Good day everyone! I have been watching tons of stuff on printing without supports and I think I have come to a thorough realization of what can and cannot be printed. But I want to ask the community of experts and users. Am I correct in assuming that I cannot print this file without adding support inside?
Yikes, that sure is going to be a challenge. I certainly wouldn’t print it without supports. In fact you may want to break it up into quarters and assemble later. Just my $0.02.
If this is broken in to quarters I can accomplish this without internal supports Kevin?
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that. I would imagine you would still need supports. You would probably have a higher rate of success printing the entire thing if it were broken up into parts.
I print large, thick parts, no where nearly as complicated and intricate as yours. I would wait to hear from some of the others in this forum as well. In the mean time you should browse the forums, in particular this post comes to mind. Not exactly your situation, but you might gain some insight.
Thanks Kev for your input will check it out.
I haven’t downloaded the model but if you load it into Preform, it may be self-supporting. I have a few parts that don’t look like they should print well but since it is self supporting, they came out great.
You may need to create some initial supports at the roots and any low hanging fruit but the rest may be ok. See what Preform thinks. Then give it a spin. What’s the worst that happens, it fails. You may want to babysit that print just to be sure.
Out of sheer curiosity loaded it up and let preform build the supports:
If @DavidRosenfeld is correct and it could be self supporting, at 100% its only 19ml of resin (without supports)! It’s not much to lose!
Yes, it might be possible with supports. I recently had no problems printing this
which appears to be almost as tricky. It did use quite bit of resin for all of those supports, and it took me quite a while to cut them all out, but the result was really nice.
If you give it a try, I’ll be very interested to see how it turns out.
BTW, do you have the book that came from? There are a lot of other interesting shapes in it. I’ve gotten some nice prints of his Developing Hilbert Curve without any supports.
Looking at that, I might have to download it and give it a try. A mini version would be cool and if it fails, a small puddle to mop up instead of trying to get that glob off the PDMS layer. Wouldn’t want to ruin a vat for an experiment.
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I literally just hit print on a 1/2 scale model. 
I opted for the absolute minimum supports that preform would generate. 2 hrs and 9ml of resin later I’ll post my results 
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I can’t wait to see the results.
Me either go Kevin! @mgarrity no i did not buy the book as the physical copy is almost $60. What other prints did you achieve without any supports?
I proudly just hit the success button on my printer. It looks perfect to me.
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That is fantastic! I hope to be able to print that soon!
Well damn there it is and it even looks better than Shapeways. See that confirms what I’m thinking, people are not pushing the limits enough and we have these basic looking prints with all these supports and nothing artistic is really coming out because people do not want to bother with all the post processing. Kevin can you send me a file with your support setting for this model?
Nice!
of course. ill post as soon as i get into work.
Thanks Kev we should start a thread that is about nice things printed without internal supports 