[ADDED] Dissolvable interface between the print and supports

[InoTek3D]

Excellent idea!!
This would be a huge money and time savings for all prints with removable supports.

[WildedSTL]

T tried printing eSUN PETG using PLA as support filament. Temperture setting PETG-240, PLA-195. Dense support with 0-seperation layers and tried with 1- seperation layer. The PETG bunches up and would not stick to the PLA. Print goes fine until the PETG tries to print on top of the PLA support layer. Am I missing a heat setting or something causeing it not to print?

[McSquid]

How is this not a thing yet? This has come up multiple times in the past 2 years. Implementation cannot be that difficult, all the pieces are already there. Just let us pick an extruder for dense support layers. This would make PVA support SO EASY.

[HexHyte]

Wow
+1

[Section31]

Just adding my support for this feature. I recently upgraded to dual extruder and I would like to cut costs on the expensive soluble materials.

[hanspeiler]

I just got the same idea to use soluble material only on the interface layers and standard material on all other support structures. In slic3r it seems possible to assign the Extruder with e.g. PVA to the support interface layers and all other supports to the main extruder (e.g. PLA). But I have not tried it yet.

Seems like a great way to save expensive PVA/HIPS. I hope they would integrate this feature into Simplify3D as well, as Slic3r tends to crash a lot and is rather slow.

I will try the PETG-PLA combination. thanks for the useful tip!

[Mach_52]

Please, S3d devs, pretty pretty please can you add this feature.

[hanspeiler]

It seems they have implemented the feature in the latest 4.0 version. I have not tried it though.

[S3D-Jason]

We are happy to announce that this feature has now been added in Version 4.0. You can now customize the extruder that is used for the dense support layers, at the interface between the part and the regular support structures. To do this, click "Edit Process Settings", go to the Supports tab, and first make sure that dense supports are enabled by changing the number of dense support layers to something larger than zero (usually 3-5 seems to be a good starting number). Then you can choose the dense support extruder to change which extruder is used for these dense interface layers. So if you had a dual extruder machine with PLA in one nozzle and PVA in the other, you could use PLA for the majority of the regular support structures, and then only switch to the PVA material for the last few dense support interface layers. There is a picture of this technique near the bottom of the page below:
https://www.simplify3d.com/simplify3d-v ... d-quality/

Dissolvable filaments can be expensive, so we hope this will help you save money on your prints and optimize where these materials are used!