Glad to hear you’re looking into a painting solution. I do prefer as much of it to be automatic as possible but it seems there are always going to be situations that will need a human to step in and give a little helping hand. I mostly see it as an advanced “touch up” tool that hopefully wouldn’t need to be used very often but when it’s needed it rocks the advanced users world.
I had several failed prints already that could have been prevented by the ability to add or strengthen existing supports.
In one case, a print had one isolated support that remained stuck to the resin tank in my first two trials. I solved that problem by adding a second object to the print, a squat cylinder, larger than the Preform calculated base for that support, but approximately of the same thickness. I put that object at the base of the support, taking the place of and extending the existing base. Et voilà… Would have been very useful in that case to be able to tweak some sort of “base area” parameter for that support. (I did try, unsuccessfully, to tweak the base thickness general setting.)
I’d be in favor of supports having individual overridding parameters such as base area, base thickness, thickness, etc. After one or two failed prints, it would allow to individually tweak supports that failed (and that could be caused by local, superficial damage to the tank, for instance, which would be impossible for Preform to take into account) without compromising other carefully chosen settings of a print, such as orientation cautiously chosen so as to minimize defects left on the print by the supports.
In several other cases, Preform failed to detect obviously needed supports beneath overhangs, where manually added supports would have prevented the print to fail. I was somewhat surprised of that, as I thought that such occurrences of “areas appearing in layer n != 1 without any support in/intersection with layer n-1” would be caught by Preform. They weren’t, and we got blobs of over cured resin stuck to the tank damaging all the following layers above the stuck blob. In those case, we had to carefully inspect all layers and manually change the object outside of Preform, and try again in Preform. (I plan to try to manually add whole support as I did for the base.)
I think It would be very useful for a start to be able to export Form setups as stl files, so as to be able to edit the generated supports using another more nimble software.
In addition to what Aka says… make that export as two files… the object and the support so anything that needs to be tweaked back in the modeler application can easily be done individually
FormZ already has a feature where it expects you to set up a special layer object as supports so that would work fine there and go back into one STL file on export
Painting sounds interesting, but perhaps over complicated? I worry about the accuracy, and the time it could take to do intricate tweaks to a single support with that meathod.
In my opinion, directly editing support base/attach points as well as deleting unnecessary supports, sounds like a more straight forward approach.
Personally I mostly want to make subtle tweaks to the default generated supports, which are generally setup well except for a few spots that need those tweaks.
At the 2:00 min mark in this video there is a great demo of the type of support structure editing we need:
I agree that preform needs at least something like what is in the video.
Of course I see the painting method as a more advanced tool that no everyone will need or want to use. But for me I paint / add textures to models all the time when I’m in 3d apps and I think this would save me a lot of setup time on some of my models. I am constantly trying to reorient my models to avoid auto generated supports from ending up in places I don’t want them. I could model in supports but again that means I can’t reorient the model in preform without having to remodel supports out side of preform. With a paint/texture map system to help guide preforms auto generated supports you could change orientation as much as you like, let preform regenerate supports then edit the paint guided results with the simpler method as needed.
One other reason I would like to paint in a guide for the auto generation is that I find the auto generated supports tend to really bunch up in some areas. In some cases that would mean editing 10s-100s of support points individually if they don’t land where I want them to. I think a painting system could help avoid needing to edit lots of individual supports and make it so you only need to edit a hand full of individual supports for people like me who want that kind of control.
So yes, I want the simple system like in the video and that should come first. But I also really want a more advanced painting / texture guiding system as well.
It seems like all of these solutions… exporting for adjustment in our own software, individual control in preform, and map system, would all have a useful place in production. Maybe formlabs can focus on getting us whichever option is the easiest and fastest just so that we can get more control soon! And then continue to work on the rest. It seems like because all options would be useful down the road, none of them would be wasted work?
ReadyGo, to be honest, we don’t see much in the video. We even see weird things, like a support bent so far that it probably will need a support by itself… 
But I agree with you that it’s probably something like that that I’d like to see implemented.
I get it that Formlabs probably want to steer its software development toward the hands-off, ease of use of “3D-Printing for the masses”, but neither the technology nor Preform seems to be anywhere near the requisite reliability for that…
So in the meantime… there could be an Easy, hands-off, fully automated mode, and an advanced mode that allows for individually tweaking supports when needed (in my experience, quite often).
And Like Ann said, if any of the suggestions in this thread could be easily implemented, that would at least buy some time to find the “perfect solution.” In any case, the present state of affairs is really frustrating.
A change I"d love to see is to allow for enclosed gaps in the support base. I’m printing bracelets recently, and on some, about 80% of the print volume is supports. If it only printed the base under the model itself these would use less than half the resin they do with PreForm supports. I’ve had to resort to Meshmixer to generate supports, as I can’t afford to waste so much resin.
+1 on being able to edit supports. I know there are a lot of ideas on how to do this–a simple ability to delete individual supports would really be a big step.
I don’t know if this is redundant or not, but I had the thought today that it would be nice to cut a section view through a model and support structure. I’m printing a part today, and there are sections that need to have supports, but they are small areas inside a larger part, and they end up in thicket of supports. Being able to take a section through the whole mess would be nice, as would having better control of support placement. Finally, I want to add a comment that the red highlights seem to be somewhat arbitrary at best, They have the potential to be invaluable, but Preform currently highlights surface that should (and ultimately do) print without any issue.
After a bit of testing, here is why we need custom support capability. Not only does it help with more complex or detail sensitive models, it also can drastically cut down on material consumption and print time.
In the attached files you see two copies of the same print. One with custom supports that I created in Blender, and one with automatically generated supports using the lowest density setting, 3.50 height above base, and a base thickness of 1.5.
Formlabs Supports
The generated supports would have results in 17.1 ML of resin usage and a print time estimate of 4 hours and 56 minutes at 50 microns.
**Custom Supports **
The custom supports used only 8.3 ML of resin and had a print time estimate of only 3 hours and 54 minutes at 50 microns.
That’s an hour less in print time and less than half of the necessary resin. Note: this was printed in the Madesolid Black. Aside from two areas at the top of the curve that needed a little more support, the model came out perfect.
The Formlabs team has done an excellent job on the support generation features for less experienced users and for overall ease of use, but as an experienced modeler I can’t justify using the automatic supports anymore except for the simplest of models.
hi Jonathon-
I recommend CG Cookie to train my clients when they want a 3d modelling option in house and don’t have a big software budget (I work making war games miniatures).
I use Blender extensively for setting up prints for Envisiontec- I’d be interested to hear your method for creating supports in Blender. I suspect my methods aren’t optimised but you are a Blender maestro 
Russ
Ah that’s awesome Russ! Thanks for all the referrals
Currently my setup for custom supports in Blender is a bit tedious, but I’m looking to develop some scripts to automate more of it. At the moment I use a support mesh with two hooks, top and bottom, and a top-level empty as the parent. This allows me to move/scale the base and tip of each support, and to move the whole support. Then I just duplicate the whole support rig for each one.
It’s tedious.
Yup but better than my system!
I’ve been using spheres and extruding them down to a support plate. I place them by keyframing a plane through the model to reveal islanded features and locking the cursor to the offending vertex.
Your method sounds way better!
Russ
BTW has anyone tried playing with meshmixer yet? It’s a touch buggy but you can add and remove support rods post-autogeneration, which makes it more tweakable, and it also supports non-vertical, non-straight rodding to support complex meshes. See the screenshot for what I mean…
NB that’s not a finished support as I didn’t set any density or Y offset, I just wanted a quick grab of the tool at work
I played with Meshmixer the other day and could not get it to behave well. The support generation seemed very hit or miss.
Shame- I started playing with it at the weekend and had high hopes. Back to the old ways then…
Hello FormLabs team,
the new 1.5 release is great.
Many thanks.
It solve so many problems discussed here.
Regards,
Mattia
Can’t wait to try it. 1.4 and 1.5 keep crashing on me (Win XP SP2). :-(