Add warning message to "Prinitability" when there's red

I have missed red on prints because it takes so long to show up on bigger prints and i know people who have missed it because they’re color blind. a small blob of red that you have to go looking for isn’t a good warning; an exclamation point with a message next to “Printability” would be.

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You get a red barred circle :no_entry_sign: in the printability if it really doesn’t think you should print a part. Of course some parts that are half red will still print OK.

You are right and i should have been more clear. I think there should be a warning for even the smallest bit of red, not just the level that seems likely to cause total failure.

I’ve had warnings for very minute sections of red. I’ve also had soem bigger sections that were slightly red and got the OK to print. The system isn’t perfect.

It would be nice to be able to control the colors a bit. With some materials it’s hard to find issues because we can’t see them. Being able to turn the part black with white problem areas would be great. There are a lot of people that have issues seeing colors when they go pink.

An intermediary notification that a model will likely print but also has some precarious sections might be useful to alert the user to look for undersupported regions. Improving the visibility of renders and undersupported sections in PreForm is something we’re always focusing on and we did recently update visibility of highlighted sections. Using the slice tool to cut through the model might also be useful in identifying undersupported sections. I’ll forward this suggestion to our software team!

I regularly print from models, like this, that have a whole lot of red on them without seeing any problems.

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The red shading is largely useless, unless they update the feature where it will be accurate then it’s a waste of time to do anything with it.

Examples
–parts that directly have supports are shaded red
–parts that are unsupported but are nearby supports are unshaded
This is the case most of the time

The supports touching the red area are support bases. This part is red because there are no supports under the red.

Also, the perspective of the view may not allow us to see how things are actually supported. I do agree that there is room for improvement but the basic strategy for the printability seems to work well.

The supports touching the red area are support bases. This part is red because there are no supports under the red.

Correct, but the piece still prints without problems, so the red is a false indication.

Some parts will self support while others will not. The red is an indicator of risk. It’s not a black and white indicator that a print will absolutely fail if you try the print.

Formlabs is not conducting a detailed FEA analysis for the print stress. The software has no clue on how self supporting the geometry is and what safety factor will be needed to print every time. Obviously this would be cost prohibitive.

I had a part fail last night that was fully “printable” in the software. It failed because I oriented the part poorly and was not paying attention. Two copies of the part were printed at the same time. One printed perfectly.

Again, it’s not perfect but the support indicator is a good tool to see how risky a print will be. There is no guarantee either way. Preform is free, real FEA software and the experimental data required to 100% predict printability would not be free and would be overkill.

That’s correct. The printability calculation is designed to be a bit on the conservative side. You’re right that we’re not doing a detailed FEA analysis. That’s mostly for performance reasons. But even if we did, we’d probably want to keep the printability report a bit on the conservative side because there are so many variables in the real world.

We’d love to get the details on your case where printability said you were good but the part didn’t print. We’re really trying avoid to being off in that direction.

I’m not concerned with the “printability” of something since there’s a lot of factors that can change that (like where the object is located on the platform including the rotation it is facing)

But it seems like a huge flaw where it shades areas red directly where supports are and doesn’t shade areas that have no form of support at all, those are things that are the most basic things that a system like that should be able to detect.

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Yeah, the red on gray is hard to see, especially if the red patches are small and/or hidden by supports. I’d also like to see an option to display the model edges to verify that supports aren’t being placed in an engraved detail. If you look at a face parallel to your screen, all the details just become a gray featureless face.

I blame these visibility issues on the geniuses at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or wherever that came up with the modern pastel style of web interfaces that are common now.