Various thoughts/suggestions/questions after first time preparing for print

Support & Troubleshooting
1

Hi,

I thought Id have a go preparing a model similar to one I have recently sent off to print at company that I currently use until I get my form1. I noticed a few things in the process that I wasn’t sure about and didnt seem to have been covered in the forum elsewhere so I thought I’d try and see if what others thought about my observations, and raise some possible suggestions.

Firstly I’d like to say how nice the interface for the software is. Just as the form1 is a nicely designed product, the software is a great compliment to it. Thanks!

I have been working on a new bottle shape and below are some screen shots of a quick dummy I prepared for this. Firstly obviously the full bottle is hollow so the software has highlighted red areas of overhang if I try to print the bottle whole. There doesn’t seem to be any documentation about this and I see someone else has asked for clarification about what this means, but I am assuming the print will fail as the far side doesn’t have enough support.

I then tried halving the model vertically and this seems to be fine. My concern with this is that others in the fourm are reporting quite long print times and having to print both halves separately seems to be time consuming and also if you look at the volumes, the halved model is 35ml without supports and 70ml with. That means printing both halves will use 140ml for a 70ml print, 50% waste of resin doesn’t seem ideal. As others are requesting internal supports I was wondering if using model surfaces for supports was a possibility too, so you could nest the 2 halves one above the other as shown in a very quick and poorly photoshopped image below.

In terms of usability of the software, I had the following thoughts. I think it might be easier to use with handles for rotating and moving the model by axis. I found it had to finely orient the model with the free rotate style that the software currently has. Also the auto orientate feature doesnt seem to take into account the bounding box of the model and the build area. I would rotate the model and it would snap to orientate but then still be outside the build area. It could also take into account the height off the build platform to minimise support heights, in the image below where the half bottle has support structures, the model could have been rotated flatter to have shorter support heights (and therefore minimise wasted resin), but as mentioned before I was rotating it then finding it was outside the build area on one axis and then going backwards and forwards. Also a cancel button while the software is generating supports might be good as I hit it a couple of times then realised I wanted to change something.

Look forward to hearing others thoughts

Andy

2

I think you’d have best luck printing the bottle vertically, or nearly so.  The taper within the bottle is nowhere near enough to need supports, although the lip may be an issue.  I tend to think it’ll be fine completely vertical though, as I’ve printed parts with very near horizontal overhangs longer than that without supports and they’ve been fine.

3

Thanks for your thoughts, Andy. Have you given your print a shot? We’d love to see pics.

We’re considering a number of solutions to the UI requests you’ve mentioned, and some are in the (long) pipeline. As Jonathan says, you may have good luck printing this model vertically. You could try printing a smaller version first, just to get a sense of how things are working out.

In general, a large unsupported area like that show in the first image will cause you issues.

4

Hi,

Thanks for your comments. I’m still waiting for my Form1 so am not able to try out any prints yet. Just trying to understand the process of prepping a model and what is achievable before hand, so I can get straight into it when it arrives. I’ve attached an image of the bottle positioned vertically, unfortunately its too big for the build area of the Form1 like this, but in the future I might be doing similar prints that are smaller so when I get the machine I might try a scaled down version.

I also tried to split the bottle around the middle, to see how that worked and ran into the issue of overlapping support structures again.  I was thinking that if I wanted to try this arrangement, I might try modelling my own support structures so I can overlap the 2 parts as shown and get around the limitation of not being able to delete/move specific supports has anyone tried this yet?

5

Hi, After reading the thread about red shading:  http://support.formlabs.com/entries/23880337-Red-shading-on-a-model-in-the-Preform-software-Guide-line-or-Definite-print-fail-

I have had a play with the slope factor for this model and it appears that a lower slope factor eliminates the red shading. There is no mention of what this setting actually does, so I hope this would work and allow us to print shapes like the bottle I have used in this test.