I can’t seem to get this right. I checked the STL, it is a manifold solid and shows that in Preform. I made sure my orientation prevented disconnected areas, edited the support structure to increase a few on the lower surface. And still get nothing. My most common issue is volume explosions but I thought it was from disconnected areas. I did ensure my resin tank was clean, the optical glass and primary mirror are clean. WTF? A month of trouble with this.
Thanks so much for taking the time to post. I’m so sorry to hear you’ve been getting less than ideal print results lately. Definitely not the behavior we want to see.
The first thing I’d like to ask is whether you’ve tried this particular print(or others) in a material besides Black? Of our Standard slate of resins, Black is the material that will tend to show faults first, so you might have better luck in Grey or White.
Feel free to reply to me here, but if you want more expedient replies and personal investigation, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team at the link below and we’d be more than happy to dig into things a little deeper for you to see if we can’t get you back up and running as efficiently as possible.
For models I have only done a few of my own parts for my delta printer and the other components of the chess set Thingiverse thing 1867308. I have had problems with white also. To be honest as I don’t have much experience with Formlabs resins the material coming out of the Form2 feels like rubber, not hard at all. I have done the cleaning procedure supplied to me by Rob Wiggins. I have successfully printed 2 ceramic knights.
Rubbery prints typically indicates that not enough laser energy is making it all the way to the resin which is definitely worth talking to us about! If you have a conversation ongoing already with Rob let me know and I’d be happy to give him a heads up.
If the rafts appear correct…and the supports appear correct up to the point they ought to connect to the model- then My money is on the model.
Just because it says its manifold is no guarantee it qualifies as Solid.
manifold modelers are surface modelers.- they were optimized to facilitate CNC Milling operations in which a surface needs to describe the bounds of a volume- but does NOT have to be solid, because the mill head is simply tracing a spline in space- which side of that line is solid material and which is not depends on which side of the spline the cutting head is on.
In surface modelers a surface has only ONE side- and zero thickness. So imagine a cardboard box where the sides were not actually part of the same sheet of cardboard- just six square planes arranged in a cube. They each only have one side- but all the sides are facing out.
Because the six sides describe a closed volume- even tho not connected in a single surface, this model would still qualify as Manifold.
If one side was missing, it would be Non-manifold. But also if any of the sides were displaced to create a gap between their edges and the others, that would also be non-manifold.
A surface model- that has, say, One spline between two patches that is NOT stitched may export into STL as having contiguous points along that edge… and those point NOT being connected in both directions as required of a solid model. That would be a model that is manifold- but NOT solid.
There are so many independently written apps and algorithms out there for converting one kind of geometry to another, that it is really common for geometry to get corrupted.
Check the STL for solidity- or look at your export functions to see if alternate settings net you a more reliable model export.
I have had several models that I got off of Thingiverse that were supposed to be solid, Preform showed no problems, Meshmixer showed no problems, But they printed like trash. I then selected Make Solid in Meshmixer and it printed great. I realize that most models on Thingiverse are not for SLA printers but most print well if you make adjustments in Meshmixer.
