Change layer thickness for base & supports vs. parts?

Feature Requests & Ideas
1

it seems like the base and supports are printed at whatever layer thickness is selected for the part. if there were a way to print the base and supports at lowest resolution (100 um) it seems like that speed gain would be appreciable. i’m presently printing at 25 um and it’s been hours yet i’m not even through the supports yet. is there any reason that this can’t / shouldn’t be implemented? or am i just wrong and the base/supports are already printed at lower res?

thanks!
-j

2

Correct me if i’m mistaken, but for most prints, the number of layers that only contain support and raft cross sections should be fairly minimal? Once the print gets to the layers that contain both support and print geometry, it will have to go at 25 micron each layer.

Suggest if you’re going to be doing a lot of 25 micron prints that you batch up many objects in one scene, since the amount of time the peel operation takes is linearly proportional to the number of layers but not the complexity of each layer.

3

I was about to request this too.

The number of layers is not what I consider to be minimal.  It seems the support + raft is 5mm thick, making it 200 layers in 0.025mm layers before you even get to the part in question. If the layers before the part could be 0.1mm, then change to 0.025 once the part gets going, then this technique could save 150 peels. Assuming 10 seconds a layer, that’s 25 minutes only building the raft & supports.

4

I wanted to ask that as well.

I think too that it would be useful to speed up base and support printing, as most of the failed prints I had were caused by support bases remaining stuck to the resin tank. It takes time to see that it is happening with white or grey resin, and even more time spent with useless hi-def printing of these layers.

So this might not be so negligible an optimization as it might seem to some at first.

5

+1

There is no reason this cannot be implemented. The software clearly knows the difference between supports it generates and part material. The supports can even be printed at a lower resolution than the part, in the same layers.

Please implement this. I just set up a print that was going to take over 17 HOURS… on LOW RES… and it is almost all support. It will be horrible when I require a high res print.

Thanks.

6

This would be awesome. I suggested it once too.

7

Yeah, this is on my wish list as well.  I just want to be able to scrub to a layer of my choice and then place a marker at that layer to switch to N rez from there on.