Floating Supports

[DavidS]

Hello...

I've been fighting floating supports... meaning that when generated, supports don't always go all the way down to a surface, they will just start in mid air (they are touching something where they start, but they have big unsupported overhangs themselves. This is happening on most models, and I always have to go in and delete those columns and carefully replace them, which is tricky because even when placing by hand they tend to do the same thing unless placed at the perfect position (I find positioning supports to be very tricky as they tend to snap from position to position, but that is a different issue). Shouldn't all supports go straight down until they hit a surface, be it the build plate or model?

Thanks

-David

[airscapes]

try changing support resolution to 1mm

[DavidS]

Thanks, that both helped and made things worse. I misunderstood what the resolution setting did (even though the tooltip is pretty clear). The earlier pics had a res of 6. When dropped to 1, I get the following...

on the last one, taken from below, all the dark edges are unsupported. The mesh in this example is this one...

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1609642

thanks

-David

[dkightley]

There are a couple of settings that affect the placement of supports in these sort of circumstances....

Firstly the Support Resolution......which adjusts the size of the virtual pillar that is used by the automatic support creation routine to determine whether or not support will be placed in any particular location. Varying this will increase or decrease the amount of automatically generated support.

Secondly the Extra Inflation Distance.....which adjusts the amount of extra support that is generated around the virtual pillar mentioned above (think of it as similar to raft size). Set to zero, support is generated at the size of the support pillar. Set to 0.5mm and there will be 0.5mm of support generated in all directions around the virtual pillar.


Looking at your photos, you probably have a Support Pillar Resolution of 2.0mm and an Extra Inflation Distance of 0.5mm or more. Change to a resolution of 0.1mm as recommended above, but reduce the Extra Inflation Distance to zero. Then check the auto-generation using the Support Management pop-up window by selecting the Auto-generate option....and add manual supports where needed.

I would also add 1 dense support layer at 100% ….which will help a lot!