Hollowing + Interior supports with Chitubox?

#1

Hi all, I’m a new owner of a Form 3L. I come from the world of cheap LCD-based resin printers previously and have used chitubox with them.

It looks like there aren’t any options inside of preform for model hollowing, so I was wondering if anyone here had experimented with hollowing and adding interior supports to a model in chitubox, export as stl and then slice inside of preform.

I just did it as an initial test but it’s looking ok so far. My machine is busy at the moment so I haven’t had a chance to test it in the real world yet, but wanted to see if anyone else here was ahead of me in trying this?

#2

I’m using meshmixer currently for hollowing before bringing into preform, but it’s significantly clunkier than the chitubox method, and the meshmixer method doesnt have a way of generating interior supports.

#3

Yes, I’ve done it. I’ve also hollowed out my models in Meshmixer. As long as you model is hollow, Preform will automatically add internal supports if they are needed.

If you do hollow out your parts, make sure you also add holes at the bottom, to make sure it can breath/vent and no cupping effect occurs. Preform should tell you if there’s a cup somewhere that needs to be vented.

#4

Thanks for the reply! did you try using the internal supports that chitubox creates after hollowing? it looks like they might be more structural than the sacrificial ones that preform generates. and yeah good reminder about making a drainage hole :slight_smile:

#5

First a disclaimer: I no longer own a Form printer, I sold mine earlier this year and bought a Photon Mono X.

But when I still had it and used it, once I discovered ChituBox and got good with it, I simply did everything in ChituBox (import, hollow out, generate supports), exported the complete supported part to STL, then imported it into Preform and printed it without supports