Continuous Supports - Technical Resin 3D Prints

now you all know that I love resin 3D printing and all the crazy things that you can do with these machines like printing things in an insane amount of detail however one issue that remains is trying to print technical geometric objects and not having them warp or having Pockets or things that you need to sand down from supports that could impact the overall structure and quality of your technical five and I saw a post by Hugh Evans over on one of elugu's Facebook groups who's trying to tackle this exact issue with something that they're calling continuous supports and how they're going about doing this is by 3D modeling an actual Port B for the object that they're print which is a really interesting way of going about this and it has a really thin contact Point against the actual object that you're printing so it's a 0.2 millimeter contact area all along one continuous support piece and to give you a little bit of clarification of where this really is going to be most useful isn't for your figurines or statues or anything like that that have lots of little tiny micro details this type of support functionality I don't think would really be applicable to this you're still going to want to use your standard Support options that you might find in lychee or chitu box that you can just generate through those slicers however one area where it will be really helpful is with the bases of your 3D prints and we've taken a look at one of the recent prints that I did of Dante Zuck for this Dark Souls bust it's a great example of where the mixed Support options might be applicable for something like this statue here where for the main body your standard supports are probably going to be the most applicable here however for the base it's a really flat geometric shape that we need to further support and if you look closely you'll see that there's little divots in this not just from the support but from where there weren't supports not to mention that you're going to see lots of little pocket holes there where we're going to have to end up either sanding that down or filling those out something along those lines and I ended up reaching out to Hugh Evans to get a set of those files that we can run off and print for ourselves and see how they actually work and hold up and then more importantly we can also test those against the standard way of supporting files as well as checking out on their alternative option that you might not even be aware of that's available in lychee slicer so the set of files from Hugh Evans ended up taking about an hour to print over on the Mars 4 ultra and the prints themselves look really good I mean I expecting those to look fairly good but what we're really interested in is how these supports work and the first thing I'm immediately noticing is yeah they printed with very minimal support contact area at all which kind of impressed me but I can also see a very thin layer of contact between the actual support file that they've created that continuous support and the object itself so if I hold it up to light I can actually see through that little seam there that we're going to end up breaking off to reveal our print you'll also notice for each of the files that Hugh Evans also ended up creating supports for the supports which I thought was kind of funny I mean one alternative way to do this is if you knew the orientation of the file and how you were going to print it you could generate those supports in that correct orientation then you wouldn't have to worry about any sort of additional supports for your supports in theory so here are the files I've got two sets of the exact same set of files here so I'm going to leave one as is and what I wanted to do with one of these sets here is just try to remove the manually placed supports that they put on there and actually might need snipping shears here just to go through and separate the actual print and the supports from the continuous support so we can take a look at that itself before trying to remove the full on support all right let's see how this goes I've got the support uh the support for the supports removed and then here's our part this is the manually continuous support there that was generated in their CAD tool and I'm just going to try and flex this oh that's like that's so thin that's awesome that's really clean that just gave a really clean smooth edge to that print this time I don't think I'm gonna bother removing the support I'll just remove these few that are there I'm just going to try and flex this off oh my gosh that is oh no yeah the print kind of pulled it probably still needs a little bit of clean up there with an exacto knife all right here's the last piece and then I'm just kind of peeling this off the connection there is so thin to the part and it just kind of snaps away so again not entirely like it's not a perfect seam but it's pretty good it's pretty good where that that contact was and I bet you if there might be like an even cleaner way to separate these potentially but overall that was uh pretty pretty clean looking seam from this continuous support there and here's the traditional way of creating sports that I went on lychee and supported these using Auto and manual functionality within lychee and using primarily the light supports and not as easy to break away I probably could have made the contact shape a little bit smaller and I've already busted up a part of the print here by the way the reason why I'm not heating these up is because they're so small I didn't want to further warp the prints themselves not bad with the manual but it's again a little bit of scarring and pocket marks there that we're gonna see and I'm just gonna do this for the other prints and we'll eventually do a compare of all of them now for those of you like myself that do not have very good 3D modeling skills whatsoever to create your own continuous supports there's actually a function in lychee slicer that they've recently added called inline supports so after you've brought in your model have everything oriented the way that you need to once you go in to start placing your supports there is an inline option this is part of the pro subscription as well for lychee and it's going to allow you to place a set of rows of supports and depending on how far the spacing is between those and I think the lowest is 0.5 millimeter so you can create some pretty thin and close supports that mimic this continuous support methodology there that Hugh Evans is working on it's not going to be probably as exact because there's going to be some continual gapping there and you'll potentially still have those Pockets that we're going to have to deal with from the supports but this might be a good alternative for some of you out there like myself and here are the cleaned up prints and I can immediately tell you these are more closely on the prints than the others oh look at that that's actually breaking away pretty good uh still a good amount of cleanup that I'm gonna have to do there it's like a it's not a perfect tear away like I was hoping it's definitely created a wall oh yeah that's not great okay I mean this it works I think I'm breaking the print more than I'm uh I mean it's not it's again not horrible not horrible but I I've definitely broken the print in a few spots and before we take a look at the results of all of our different prints I did want to say a thank you to elugu for sponsoring today's video they're the makers of the elugu Mars 4 and the Mars 4 ultra that I used in the prince for today's video you can also find more information on the new elegu Saturn 3 and the Saturn 3 Ultra as well as their new Fast fdm3 printers the Neptune 4 and the Neptune 4 Pro if you're interested in more information about any of elgu's new products you can definitely find links to those down below I have to say Hugh Evans the option of the continuous supports I think was probably the best option when it comes to not damaging the file or leaving scarring or pocket marks or anything like that they also broke away fairly easily here and if you're considering using the inline support option and light sheet I would consider taking a look at the depth option for the tip as well as that diameter to try and reduce those as much as possible because you have so many of those support Sports next together stacked together and it's going to make it easier the smaller that contact area is to break the part away from the print and by the way yeah the traditional way left the most pocket scarring issues with just removing the overall supports it's definitely the messiest option and would require more sanding and smoothing and filling for these technical objects here I also want to say a big thank you to all my patreon supporters for your continued support of me making content here on the interwebs if you're interested in things like my resin 3D printer settings you can find those over in my patreon and let me know what you guys think about Hugh Evans approach to this continuous support methodology I think this would honestly be pretty cool as a feature if it eventually ended up into something like lychee slicer or you could just go in there and paint a line along an edge and have it auto-generate that versus you drawing some inline supports and trying to figure out all that his option was still the cleaner option in my opinion when it came to Breaking these away it wasn't perfect but it's certainly a step in the right direction I think to help trying to solve this issue of printing these geometric technical objects that people tend to struggle with when it comes to resin 3D printing oh another great use case for this to test this out on your own is trying to print your own set of dice for miniature games using some of these Support options that I showed off here in today's video hey thanks so much for watching all and I'll see you next time and I completely forgot to tell you guys about how I broke the Mars 4 ultra prototype that I have access to here yeah I ended up getting resin stuck inside of this bolt holder here and snapped the bolt in half so if I lift out the vat one half of the bolt is stuck there inside of the printer until I can get elgu to replace this for me or until I can somehow get this out of here but yeah I just thought this was a music that I managed to break yet another 3D printer here good times

Channel: Uncle Jessy

Views: 45,155

Keywords: Uncle Jessy, 3D Printing, 3D Printed, 3D Printer, Cosplay, Supports, Continuous Supports, Inline Supports, Lychee, Lychee Slicer, Chitubox, Resin Supports, Resin technical prints, Resin Dice, Miniatures, Geometric prints, warping, scaring, Support placement, technical prints, modeling, 3D Modeling, Elegoo, Elegoo mars, Mars 4, Mars 4 Ultra, Elegoo Saturn, Elegoo Saturn 3, UncleJessy4Real, Calibration, Resin Tests, Resin Files, Support Removal, 3d printing for beginners

Id: 666M9bEpVgU

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2023