It would be helpful if there was a slider control when previewing parts to make the red areas brighter. with complicated parts it is sometimes difficult to see the red if it is not very intense. With a color slider brightness feature the less bright areas would be easier to spot and add manual supports.
1 Like
The red shading is not super accurate–there’s a lot of cases where there will be shading that will print just fine, or cases where it’s just wrong where it shows shading on an area that has a direct support. Other times it can miss areas that aren’t supported simply because an area near them is.
That’s okay, we have what we have and I would like to be able to tune the brightness.
An example of another way to do this that works well is how ProtoLabs ProtoQuote visualization works. If there is a problem with your model they highlight the problem, but you additionally have the option of decreasing the transparency of the primary model while keeping the problem highlights bold for easy identification. Same idea, difference implementation.
I’m just saying it’s not very accurate at all, I ignore it because the shading is wrong more than it’s right.
1 Like
This is an accurate statement. It’s a distraction while you are learning how to support various parts and then you completely ignore it. This suggestion is contingent on the base tool working properly.
I have never had a bad print when adding supports in response to the red marks. I have also never risked printing without resolving the red marks. So I can’t say, either way, whether it works. I would think formlabs would eliminate this feature if it did not work but your experience sounds otherwise.
That being said, I would still like a tuner for the brightness and based on your input maybe there should be an option to turn it off in settings.
There are sometime the red shading does not go away even after I add extra supports and the job print fine
It happens very often where there’s something like the very bottom of the print where there’s a support there and then there’s red shading all over that part, which is impossible. Besides that, you can get away with less supports than what the shading indicates, and if you’re placing your own supports rather than using the automatic generation then it won’t necessarily indicate that an area is unsupported–like in the sense that a part will print in empty space. Also, the shading depends on the vertex count of your object since it colors the vertices, so if you don’t have a lot of vertices then it won’t be able to shade areas properly.
No, it’s actually implemented using texture mapping, so it does the color lookup per fragment, not per vertex. You can see it in this example. This is a cube with 8 vertices balanced on a single support. Notice that the red shading changes in a nonlinear way across the 2 triangles on the bottom of the cube.
It really doesn’t care much about how many vertices your model has.
BTW,. thanks for the feedback about what we can do to improve the red shading. We are working on improving it. I’d be happy to hear more ideas about what we could do to improve it.
1 Like
Interesting, so does it create automatic UV’s when you import a mesh?
No, it’s actually doing that when it computes the supportedness because it can change if you change the orientation of the model.