Andreas and LeiLei, can you share the .form file or STL?
PreForm should be catching all of the edge-cases where a model needs to be supported in unusual ways. LeiLei, it’d be particularly useful for our software team to check out if you’re seeing models that aren’t having supports generated correctly (like not catching the lowest overhangs).
As for manual support control, we’re trying to strike a good balance of simplicity and power, and there’s a lot that goes into calculating supports correctly. We’re looking at some good options for smoothly integrating our automatic support generation and providing manual feedback.
maybe I’ll model something that deliberately tricks preform to gen wierd supports.
I ended up creating my own supports - with amazing success.
My workflow was:
Import model into preform.
Create supports, to check out size of auto generated, and therefore suggested, supports.
Back into maya, I recreate (by eye measure) the somewhat same size supports. Smaller, and + shaped instead of cylindrical.
I refrain from making two many “bridges” between supports. Preform had 20, I had 3. Which was more than enough. I could have had 0.
I made slightly sloping supports, which was great for avoiding internal supports.
I made internal supports, however small, and very few in numbers. Preform would have made maybe 15, and additional 8 INSIDE the model. I ended up with 5 internal supports.
All supports had a cylindre at the base. + shaped trunk, and a cube at the top. The had one vertex going into the actual model.
I “wasted” half the amount of resin with my manually placed supports than preform would.
I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. The print was excessively successful -
@Sam - I am surprised by your seeming lack of awareness of PreForm’s generated support shortcomings.
As I have said previously - it’s obviously a “hard” problem (I’m a software developer by day) - and I’m sort-of ok with the stochastic nature of PreForms support generation. I just keep trying with different orientations and config tweaks until I get something close to ok - but it would be so much faster if I could just add manual supports to areas where Preform struggles.
It seems to have the most difficulties with hard geometric shapes - squared/rectangular surfaces - rather than soft organic rounded ones.
I say I’m surprised at your seeming confidence in PreForm - because I have support issues with the majority of my hard geometric objects - rather than with a minority.
I’ve attached an example - images 1 and 2 show a support gap at the most crucial contact point of the model - the lowest point. Image 1 is with the default support settings, Image 2 after I’ve tweaked them downwards to consume less resin and print time - the same gap appears both times - but on different sides of the lowest point.
Needless to say - I had difficulty when I tried to print this model - see image 3.
Thanks for this, both of you. This is useful. I’ve passed your models on and our software team has been taking a look at this thread, and this is something that we’re aware of and working on – I’d expect to see a solution sooner rather than later.
Has this been resolved? My printer will be arriving soon…I have a lot of experience manually adding supports in my modelling software, but I have also started to use Meshmixer’s support system, which auto generates but allows a LOT of control over the supports and you can ‘drag add’ your own- this feature would be awesome
