These are some great results, especially for a first run. ( I looked at the stuff in your other thread too) Totally impressed! What a great idea to slot the steps for the figure base. You are making this look easy.
Any chance you could post a pic of a figure with the supports still connected? Just to get an idea what they look like. The figures I buy are so smooth you’d never know they had supports. However, I’ve seen larger designs online that have dozens of supports still attached for sale. Is that a difference between filament and resin printers?
Filament and resin printers both require supports, but I’ve found I can usually get away with fewer of them with resin printers. I don’t have a real-life pic handy, but here’s what the supports look like in the slicing program:
Those are just the autogenerated ones. I’d spend some time optimizing those further when actually trying to print it.
The supports actually come off pretty easily for the most part. You’ll notice on large, smooth surfaces but not so much on anything with surface texture.
Unless you’re doing something like the Peter B. Lewis building at Case Western Reserve University, buildings are easy. I imagine that you could design good buildings with any program whatsoever.
So you have to manually remove the supports when the printing is done?
I was thinking about something like a witch’s hut, Hobbit house or this. I couldn’t remember what it was called so I had to google it and the first thing up was a 3D file for sale. Apparently you are correct.
Incidentally, there are dual-head filament printers where you can load normal filament into one side and a special dissolving support filament in the other. For those, you just plunk the printed object into some kind of solvent and wait. But most printers, whether resin or filament, require removing the supports manually.
Yeah, that specific style is very handy for support removal. The sharp tips can get into deep spots, and the rear side is flush–so when you trim off a flat surface, there’s almost no remaining material. I always liked the Hakko brand.
Already have a couple of those from models that come on sprues, so I’m good to go there.
Now that you guys have answered all my questions and showed off your work, I think you have forced me to go ahead and buy a printer. Just have to figure out if I want to get it now at our vacation place or wait a few weeks until we get back to our main home. Decisions, decisions.
I don’t think so. The stuff I’m using says Water Washable on the label. I bought: ELEGOO Water Washable 3D Printer Resin LCD UV-Curing Resin 405nm Standard Photopolymer Resin for LCD 3D Printing 1000Gram Ceramic Grey
For filament printers, the standard method for that is to put a layer of masking tape on the bed. Masking tape itself might not work here, with being immersed in the resin liquid, but there might be something similar.
Resin printers are pretty different. For one thing, they demand pretty significant adhesion between the print and the plate, because after an exposure it also sticks to the plastic film at the bottom of the reservoir. When the plate pulls up, it needs to separate from the film and not the plate.
It’s actually one way I know that a print started ok: for the first few layers, you can hear an audible pop as the print releases from the film. As the plate moves up, it doesn’t separate right away, so the film flexes up a bit, and you can hear the pop as it separates. If there’s no pop, it means the print is still stuck to the film, and separated from the build plate instead.
That could happen because the settings are wrong, or there’s not enough surface area on the plate relative to what it’s printing, or bad height calibration, or a few other things. Usually not an issue but it’s bitten me a few times.
As for my filament printer, I usually use a glass plate covered with a PEI layer. That’s a plastic that achieves a nice balance between adhesion and ability to separate. A few seconds with a paint scraper is usually good enough to pull up the print, though some can take more effort.
I seem to have figured out the settings for removing the completed figures from the plate with harming the figures or myself.
I calibrated the zero using the self-leveling. Then went up by .4mm and set that as the zero.
Also in the splitter I set the Bottom layers down to 4 and exposure time down to 40. (I’m not fully sure why )
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