Hey guys, one of the most important things to think about when 3D printing is the support material. With out sufficient support, models with steep overhangs or floating parts will simply fail to print correctly and you will end up with a pile of spaghetti.
Most slicing programs will be able to create their own support, as mentioned in my "How to print" series of posts, however, for some models this is simply not good enough. The most widely used alternative is Meshmixer, and in this post we're going to look at how to generate support material using it's analysis tools.
Import the model, this step is fairly self explanatory. Open Meshmixer and import the model you wish to print, either by clicking on the import button on the home screen and navigating to your model, or dragging your model into the program.
I'll be using the standard bunny included in the program for this tutorial.
Head over to the menu bar on the left of the screen and click on analysis;
Select overhangs;
I usually go ahead and generate supports using the default settings first to see how it looks before I tweak anything;
To add more supports, hold shift and drag the cursor from point to point as shown in the gif below;
To remove, hold control and click on the branch you want to remove.
Once you have the supports looking the way you want, head up to the file menu and export the model as a STL again to be able to bring into your slicing program.
There are more options you can play with, such as branch diameter, but I won't be going into those in this post. The best way to learn is trial and error, so go nuts and see if you can find settings that suit the types of models you want to print.
Hopefully the model will print OK, but it does take a bit of playing around sometimes to catch certain areas or realise that you've added too much support or support in an inaccessible place and you cant remove it (This. Sucks.).
If all goes well, you will have a successful print with easy to remove supports!
Hope that was useful guys, see you next week.
Most slicing programs will be able to create their own support, as mentioned in my "How to print" series of posts, however, for some models this is simply not good enough. The most widely used alternative is Meshmixer, and in this post we're going to look at how to generate support material using it's analysis tools.
Import the model, this step is fairly self explanatory. Open Meshmixer and import the model you wish to print, either by clicking on the import button on the home screen and navigating to your model, or dragging your model into the program.
I'll be using the standard bunny included in the program for this tutorial.
Head over to the menu bar on the left of the screen and click on analysis;
Select overhangs;
I usually go ahead and generate supports using the default settings first to see how it looks before I tweak anything;
Once you have the supports looking the way you want, head up to the file menu and export the model as a STL again to be able to bring into your slicing program.
There are more options you can play with, such as branch diameter, but I won't be going into those in this post. The best way to learn is trial and error, so go nuts and see if you can find settings that suit the types of models you want to print.
Hopefully the model will print OK, but it does take a bit of playing around sometimes to catch certain areas or realise that you've added too much support or support in an inaccessible place and you cant remove it (This. Sucks.).
If all goes well, you will have a successful print with easy to remove supports!
Hope that was useful guys, see you next week.
Troez.
Comments
Post a Comment