@Friedl_1977 at this point I’d reach out to support and have them work on fixing this because that quality of print is atrocious for the price of that printer UNLESS you have the layer settings screwed up
Hi @br4n_d0n -
hhmmm… Not sure I can reach out to support. I have do so before but they refer the ticket to the local agents.
Well, the layer settings are what they are by default on the machine, I did not adjust anything. The machine is brand new (probably 5L of resin printed) and the tank, resin and mixer are all first time use. First time printing black. Kind of looks like when you have under extrusion on FDM 
I selected black V5 under print settings (previous print had Grey in) and left the rest as it is. I did adjust support and orientation that is it, then hit print. As I mentioned, the reason I bought FL is that I had to get a printer I do not have to babysit and keep adjusting stuff. This is not my main focus so I cannot afford to run all sorts of tests and stuff like you’d normally see on YouTube.
Anyway, I will be extremely glad if I am doing something stupidly wrong and I can fix this.
I don’t think you are doing anything wrong, this looks like the pixels artifacts. Black material really emphasizes this, nothing you really can do to change this. Formlabs antialising needs to be better to fix this, which realistically probably wont happen anytime soon given thing look fine in other materials, black is tough as it REALLY emphasized any imperfection. Grey does a little better, and it’s imperceptible with the precision model material.
Bigger question is are the straight edges and rectangular parts of those parts straight? Like without warping and you can take a straight edge to it and see that it’s flat/ 90 degrees?
That is a pity as most of my clients want black part, the grey is not aesthetically very pleasing ask I cannot see myself spending hours painting parts. Then I simply need to revert back to FDM.
Three of the four sides are relatively squared and mostly straight yes. One side is not, not even close. It seems to “sag” in the middle and then tapers back towards the corners.
Holes remain a problem, none of them fit. Client had previous part printed elsewhere and they were spot on, my suspicion is they were media blasted as the are much “smoother” than mine. also, all sides are square and straight and all peg and holes fit and line up. Client not to impressed at the moment. I will have do more prints to try and fix this, of course which I cannot recoup 
It seems like you are encountering the exact same warping problem as me then, the one side first attached to the build platform warping weirdly away from the rest of the model, causing the entire edge to not be straight. Most of this can be seen visually, customers can tell without a straight edge and reject the part.
I also hypothesize that this warping effect is what is driving the holes not fitting in your case, I bet the entire model has warped to some degree.
It’s been 3 months since I met with Formlabs, and nothing so far has been outputted settings wise to hint at this issue even being worked on, so I am not exactly holding my breath at this point. I am having some discussions to switch to an SLS or polyjet machine.
edit: was the previous client part printed on a Formlabs 4 or a formlabs machine at all?
I sincerely hope this not be the case as I really cannot afford to lose the money invested into this printer 
SLS sounds nice… I have had some parts printed with SLS and MJF for clients, as much as I liked those parts, I will not be able to meet those costs or accommodate the level of post processing required on the SLS machines,
If these is no fix coming for this, my guess is I will have to write this off as a loss and go back to having parts printed.
Hi -
Some more disappointing results;
Settings:
- Standard Grey V5
- 50µm
- 100% supports autogenerated
- touch points 0.45
- Washed for 20mins on High
- Cured for 10mins at 60C
Really hoping Support can chime in here.
Regards,
Friedl.
That’s horrible for a brand new Form 4. We’re talking SLA here and yet you have lines almost like FDM. You really need to get a hold of someone from support to see what’s going on
I have been trying, but sadly no luck yet. Not sure how to ping support as logging tickets only result on the local agent calling me.
I am really hoping I am doing something wrong and that someone can point out what I am doing wrong. The only assistance I have received so far with regards to this is the local agents suggested I do Z-Axis calibration. However, reading through the article it does not seem like that has anything to do with this and I would not want to deviate from factory settings at this stage.
I have only seen this on flat surfaces that was printed at an angle. On smaller models (Astronaut Phil test prints) this seems to not be a problem.
Regards
Friedl.
I’m going to take a wild guess from what I can see from that image here that if you were to take this off supports, the flat surface you see here would be nowhere flat, with the bottom corner with where the print first attached to the supports warping and bending away from the rest of the model. If so, then this would be pretty much the extensive issue I have experienced and documented with warping on Form 4. It’s not how you supported this, how you oriented, or post-processing. It’s because the printer cannot print this accurately.
First thing first, I do not believe you are doing anything wrong, and quite frankly, there is nothing more a user can really do. This is the best printing orientation and pretty much adherent to everything Formlabs recommends (there is not really anything else you can adjust). The issue with Formlabs support is that for the most part no one who works there are engineers, and most have minimal experience. They are great at customer service, giving you free stuff, and being nice, but not capable at solving any technical issues and can only read from a script to you because most agents there seem to have only a customer service background and have little experience using the printer. I will put it this way-- based off of how you walked through troubleshooting and your experience in additive you have demonstrated in this thread I would say that you have consider more experience and know more about this printer than basically “normal” support agent I have talked to there.
I was pretty much nicely told by support I was not allowed to talk to the engineering team; that being said I did meet with the SLA product lead and some setting engineers to give feedback, where they did acknowledge this problem. However, I was also told there is no current timeline to fix this within couple months, and that ultimately we are at the mercy of Formlabs to fix this through material and setting changes (which need serious engineering and is beyond the abilities of us).
My newest hypothesis is that in trying to find a General Purpose material that can print fast, have minimal post-cure, and still be pretty strong and impact resistant, Formlabs stumbled across a general purpose material that has very strong internal forces and cures/ polymerizes very strong across each layer. This leads to annealing forces to build up across each layer, culminating the warping forces that create things like the lines you see on that case model. This is just one symptom of the entire part warping. Again, a true, real fix is to reformulate the material or make better printer settings way beyond what we would have the resource or time or ability (since Preform is mostly locked down) to tune. So far, it has been 2-3 months since I spoke with the SLA team and nothing has been done.
The reason this is visible on big models and not small organic ones is not that it does not happen, but that it is smaller and less visible. If you have a circular overhang/ spherical part attached to supports you can see the rings near the bottom as a side affect of this. Of course, things that can print directly on platform has the advantage of a big surface helping to pull against the part annealing forces, but this is niche and I really don’t see parts I can print this way often. I think this also drive the fact that Form 4 is reporting “98%” print reliability to Formlabs with people printing tiny things where they cannot see this warping or the many dentists printing little arches on platform where this problem is entirely bypassed, I have no doubt this is true from the perspective that prints “finish,” but accuracy is another discussion entirely. This unfortunately signals that Form 4 is amazing to Formlabs even though the truth is nuanced but it does seem to discourage any initiative to fix this; so far, again, no fixes.
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Hi @eaglechen -
It kind of feels like we are going in circles… really hoping to get some feedback from Formlabs with regards to these things. I do not think this is acceptable.
I know someone with a Uniformation GK2. I will reach out and ask them to print this part in the exact same orientation and see what it looks like. I will not be happy if a $600 printer outperforms my $6500 investment.
I printed 20 enclosures upright and directly on the buildplate. They printed without any such artifacts. That seems to be inline with what you are hypothesizing. I REALLY hope Formlabs is willing to listen to some of their users to help them make their products even better. Being someone who design ad-hoc custom product for clients who could not find any existing solutions to meet their needs, I know very well how important customer feedback is.
Haha… that would also be nice. I have not yet received any free stuff. So far all the resin printed and tanks used for trying to solve this has been for my own account.
What is it again about the definition of insanity… haha… I tried again with a different flat part, same settings and orientation.
This time I spent couple of minute sanding with 1000 grit sand paper… results are disappointing indeed.
Below is an example image from Formlabs that shows what you’re getting is NOT normal. This is a zoomed in image of the tiny pump housing sample part.
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don’t get me wrong, I can print really nice @matterhackers Astronaut Phil figurines… but this is not why I bought it. I need to print enclosures.
I will try to increase the wall thickness of those small enclosures to 2.5mm as apposed to 1.5mm but cannot see that it would help much. I would like to try and and print it in the precision model resin @eaglechen suggested but I do not feel like spending more money on testing. I am sitting on couple of liters of V5 resin and have used 4 tanks for the different colors.
Below are two prints… one done with Fillamentum Nylon Carbon fibre using 0.6mm ruby print core and 0.2mm layer height. The great is Formlabs V5 resin at 100µ
so yea, really nice figurines…
This looks like your build platform is wobbling as you print. Have you tried running the build platform alignment and making sure your screws are tight? Check if you can pull the platform out of its holder when the latch is down too.
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Thank you for the feedback. I would assume they are all tight still, the printer is brand new. About 5L or resin printed.
I have not run the alignment process, though this would not be necessary on a brand new printer?? It is worth noting that these lines disappear when I print directly onto the build platform but then you get holes that are not 100% round and some other nasty side affects (elephants foot etc).
Regards
Friedl.
Making the walls thicker should not affect issues that you are having with the optical quality. I can see a moire effect on the top of the model mostly on the feet, the backpack, and the head. I’m not sure if this is due to the 100um layer height or more of a side effect from the screen/optics used in the Form 4. Either way, it’s not like the laser variants in terms of quality.
Statring to regret not getting the Form3 or the Uniformation GKTwo.
Where are you located? I have an extra Form 3+ that I could trade 
haha… funny 
I mean at the time the Form3 was on special offer for ±50% of the cost of the Form4. Now from what I hear chances are it would have delivered better print quality, albeit at a rather slower rate.
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