New supports have some cons

Feature Requests & Ideas
1

I’m not sure I see the benefit of the new support structures. They look prettier, but there are a few aspects that I think are significantly worse than the old supports:

  • In Edit mode, the supports disappear and only those little nubs representing the contact points are displayed. As I add or remove supports, I want to see where the actual supports are.

  • The support base is much bigger relative to the part and takes up more real estate on the build platform, making it harder to lay out multiple parts.

  • If I turn Internal Supports off, I am prevented from adding one or two supports that are considered internal to the model. I used to be able to do this.

I think the above changes should be made to support generation.

2

Hi @Matthew_Swift,

To answer these in order:

  1. We made this change so it was easier to see where each touch point would contact the model more clearly. In many cases with complex models, it was difficult to see through the forest of supports as you edited the touch points in the older versions of software. If you hold shift and use your scroll wheel, you can actually change the point size for each individual point as you add points. Is there a specific reason you want to see where the actual support structure goes as you manually edit supports?

  2. You can have support bases overlapping each other on the build platform. We have also heard concerns from other customers about the size of the base and there may be future changes to this.

  3. A bit of a workaround, but if you enable internal supports, then edit, delete all the ones you don’t want, and add what you want, it will work.

Another workaround is to generate with internal off, then turn the internals on before editing and it will allow you to add internals. I understand that this is a bit unclear and confusing and will tell our software team about this.

Hope this helps!
Aaron

3 Likes
3

Hi Aaron, thanks for the response. Good to know those workarounds on the internal supports. Not being able to see through all the supports was actually a slight annoyance with the old supports, so I get that. The reason I like to be able to see the support(s) I’m removing is that the ones I remove are generally ones that are internal or are somehow using the actual part as their base. I prefer not to have supports do this, so I would remove supports that were generated as having the part as their base and move them slightly, hoping that the new support would generate and have its base at the actual base and not on the part. Not being able to see the supports in real time as you’re editing makes it difficult to tell which supports you’re removing, and/or what new supports will look like.