How do you effect the support structure design?

giantrobot2001 · April 2020

I was appreciating one of the more flimsy support structuring done in the old Cura slicer in JGcreate

. In the default slice method, it might have be an advantage for support removal.

Is there a way to adjust to a more nesty, or different support structure that breaks away easier?

I am designing my own art pieces, but I know this comes up on the more complicated prints. Especially in action figures. You know the paradox-either print the halves of the body separate or risk breaking parts.

I also have a need with utility work, and PLA glue is not the answer for everything.

So the walls of the support could be more aerated or nesty to dig down to fragile appendages on the part (for example).

Or adhesion points can be decreased or made in a way that needs more clean-up but they break away easier

I could explain it, maybe even diagram it for a programmer, but I could never program it - LOL

But I'm totally new - and there's probably a simple answer, but I sure couldn't find settings.

Stephen Todd · April 2020

I'm no expert on using support, and I sometimes have problems with support removal - but it seems that the newest versions of Cura have far better support options than the old versions have - so you may be out of luck with JGCreate

Tree support is often mentioned as being the way to go

Other slicers may have even better support options than Cura

A couple of videos worth watching:

giantrobot2001 · April 2020

awesome - thank you. I found where it is, and the different versions of Cura have different settings for support. I think JGcreates version does not have tree. I read the little [i] info things, but it's way to vague, and doesn't explain what the change or amount of change does.

These videos will help. I need to study up. No way do I want to do it all trial and error.

Laser8302 · April 2020

I would use Cura, turn on support then use support blockers to stop support build-up where you don't want it. I find the Cura custom support plug-in to have problems when you try to resize the custom support.

Ideamaker has some good support structures and the ability to place your own supports and visualize where they are.

Stephen Todd · April 2020

I came across something - will try it on my ancient version of JGcreate - you can find and download packages to desktop and install them into cura - pretty sure you can do same in JGcreate as it is simply a JGAurora knock-off

https://thopiekar.eu/cura/plugins/installation/

What version of JGcreate do you have? Tree support seems to have appeared around Cura V3.2.0 - I should imagine JGcreate use same version numbers as Cura

Stephen Todd · April 2020

Laser8302 - he has problems with SD card reader and has to use USB cable to print - and has problems with printing with anything other than the supplied JGcreate for some unknown reason

Stephen Todd · April 2020

Think I found the solution - someone wrote:

"I imported my stl into mesh mixer and had mesh mixer generate its tree supports. Then exported it back to an stl and sliced with cura.

Worked like a charm."

They say its better than using cura trees which are quite thick - meshmixer creates thin trees - the meshmixer program is free to download

giantrobot2001 · April 2020

So a MeshMixer export it to an STL, with thinner tree supports included, then slice as-is with no support - because the MeshMixer trees are already there.... I will be trying this right away. Thanks a bunch!

How do you effect the support structure design?

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