New to the forum, Simplify3D is the best!

[chadtheartist]

Hello all!

I'm new to the forum but I've been using Simplify3D for a while now. I was gifted a Monoprice Dual Extruder printer over a year ago, and only unboxed it and set it up a few months ago. Since then I've been tinkering and experimenting with getting detailed prints out of it, and have really great success with the help of the support team at Simplify3D. The software has made things a lot easier to troubleshoot!

Being that my printer is a clone of the Flashforge Creator Pro, I've been able to hack quite a few things to make some really great prints. I'm genuinely shocked at the level of detail I'm getting from such a cheap machine and I don't even think I've upgraded all that I can with it. I'm still having a few issues with things like ringing and the like, but all in all I'm pretty pleased with how things are working.

I wanted to show some of the 3D prints I've made, all my 3D art since that's why I started doing 3D printing in the first place. Much more fun to see my work in my hands than on a screen!!!

Looking forward to doing more with this software. I'm currently trying to experiment with encasing my model in supports so I can print some more intricate things, like a character posed with guns/swords/baseball bat, etc... Right now I'm having issues with overhangs still being pretty poor, even with the supports. So hoping to find a good middle ground.

These are all at a layer height of .05mm. The first model is over 5.25 inches tall! took 53 hours to print! The rest are all in the 3-4 inch tall range and vary between 8-13 hours per print. Most of the prints are from the white and black monoprice filament, but the grey print was Solutech Real Grey. I'm having issues with it not maintaining a consistent color during the print, so the lines you see are actually color changes, not layer lines. It's super smooth.

[CompoundCarl]

Wow, those are some really nice looking prints! Even better considering that printer only costs around $700.

For your questions about support material, since you have a dual extrusion printer, you may want to look at using dense support structures. This makes the interface at the part much more dense which can help the print quality and save filament. There is a good video of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koCVOsRA6Bc

Hope that helps, and welcome to the boards!

[chadtheartist]

Yeah, I've been experimenting with dense supports. The first model had them, I had the dense support layers set to 12 with and infill of 70%. I'm not sure if that was enough considering the size of the model and the low layer height of .05mm.

I use to have really bad issues with the supports making the model underneath super rough and crummy, but I added a cooling fan that seemed to help fix that a lot more. I'm wondering if I should try and add another fan to blow on the prints even more, since I'm still getting the occasional roughness around the supports? Guess it could really hurt.

I'm also thinking of trying out the polymaker polysupport material for the extra nozzle. I've not had great success with doing dual extrusion prints since I've got two different nozzles, took me awhile just to level them so I didn't have one nozzle dragging across the print. That was also before I got a glass bed too, so maybe it will fair better?

I feel if I can figure out the support thing, my prints will be perfect! It's close now, just takes time to clean up the prints. I think it's incredible that these printers can rival a polyjet printer as far as details go. The supports are a whole different thing though. Not even an issue on a polyjet.

[CompoundCarl]

I've done a few really complex prints with dissolvable support material, and it definitely helps. There's extra complexity since you're using 2 materials now, but it can be worth it for really detailed parts

[chadtheartist]

Early tests with using the second extruder for infill haven't been that great. Fun experiment but ultimately not as great as I'd like. So I'll just stick with the one extruder and go from there. Thanks for the advice!