Design Tips for Support Free 3D Printing Models (FDM)

in this 3d printing 101 I'm gonna go through my tips on designing 3d printable models that don't need support material this is more of a 3d printing master class but it's been a while since I've done anything like this so let's get started how's it going guys I think is here from makers muse and welcome back to another 3d printing 101 video I have a whole playlist of videos designed to get you into 3d printing easily and smoothly and this is one that I haven't added to for some time so it feels really good to get this video out now I've been designing models for 3d printing for a very long time and FDM 3d printers have a very unique set of parameters that you need to consider when designing for them because if you design things that overhang or need to fight against gravity you'll need to use support material but sometimes with careful consideration you can negate the need for support material which is great when you want to design things like this so in this video I'm going to show you my design tips and tricks for getting just that little extra bit out of your FDM 3d printer and not having to take support material but I do need to stress that if you have a design that does need support material there's nothing wrong with it but it's just best to try to avoid it if at all possible so what determines needing support material in an FDM 3d print a little comes to overhangs an FTM 3d printer fights gravity as it builds up its layers layer by layer by layer if you build a layer over nothing with nothing supporting it well gravity takes hold and sends that down and you're going to end up with a print that either looks terrible or fails altogether so all of these tips revolve around two fundamental aspects of FDM 3d printing number one 45-degree overhangs are pretty much the sweet spot for getting good quality 3d prints and anything more than that might start to affect your print quality so 45 degrees from vertical and finally bridging is possible in FDM 3d printing bridging is where one filament across a gap between two surfaces doesn't mean doing a cantilever like that we're just off into the distance that's not going to work but bridging between two points is entirely possible on an FTM 3d printer and you can go very long distances depending on how good your cooling is if you're if you have a fine-tuned machine in terms of bridging so with those two fundamental aspects in mind let's jump into our first example so here I have a random part design in fusion 360 that I intend to 3d print if you look at it from different angles for example top view left you front view there's no real obvious way to print this without support material because of this tab here if you wanted to put it this way it needs support there this way it's not really going to be supported by anything because it's a sharp edge there and this way if this is where the bed was you need support material there so at the design stage is the perfect example to apply our first rule try to make every overhang where possible have a 45 degree angle anything more than that then you will start trying to travel again not considering the bridging aspect which we'll go into in a minute so for this part here we can make this properly 3d printable without support material if we give it a 45 degree overhang so to do it in fusion depending on how your model that I'm just going to do a chamfer so here modify chamfer drop it in there and pull it out like that and bam we're good to go that is a 45 degree angle and now this part will print with no support material needed so when considering designing a 3d printing model if you have details that stick out at any angle try to make them have 45 degrees or less so a good example is my puzzle cube now I designed this to be as easily 3d printable as possible and that's why I designed it to print on these faces here so when you look at the actual pieces I designed these to print on that face there and that means at any point of time 45 degrees is the maximum amount of hangs I will have and I carefully tweak the inner portions to ensure that they went over 45 degrees which means that these models print with no support material now it does sometimes what generate support material for the actual indentation of the logo but that's so small that realistically you don't really need to consider it when designing for support las' 3d prints so small you can get away with not using supports unless you scale this model up quite a lot my next tip is to give yourself a good solid first layer there's nothing worse than having a bed full of support material before it even starts forming the model because that's highly likely to get knocked over and fail so an example here is a fantastic model that I really like printing and the teeth do generally need supports yes absolutely and sort of the spikes but see the bottom here it says the sculpt has a sort of organic shape and that's not conducive to good 3d printing so to make this model easier to print what I would do is grab a plain cut in mesh mixer and just cut it off maybe just here for example and remesh the fill so there it will actually give it a really good solid first layer and even though it will need support material for some of these details it will stick really well and won't get knocked over I will link to this model in description it's on Thingiverse and it's a fantastic sculpt of a dinosaur head that's my next tip make sure you give yourself a good solid first layer alrighty now let's talk about clever print orientation now this is huge a lot of people struggle the idea of pretty things that weird orientations to get a bit of a better result but that's just part of getting a head around 3d printing as a technology it has its own unique constraints this is a action a diamond asscher-cut diamond model that I drew in fusion for another project but as you can see if I if I give you a front view here side view there's no real obvious orientation to print this it has some crazy steep overhangs if I printed it upside down like that and I can't print it on the point because well that's not going to stick to anything so how would you 3d print this diamond without using support materials well believe it or not it's actually possible and I'll show you how by firing up meshmixer using a really cool little analysis tool built into it so mesh mixer actually has a tool built into it to help you determine the best printing orientation to minimize overhangs it's really handy so under analysis we have orientation so the orientation menu gives us an overhang angle we can set and you can choose to determine where you want it in terms of what your 3d printer is capable of so let's say 30 degrees is something I'm comfortable with and we can update the model to see what it gives us as you can see here the best orientation would be like this except keeping in mind our original rule we want a good solid first layer so the option here from a front view would be to perhaps to cut a plane cut here to make this easier to print on the surface but what I'm going to actually use is this tool to inform my decision to print on one of these faces on the edge here so using the results we got from meshmixer I'm going to try the to print this model on one of those edges which does seem really weird and kind of intuitive however if we change it around so I'm gonna this is an idea make it by the way so I can go to model and I can lay flat on one of those triangles that looks good apply so even though it looks really strange if we give it a good brim by a couple of layers to help really stick that thin side down you can see that it actually makes the overhangs a lot less than if we printed it with this face down so I'm gonna start and just try it out that slice it yeah why not and preview this is invalid by the way but you can see it would actually print I mean this is this would be challenging still leave this overhang here but it would actually print okay which is really surprising okay but what if you can't overcome some of the overhangs of a model what if it's just too difficult no orientation makes sense well then there is no shame in splitting your model into separate pieces there's nothing wrong with that I was planning to do it on this model anyway there is nothing wrong with splitting a model and in meshmixer I've got a whole video here about how to use the plane cut tool but essentially we can go to edit plane cut and then I can choose where I want to cut my model that's just set sail I'll cut it here whatever and I want to keep both sides except and then separate shells and now I have two halves in the model as you can see here one half there and one half here we can use that nice big flat area we now have to print the model without any real difficulties all right so I'm not sure who came up with this idea it wasn't me I definitely stole it from somewhere but this next tip involves bridging so what I have here is a nice little nest of parts for a new project I'm working on and this is a perfect opportunity to use a bridge so you can see this part here it has this area here that could be used with support material but I don't want to I want to have a bridge except that will normally be fine but I have holes here for a motor mount what I've done is I've given those holes a fill that's only one layer thick so it's about 0.25 millimeter layers thick of material and what I will demonstrate is when I go to slice this model slice with no support material on this will allow those holes to actually succeed so what would normally happen if I had holes going all the way through the model is we would get good bridging up to that point where it would start to try to fill in holes over midair and it would fail however because we have a microscopic one layer or so thick layer or material if I scroll back in the timeline all the layers and show you that first build where it just starts to build that bridge it does a perfect bridge and that material which is very thin gives us support for those holes which begin to form next now when this model is finished it gives us a very thin layer that we just bust through with our part and it gives us a very clean part so again I did not come up with this idea I can't exactly remember where I saw it I've been using it for a few years and it works really well for letting you print models without any support material but they have very big large bridging overhangs now remember I said bridging works fine but if this was cantilevered it wouldn't work you'd need that 45 degree or you would have to use support material okay and this is the last tip and one not many people really consider when trying to max out the overhangs and get away with on their FDM 3d printer and that is layer height and extrusion with so I did some experiments last year early last year on the maximum overhangs I could get at a given layer height and I found something really interesting the finer your layer height the further you can push your overhang the more overhanging can actually have when you think about it it makes sense you have layers upon layers and if they closer together each time they're overstepping each other more than if they're further is based apart however if you also want to push this even further there is one more hack I'm going to given it going to call it a hack because it really is - pushing how fighting it away with with overhangs that is to increase your extrusion width and this one is really interesting so we're actually combining the both both of those advantages of a lower layer height and an increased extrusion width which means the line you're extruding is wider now if you've got a zero point four millimeter nozzle default it's usually zero point four eight you can increase this so here I've got a zero point five millimeter nozzle on the end two plus but if I go into the settings under the extrusion width I can actually increase this from zero point six which again is quite standard to one and I can actually go to the layer height and again make that zero point one so this is going to give us the maximum chance we have for getting a ridiculous overhang seven clothes slice yes let's see how that goes and in our preview window you can see that it actually gets way up way up and this will actually probably succeed all the way up to in my experiments at least 70 degree overhangs they might not be pretty it probably won't be pretty because the extrusion widths thicker as you can see here we can get away with a much much steeper overhang and that is going to do it for this video on my design tips for getting a 3d print to succeed without knitting supports combine all of these tips together and you can design models like this this is my Easter egg torture test and this was printed with no supports and intentionally designed so when you print it correctly on a good printer the parts move like this and similarly my lattice cube torture test which I did quite a while ago this is designed to print with no supports with a steep overhanging it really pushes the limits of FDM but takes advantage of FDM in that they don't need support material if your machine can handle the overhangs if you found this video useful guys I would love to have you subscribe and keep in mind this is gonna be added to the 101 playlist here on maker's news there is hundreds of videos designed to help you get up and running in the wonderful world of 3d printing and I look forward to seeing you again very shortly catch letter guys bye [Music]

Channel: Maker's Muse

Views: 289,259

Keywords: 3d printing 101, support material, how to design for 3D printing, no supports, fdm 3d printing, overhangs, what is bridging, 3d printing tips and tricks, 3d printing hacks, for beginners, design tutorial, maker's muse, angus deveson, australia, makersmuse

Id: SBHHwid7DWM

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 16 2018