Which slicer has the BEST support material? #3DP101

we all need a little support once in a while support material that is but what 3D printing slicer generates the best support material well I decided to find out testing four of the most popular slices right now for support material reliability easy removal and print quality and the results were really interesting let's get started [Music] for many people support material generation remains a kind of Dark Art but it's one that once you understand how it's generated you can really level up your 3D prints so let's start right at the beginning why do you need support material at all fdm or FFF 3D printers work by extruding molten plastic line by line layer by layer to eventually create a three-dimensional object but they work in open air which means that some geometry presents challenges if you try to reproduce it take this model of my maker coin available on my website Linked In the description below if I 3D print it like this each layer is well supported by the previous allowing the plastic time to cool and solidify accurately and resulting in a good quality 3D print but what if I try to print it in this orientation now as we scroll through the layers you can see that these islands are material just appear in thin air and air isn't going to magically levitate our print now is it the only way to print this model in this unusual orientation is to have the slicer print special columns which which come up from the print bed to meet the model at the exact layer it begins to form supporting it in place you may think that gravity plays a role here too but in my testing it's much less than you may think even when 3D printing upside down or in zero g in space this kind of 3D printer still needs to print to be held firmly in place to the print bed as it's created or it simply won't work it's important to note that Extrusion based 3D printers are just one kind of additive manufacturing technology and there's powder-based systems such as SLS which don't require support material at all instead relying on the previous layer of unscented powder to hold these islands of material in place as they form but in the case of filament 3D printers there are two main classes of support material Breakaway and soluble unless you have a fancy multi-material 3D printer which lets you use a separate material for your support structure you will probably need to use Breakaway supports which are printed using the same material as the object that they support but they're designed in such a way that they can easily be broken away once complete as this kind of breakaway support that I'll be testing in this video using my bone stock reality Ender 3 with Micro Center's high quality Inland pla plus the sponsor of today's video it's a new year and Microcenter is your source for the latest new tech with all of your PC and maker needs covered from 3D printers to filaments resins and heaps more and they're currently offering an Ender 3 Pro to new customers for only 100 bucks which has to be one of the most accessible ways to get into 3D printing right now I've used the Inland pla Plus for several projects now including the tests in this video and it's been working really really well so definitely grab yourself a few rolls along with that shiny new 3D printer of yours their friendly staff will be more than happy to answer any questions you may have help you get your latest project up and running and I've heard nothing but good things from you guys in the comments from previous videos who have been able to take advantage of the previous Micro Center deals so get into it links in the description below alrighty so here I have my maker coin within purchase slices I've actually added this little square down the bottom here to make it hover off the print bed which forces the slicer to build supports because otherwise pressure slice actually brings the file down onto the print bed it tries to avoid support material automatically and for this this test I don't want that I really want to emphasize this video is for beginners who generally just use automatic support generation and don't change anything so if you're an expert user who's comfortable with customizable support structures then you might want to just skip to the results to get an idea of what I got out of these slices but if you're new stick around and I'll show you the things you might want to change in your support material generation so what you want to do is go into print settings and here under support material we're going to click generate support material and then it'll ask if you want to change a few things say yes and if you're only seeing this many settings then you have the simple mode enabled in pressure slicer and Cura is very similar you can hide or show different settings but I'm going to just click export to uncover all the different settings that you can change when it comes to generating support material there's a lot but don't panic there's only really a few that you need to be aware of when you start working with your files so the most important one is your overhang threshold this is going to determine how far you can have an overhang before support material is generated so as I mentioned I tilted my make a coin to 45 degrees because that's generally the accepted limit of an overhang you can do on fdm 3D printers without needing support material but I do want to support the rest of the model that's obviously floating in space this is the setting you're going to be changing a lot depending on how complex your model is and it's really important to know that changing this can affect your print time print reliability and how much support material you have remove at the end of the day so if I reduce this down to something really small like 20 degrees and then I slice my file you'll see that there's really not much support material generated it's actually quite sparse this file may succeed but there's areas like the edge of the maker coin here and it's particularly this Underside Spike here of the logo that really aren't very well supported and you are going to get poor quality prints or in the case of this this make a coin you're probably going to lose this part it's probably going to come free so that's why you might go back into your support material generation and increase that number what if I what if you increase it too much do you get a better print well not necessarily let's increase this to 60 degrees of overhang supported look at all of that support material now this print will definitely succeed but if you look at it there is so much support that you're going to now have to remove it's going to take more time use more material and you're probably going to damage the print getting it all out of there so you need to find a happy medium be between the print being supported and successful and not having too much support material so that's why I've chosen 40 here because I know 45 degrees generally prints okay but I want the print to be pretty well grounded so let's try 40 and see how it looks and there you go so you can see the print here is being supported quite nicely it's sort of got this nice support at the bottom and it builds up and that back area with the logo where it starts at little Point as it comes up is very well supported so I know that's going to be successful but these large areas here where it's just a 45 degree overhang with nothing fancy happening there's no details there isn't bothered generating support there because it doesn't need to it's beyond the threshold that I've set the next important support setting you should be aware of is this tick box down here support on build plate only so for example I have this part here which is quite complicated to print on a filament-based 3D printer and it's actually got areas that do need support it will not print any other any other way but I've chosen this orientation because I want to print these top Parts without support material because I know that with those holes they don't need it strictly they will print okay but these bottom parts will so if I just print this like it is what we get is this so we have this support structure at the bottom which I do know I need but as it goes off to the top you see it's actually supporting these holes at the top as well now sometimes you have a model that needs support building up to it to hold it in place but you don't want support structures generated on the model itself and that's when you'll tick support on build plate only if I tick that and regenerate this file you notice that it actually doesn't generate any support on the part itself at the top it'll only generate support building up to the part and hold it in place and this is a setting I use all the time when I have files that don't need support material on top of them for example holes or overhangs that I know will print okay when they don't need support and you can always check if you're unsure by scrolling through the layers to see how the layers join together as long as there's no Islands or huge like unsupported shelves sticking out into middle of nowhere you don't strictly need support material the final thing you should be aware of when it comes to support material generation is how dense the support actually is and that will change how easy it is to pull away from the Mortal and there's different ways to change this in different slices but in pressure slicer here we have two different kinds of support we have this sort of more sparse open Line support that's designed to break away easily and then you can see as it gets to the model there's actually these dark green interface layers that interface between this sparse support and the print itself as it's forming which does the job of holding in place more accurately to get a better looking bottom layer of the 3D print now you can change these so if you go back into the support material settings you can see that we have the top interface layers so two as a default you can go as high as you want it says three but you can actually type in any number you want and then for the sparse infill you have different patterns you can choose so again rectilinear is the default if you find it's too fragile because it's got those open-ended edges you could go to rectilinear grid and as you can see here that gives you a tighter stronger infill that may be harder to remove but for example with tall columns it might be more successful and if you have tall columns there's one other final bonus trick I'll tell you and that is the support sheath option which actually gives you really strong columns at the expense of them being well stronger which makes them harder to remove so you can see here you have the option to turn on a sheath around supports so if I go extractility in here and have a sheath you can actually see what this does it actually wraps the support in a continuous outline that will make them much stronger so if you have a really tall support they won't break or break during the print as easily but again they're going to be a lot stronger which means they're harder to break away at the end if you need to get them out of delicate areas of the 3D print but let's move on to the results I found testing other slices and seeing how good their support material generation really was they're pretty varied all support angles were set to the same 40 degrees and I tried to keep all prints at the same 0.2 millimeter layer height and infill with mostly default settings for the creality into three but I was forced to make some changes in a few cases but it was obvious to the default settings were going to result in failures still I didn't expect this much difference between the different approaches and we'll start with Cura Kira's tree supports were some of the easiest to remove from the batch both the original and the new supports in the Christmas Alpha release they're also very efficient with under 2 grams of waste but the print quality particularly at the interface of support and the print was definitely lacking with some of the worst results in the batch and unfortunately the new supports in the Christmas Alpha although they do look really cool failed to support the sharp Underside edge of the Maker's Muse logo which is really disappointing because the rest of the print looks okay the traditional support syncura on the other hand were totally different forming this huge block of material which I initially thought had no chance of separating from the print and I'll admit it was difficult to pull away but I was able to do it without the need for any tools and it left behind this perfect little seat for the maker coin which is actually quite remarkable once again the small cross hatching was used as an interfaced layer but the first few layers of the maker coin are markedly improved over both of the tree support prints it used a lot of filament though and the print took the longest out of all the tests but not by much I feel this kind of chunky support would be perfect for soluble support materials but perhaps too overkill for everyday Printing and removing delicate prints could prove a challenge however and granted it's kind of random I think this support approach could be useful for creating stands for odd shape 3D prints and you don't even have to print them at the same time I did some tests and it's totally possible to only print support structures in Cura by setting all of the solid layers in fill and wall thicknesses of the part to zero and then you get a nice little stand for your 3D print now moving on to push a slicer this print was actually done way too far away from the print bed for the first layer but because this one layer raft is printed before the support structure it actually didn't fail and that's some nice Insurance the supports and pressure slicer are fragile and easy to pull away but they're sharp so be careful not to cut yourself and they left just about two to three grams of weight and the print is one of the best of the lineup when it comes to those few Underside layers of the maker coin this is because of the dense interface layers that you can enable between the print and the sparse support structure speeding up Prints but including that dense support layer where it's needed the most and it works really really well if come a long way since the LEDs of slicer welding supports to your pla prints let me tell you it's worth noting here that pressure research are working on their own kind of tree supports as well and I've waited patiently since the announcement but as yet it's unreleased at least a time of filming no doubt they'll drop it in a few days after I upload this video so check the description for an update I'll be sure to keep you guys in the loop and also I'll be updating everyone with photos over in the makersmutes community next up is bamboo lab slicer bamboo Studio you might be wondering where I'm including this when it's just a re-skin of prusa slicer but the two do actually differ especially where supports are concerned just like pressure slicer the traditional supports out of bamboo Studio work very well with the interface layer supporting your first few layers of the print and ensuring a decent and finish but the results are pretty much identical but bamboo studio also has its own take on tree supports and they're quite different to the way Cura does it these supports like chunky tentacles that grow up and Branch into points of contact for the print and they are some of the most efficient of the lineup with only one to two grams of material wasted and a print time of full half hour quicker than the traditional Cura support print and I had high hopes for it but alas when I went to remove the supports from the model they were pretty well stuck and I had to resort to using the side Cutters to pull them away those white marks are all of the points of the model where it was stuck to the support material and the pre quality is okay but not as good as traditional supports but considering how quick and lightweight this kind of support material is it might be suitable for larger more organic models where those tentacle-like arms can wrap tightly around the model to save time and material instead of those scaffold-like towers that the traditional support structures create finally idea maker I wanted to include idea maker in the hopes they would bring something new new to the table however default support generation was obviously going to fail up until recently it's been very difficult for slicers to detect downward facing sharp points of models as requiring support material so I did have to tweak a lot of settings until I was happy with the area of coverage and chance of success out of idea maker but to its credit the print had the lightest amount of support use out of all the test prints and it did come away effortlessly so it's a real shame that the sharp point of the logo failed something I found that dramatically increases support material reliability is the ability for the slicer to add support up and past the point of contact effectively creating a little cradle for these areas to form accurately and you can see it pretty clearly here in the support generation from prusa slicer unfortunately I couldn't really figure out a way to do this in idea maker which again is a shame because apart from that one failed detail this maker coin is actually the best out of the lot especially when it comes to the back face of the maker coin which is at a con constant 45 degree overhang during the print but when it comes to support material there's one more option that's better than any of these design your models so they don't need support material at all with clever design you can eliminate the need for support material all together you can find my video here highlighting my tips and tricks I use to achieve just that so go check it out catch little guys bye

Channel: Maker's Muse

Views: 156,567

Keywords: 3d, printing

Id: dA_8NcYCMok

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 28 2023