Dual Extrusion Support Generation

[LeonMF]

I've been playing around with the dual extrusion features on S3D v3. Unfortunately, I seem to have found some weird support bug that causes supports to be generated between the layers of a dual color print.

As you can my aligned smooth wall sides are having supports generated inside them! Until I figure out what's going on here, it's back to Cura for dual extrusion prints.

Am I doing something wrong or have I found some edge case bug?

[JoeJ]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean... When you preview the gcode there are no supports inside your parts. Everything looks correct to me.

Perhaps the thing that is confusing you is that you are seeing supports in the model preview before slicing. That is just the software's way of telling you that the "TestOuter" part would require support structures if it was printed by itself, but of course, it is smart enough to remove that from the actual toolpaths when it sees that you are really printing both pieces together.

So I imagine if you printed this it would look just fine. No overlapping supports as far as I can see.

[LeonMF]

When I add supports, it doesn't take into account the second color model until it slices. That's confusing and makes it very hard to manually tweak supports.

I'll go back and play with it some more.

Thanks!

[LeonMF]

Here's a different factory file for another part variant.

You'll see that it generates supports outside of the part for no reason whatsoever which is going to give me color contamination (isn't it?). Also, for some unknown reason, it's printing the middle layer at 100% infill no matter what seeings I choose.

[JoeJ]

You're using far too large of a support pillar size for a part that small. That's why you're seeing some pieces that are outside the part.

This ring is only about 6mm wide. You are using a support pillar size of 4mm which is far too big for a part that small. Change it to 1mm and it works perfectly.

In general, you want to use smaller support pillar sizes for small models with small features. Larger models with big features can use larger support pillar resolutions.

[LeonMF]

You're using far too large of a support pillar size for a part that small. That's why you're seeing some pieces that are outside the part.

This ring is only about 6mm wide. You are using a support pillar size of 4mm which is far too big for a part that small. Change it to 1mm and it works perfectly.

In general, you want to use smaller support pillar sizes for small models with small features. Larger models with big features can use larger support pillar resolutions.

Thanks for the feedback. I've never done anything but the default supports.

I can see how using a smaller support might help. However, this is not a small part and I've never had a problem with supports when I've printed with single extrusion. It seems that slicing with smaller supports does help prevent the weird outside useless supports from being generated but I'm still seeing the middle section sliced at 100% infill for some weird reason.