Gradual Support Infill Percentage and Perimeters

[watsonstudios]

I have a great feature that would help when trying to cut down on the amount of support material used! Right now, it is great that you can split the process up to adjust the support fill percentage so you can use progressive support that gets denser as it gets closer to the overhangs. The only problem is that at low density, the supports don't fill the entire support footprint (see pic 1) so when you start a new process with more dense supports, you get a lot of overhang and printing in air issues. (see pic 2, red areas) If you could add something like "support wall" that adds a single loop wall around the entire support footprint, (see pic 4, red line) then when you add denser support at a perpendicular angle, there will be no support overhangs. This problem is not as bad when you have more dense supports (see pic 3) but it would really be nice to add this footprint "boundary" to catch the ends of the next finer support process layers. This would really cut down print time and material usage without risking a failed print from the support printing in air over these missing pillars.

[S3D-Jake]

Great Idea! The outline around the entire support area will certainly detract from our famous quick and easy to remove supports. You can likely accomplish something similar by modeling the supports in your CAD package and then gradually changing the infill density of the process assigned to print those parts.

I've documented this feature request and will continue to monitor the thread for other user input.

[watsonstudios]

Well I'd like to not have to model the supports. That's a lot more work to do. The outer perimeter support wall could be adjusted in settings to maybe a percent of extrusion width, say 50%. Also, the easy to remove supports has more to do with the interface with the part - like skipping a layer between support and part, that's what makes it easy to remove.

Another way to achieve the same result as a perimeter wall around the support footprint is to just make sure the supports can be "adaptive" and hit those outer perimeters no matter what the infill percentage is. I'll attach an example. The black lines show what would be an "adaptive" support creation. This would allow the supports to stay sparse depending on infill percentage but still make sure it follows the footprint perimeter of the supports and would still be easily removed.