the mask. Later automatic support generation would attempt to support the part without attaching to the part where masked. If the part can’t otherwise be printed without supports there, they’d be added anyway.
Although this feature would be nice I feel like it’s part of the orientation job. You orient so as to avoid having to put critical areas facing the build platform, and if you can’t you can click-drag a rectangle in Support Edit mode to batch-remove a bunch of points from the incriminated area.
Yeah, I agree that the current version allows you to manually edit supports to move them around. But at that point you’re making educated guesses at to the best way to support an open space, whereas if you could mask it, you’d be able to take advantage of the support algorithm’s judgement as to what additional support is necessary.
Definitely agree that in most cases you can orient a parts detail away from the build plate. But in cases where you can’t, or you want a layout system that requires less expertise, this mask method might be helpful.
Yes, completely agree this needs to be a feature. It would be great to be able to specify a .obj group name that would not allow support attachment points. Sure, you could easily create a situation where the part is undersupported, but that’s what the red visualization mode is for. Manually moving supports very quickly becomes a pain when repeatedly iterating part design and at the same time there are dozens and dozens of supports points.
