How To Support Your 3D Printed Resin Minis

oh hey i didn't see you there i was busy walking around my endless void and based on the title i see down below my endless void it seems like you're here to learn how to support your own 3d printed miniatures so that they end up looking like that or having supports that look this good or maybe your minis keep failing and you just want a good time lapse that looks like this well i can be your guy for that i've got nothing better to do anyway let's move out of this endless void and into the magical world of computers so i'm going to show you how to set up your supports for your 3d prints using chittoo box because it's a free program there are many other programs however i like using titubox because it pretty much comes with every printer that you want to use other ones require subscription or a one-time service and shittybox just doesn't require that the model that we'll be supporting and printing today is alexi the explosives expert from print minis who was one of the sponsors of this video printminis was awesome and provided this many to me for free and to you for free that way you can follow along this video and learn how to support in the same exact way that i'm going to show you so since that's what we're going to be printing let's go ahead and load it into chittoobox you can either just drag the file straight in or you could open it up from ji2 box i'm going to do both because they actually have two versions one that comes pre-supported versus one that has no supports on it at all i'm just going to rotate it so that you can see a little bit more easily here okay the comparison between the two models is pretty easy to see this one has a bunch of things that will help it print more easily one of the things that it does have is supports all over this bandolier they kind of gave me a tough model to show off but i think that's the best way to learn is by trying something a little bit hard but not something terribly impossible i'm going to assume you have some sort of 3d printing knowledge already in terms of what it is but if you don't here is a very brief understanding of how a resin 3d printer works resin 3d printing works by creating hundreds of tiny layers of cured resin via uv lights you can see here this is the actual build plate in which the first bit of resin will be cured via uv lights this is the first layer that you will see here if you go to layer 1 this is the absolute first thing that will be printed and essentially what happens is on this plate that's on your 3d printer lights will shine right here where everything is green and that will cure a layer of resin that will stick to the build plate the build plate will move up and then it will move back down into the position of layer two once it's on that position lights will turn on once more and then it will cure another layer that will go all the way up until you reach the top and you have a completed mini now the reason we have to do supports like the one on this mini here to the right is because if you don't and you try and print something from thin air like you see these little bundler or grenade type things on the right side of this mini here if i tried to just print those straight up they have to print on nothing so there's a good chance they just won't because they're going to start printing right here where there's nothing and now suddenly there is something around layer 445. now they don't have anything to stick to so they may just have a bunch of light that shines and causes a blob of cured resin that will not do anything for you by contrast these ones already have supports on them which are these big things here they have something now to print on top of so that they're not hanging freely and they can easily connect down to the bottom and go further from there you can see why we need supports otherwise things like these edges that just kind of hang off on their own really just won't print in resin prints now you might be asking a lot of programs have automatic supports and honestly a lot of people used to hate on those and i still do but they're not as bad as they used to be so for example i'm just going to go ahead and hit all for auto supports on this mini here and you can see there's not too terribly much of a difference compared to this old one though it does have thicker things here at the bottom i would say that it has gotten far better than it used to be but there's still a lot of things that it's going to miss that we can try and fix on our own so instead of doing auto supports instead i'm going to show you how to do all the supports you need to do on your own t2 box has also gotten a lot better than it was a year ago and so all of this is going to be a lot easier to do now we need to support this mini now there's a few things we need to do before printing you can print him straight up like this and a lot of people do do that but it's always good to take your mini and rotate it just a little bit to make it so he leans back not a huge amount just enough to where he looks like he's just kind of relaxing that's pretty good for me i don't want it to be flat on his back but i also don't want it to be straight up the reason we want to do this is because most things on the front of him now require essentially no supports to be done these will all be built off of his back that slowly builds up and that will prevent any sort of support lines or marks on the front to where we don't have to do really any support cleanup i'm going to try and show you the best way to not have to do any support cleanup but there always is some that needs to be done and if we can avoid that that's better so we want to have him go on his back so if there's any little marks from where we put the supports they're going to be on the unimportant part instead of on the front where his face and his chest might be things that you're going to take immediate notice of on your mini if you care less about the front of your mini and want their back to be pristine i would say go ahead and do it the opposite way but again none of this is wholly required so if we move up here to the top right of chitty box this is where we do our supporting whenever you click this the mini is going to be elevated by a small amount that's determined by the z lift height now chittoo box has a feature as well as most of these slicing programs where if you look at the bottom of your mini anything that's red is going to be something that's going to have some difficulty printing and you probably want to have a support there as we do more to this that's not going to make the red go away you'll just slowly gain an intuitive sense for what actually needs supporting for example this shoe here doesn't exactly have a lot of red compared to other things but this is the bottom most part of the print it actually is going to need a lot of support since everything is going to be dangled off from this this mini is going to hang as if he is upside down so all of the weight of this mini is going to be hung by the foot now there's a couple different types of supports we should talk about before we go into fixing them there's a billion different ways to do supports everybody has their own philosophy i am not a professional i am a hobbyist as i imagine you are if you're a professional you don't need my guide so i'm going to tell you what works best for me and i really suggest that you experiment and find out what works best for you there are three different types of supports light medium and heavy they differ pretty greatly in the base function of chittoo box but i've set them up to where they're not all that different because really if you can tune your printer in well they shouldn't be all that different a light support is obviously going to be smaller or lighter a medium support will be a little bit thicker and a heavy support will be the heaviest of them you can see the difference here as i've placed them on the mini i've created kind of my own custom setup for all of these different supports if you want to follow what i use go ahead and do so however recognize that i'm going to be printing on an elugu mars 2 so my resolution is a little bit better than a typical elegu mars or any of the other kind of baseline resin printers that being said i don't change that much between using an elegu mars ii and an elegumars pro or elugu mars one the only thing that i change is the contact diameter because the resolution is a little bit better on my elegumars2 i change the contact diameter and contact depth to 0.2 if i'm using an elegumars 1 or an elegumars pro but since i'm going to be using an elegant mars 2 i'm going to leave my light supports at a 0.1 so why might somebody use a light a medium or a heavy support generally you want to use a heavy support if it has to carry a lot of weight for example down here at the bottom of his boots i probably will do a heavy support for a couple of reasons heavy supports generally hold a lot of weight better than medium or light but again that's all just changed in preference here the reason i want to use heavy at the bottom is because this has to hold the entire weight of the mini the reason i want to use heavy supports on these boots is because the bottom of these boots is going to hold the rest of the weight of the mini so i think it's very important that there's something heavy to hold up the mini i will probably not use medium at all for this however that may change as i get going and i will use light pretty much everywhere else the reason i will use light pretty much everywhere else is you can see how little of the mini this light actually is going to affect if i'm using a heavy part that means there's a lot of support that's touching the mini and when i break these off there's going to be a lot of marred or scratched up surface area from removing the support you can see i have very very tiny contact and contact depth diameters here so hopefully this will basically just peel off if i blow on it hard obviously that's hyperbole but that would be amazing if we could get that far so that's what we're going to go for i'd rather over support with light that are easy to remove than under support with heavy that i have to do a lot of work in the end to fix so i'm going to remove these supports and let's get started so let's do most of the heavy lifting that we have to do here and now like i said this is going to be held up from the bottom so the first thing that i'm going to do is place some heavy supports right on the boot here whenever you place a support you can see where the supports are actually going to be and what's going to be printed and if you don't like how that turns out that's your own fault all you got to do is edit it this button is kind of spooky and i didn't do it for a long time but it's really easy to change around moving this little edit support thing here changes where the outline of the support is going to be and you can see exactly where things are going to line up that's where i'm placing the first heavy support i don't want it to go outside of the boot to where whenever i pull this off it's actually going to remove part of the boot so i want it to be right there right along the edge of the heel and that should hold everything just fine i'm going to put extra of these on the heavy parts of the boot just because again this has to hold the rest of the figure up that should be good enough to hold the mini and the rest of the weight these things stick pretty good to the build surface and this honestly isn't a very thick mini now that should be all the heavy supporting i need to do we can always add heavy supports which is a technique i like to do later and i'll show you what i mean by that what we really need to be looking for now are islands islands are where these little black lines are these are each of the layers going up and down this mini if you ever find a part where there is no circle or there is no ring in which this is connected to that's called an island for example around his leg here these are not islands because there's something on the inside and out however each of these little bullet ends here these are islands the further i get away it's not an island this part where it's all black that means that is an island so this little bandolier or reloading set of bullets is gonna have a lot of islands let's see how we can fix that so let's go ahead and start there that's a great place for us to learn because this is a hard thing that needs a lot of supports so we're gonna find every island on one of these bullets and just go ahead and click our way through so that way we have something that supports it here is a tricky island see if i go under here shittybox wants it to be held up by this other bandolier that would be good it would hold this up and make sure that it gets printed but then i'd have to cut this out and i'm not really confident in my abilities to cut this small bit of support out without breaking or damaging some of this bandolier so the better thing to do is to create this support here go in and then edit it so that it supports the island that you want it to support and if you're worried that that support's not gonna go well who cares just go ahead and support your own support that's the easiest way to do things like that boom now that support is held up even better now we have just a bit of editing to do to make sure that we are both supporting these islands and not touching any of the other bandoliers see this is an issue what i've done here i'm going to go ahead and move this ball up we don't want anything getting too close to these other little bandolier parts or else they're also going to have issues printing so if you feel like you've got some issues you can move the ball up or if you touch the base you can actually move the whole bottom of the support too we want a decent amount of clearance or else there's going to be issues and we just don't want those boom now there shouldn't be any issues where these are getting printed now we have the majority of the bondolear or bandolier supported and i think it looks pretty good we can edit a few things if we really wanted to fine tune it here but i think that's good enough so we can do one of a few things we can either call this good or when i use light supports like this if there's nothing connecting or holding them i do get a little bit worried so sometimes i place other light supports that will connect in and up along these other ones this will make sure whatever you print isn't going to have any issues down the road and that these light supports themselves aren't going to fail again over supporting way better than under supporting there i don't think any of that is going to have a problem and i think all of this is going to print pretty well now we want to do the same thing on every other part of the body you can see there is an island in a very awful location for this man but hey that's where we need to put the support so that's where i'm gonna put it i'd rather have a bunch of smaller supports sporadically placed than a heavy support for example here's another island we want to try and make sure every island on this piece is taken care of by at least one small support so that's basically it i'm going to find anywhere that there's an island or any large patch of red because any large patch of red means that's kind of a heavy angle and it should use some supporting i'm moving away from the bottom part now which has what i think is enough supports you can see again i had to do hardly any supports on the front because there's just hardly anything red there's a few here that i probably could add something to but again i'm not too worried about things on this side now say there is something that needs to be supported like this part of the gun here but you just have to do something that connects to the mini well you could do that or what i generally like to do is move this part of the support way out here to where the bottom will actually move off of that support and honestly by all accounts this is done this is fine supporting here this will hold up your mini and have no issues by comparison you can see these supports that are made by their professional ones are much more sturdy and there's no way that these are going to be failed on their supports and they have very tiny tips and there's ways you could go about remedying those but honestly this should do the job what i like to do to make sure it does the job is do a little bit more supporting of the supports this probably took a professional supporter somewhere between three or four hours where this took me i would say the better part of 15 minutes if we can get the job done at this level and now go back in and support the supports i would say that that's good because my supporting the supports takes no effort at all i go in with a bunch of just small light supports connecting all of the other ones basically making sure that all of these pieces here have something to build up in on their own and then afterwards i'll take a few heavy supports and just connect them up to some of the lighter parts so that there really is a build place for all of these to connect to and that there's no way that any of these are going to have any fails even on the light and thinnest part of the supports so there we go i would say that this is a completed and supported model i will print both of these to test the difference and see what a professionally supported one looks like versus my hobby one as well as to see which one is easier to remove but there's going to be a second video or a follow-up one to this one that shows the easiest way to remove these type of supports and do follow-up care for your minis for now let's take a look at the print settings that i'm going to be using i have a couple of different print settings depending on what i'm using these are my settings for my elogu mars 2 and these are my settings for my elogu mars pro if i was going to show you a regular elegumars all i would do is change my exposure time from 7 seconds to somewhere around 9 or 10 seconds these settings would of course change depending on what resin i'm using for example if i was using amerlabs i might even be able to change the exposure time down to 4 seconds but since i'm going to be using the base elegumar's resin i'll leave it at 6 seconds and i should be good to go now print mini's provided me with two minis to show off during this tutorial that first one was that alexis and this one is the diesel trooper heavy gunner they also have a pre-supported version of this mini and i'm gonna go ahead and do a time lapse of me supporting this heavy gunner while you're watching this time lapse i want to say a thank you to the two sponsors of this video my mini factory and print minis if you want to get these two minis that i'm using in this video you can go check out the my mini factory print mini's web page and download them for free there's a bajillion other minis you can check out on the myminifactory webstore that's pretty much what they do and you should also check out the print mini's patreon page they come out with a bunch of new sci-fi themed minis every month and each mini actually has a running story going with it so if you want to see the story for the alexa mini that we supported i'll put that in the description down below and so there you have it two completely different prints done both in my way and in the professionally supported ways i'm going to go ahead and set this up to where i can set these on my printer and get them going and we can take a look at what those look like and make sure that the supports come off properly and as those are printing i do want to tell you about something cool that we're doing to go along with this video on may 26 over on my twitch channel twitch.tv ribonator i'm going to be supporting these again and a couple of other minis live that way if you want to support along with me or come ask me questions live you can do that i'll be doing that this wednesday again may 26th with these minis and since they're available for free you can go along supporting the exact same minis and ask me any questions you want to thank you so much for watching next week we're going to have a follow-up video that is basically all the stuff you do after you support a mini like how you get it off of the print bed and what you're supposed to do to cure your mini so subscribe to make sure you don't miss that like the video if you like it dislike it if you disliked it and either way i will see you on wednesday for the live stream i hope that you have a fantastic day

Channel: Rybonator

Views: 13,450

Keywords: 3d printing, tabletop, minis, miniature, 3d printed, 3d, print, dnd, dungeons and dragons, warhammer, obsessions, myminifactory, elegoo, mars, resin, dlp, sla, fdm, challenge, ttrpg, models, dice, army, rybonator, dice goblin, how to make dice, resin miniatures, supports, timelapse, cure, curing, station, how to, settings, chitubox, miniatures, 3d printing miniatures, 3d printed miniatures for dnd, cura, 40k, painting, sanding, files, bundle, printer, 3d printed minis, support, guide, tutorial, class, light, heavy, mars 2

Id: cPXCilN7Cqc

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Sat May 22 2021