JBell
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Mar 19, 2015 9:05 pm

external support only

Hi. I'm looking for the ability to apply external support (from the heated bed to the external surface of the part) only. I am printing hollow tubes that absolutely can not have support inside. I'm familiar with Cura, which has this option. Very useful. I am able to apply a global support and then manually remove the internal support I don't want. At a small support pillar size (1 or 2 mm), this can take 15 minutes to manually click on each pillar to remove the support that's internal. I have a very large number of parts that this must be applied to, so this extra time to click is not possible.

Any ideas?
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jimc
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Location: mullica, nj
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Re: external support only

There is no internal support. Support is external only. If its within the model then its infill. Turn your infill to 0
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3Drasle
Posts: 84
Joined: Thu Jan 30, 2014 6:29 am

Re: external support only

JBell wrote:Hi. I'm looking for the ability to apply external support (from the heated bed to the external surface of the part) only. I am printing hollow tubes that absolutely can not have support inside. I'm familiar with Cura, which has this option. Very useful. I am able to apply a global support and then manually remove the internal support I don't want. At a small support pillar size (1 or 2 mm), this can take 15 minutes to manually click on each pillar to remove the support that's internal. I have a very large number of parts that this must be applied to, so this extra time to click is not possible.

Any ideas?
Use the manual support funktion to remove unwanted parts of the support.

Edit: That is the only way at the moment.
/Michael, Denmark
dennisjm
Posts: 343
Joined: Wed May 07, 2014 9:51 pm

Re: external support only

jimc wrote:There is no internal support. Support is external only. If its within the model then its infill. Turn your infill to 0
If you have a model that is modeled as a hollow object instead of solid, it will still put support on the inside instead of infill.
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jimc
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Re: external support only

umm yeah this is true but that is still external to the model not internal.
dennisjm
Posts: 343
Joined: Wed May 07, 2014 9:51 pm

Re: external support only

Yep, just clarifying since sometimes it can be confusing.

Luckily S3D has hands down the best slicer preview I've seen of any of them all so you can figure out pretty easily if you got your settings right or not.
JBell
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Mar 19, 2015 9:05 pm

Re: external support only

Just to clarify, I am not talking about infill. I have a hollow tube, printed on its side (the long way) to get the correct flex characteristics from the nylon.

The question is how to efficiently get support from the heated bed to the bottom surface of the hollow tube. It is impossible to clean any support from inside the hollow area and any debris will get in the way of a cable that must pass through.

I have been manually applying the support and manually deleting it where I don't want it (i.e. inside the tube). However, this is about a 20 minute process for one tube and I have about 100 to do. Just looking how to do it as efficiently as CURA, where you select "Support type = Touching BuildPlate".

I'd continue to use Cura, but now I'm using a Flash Forge Creator Pro printer and need to use the GPX translator to get it into X3G. I have failed many times using the GPX command line translator tool.

Besides, I really like using Simplify3D and think its amazing, however right now it is not "Simplifying" anything.

Jack
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jimc
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Re: external support only

i see. so am i correct is assuming all of these 100 tubes are different and this is why you need to individually do each one separate? there is really no way i can think of at the moment to avoid support from being produced in the tube center.

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