torporus wrote: ↑Tue Oct 15, 2019 9:29 am
I have been trying out the trees support feature in Cura for over a month now and it has become my favorite support type on my Anycubic I3 Mega!
It is a game changer! The biggest advantages are less surface deterioration due to less support material sticking to the model and, what is a much more significant factor, the support structure is MUCH EASIER to remove! It simply saves a lot of time in post processing! Most of the support can be remove without tools more often than not and removing all of the support usually takes me twice as long with conventional support and that's just getting it removed; since there are more contact points with conventional supports the cleanup is even worse for conventional pillars!
I have seen a few posts being skeptical about the practicality of such support in FDM printing in this thread.
I cannot agree on this type of support causing any problems for FDM printers. My Anycubic I3 mega prints those out with no issues at all when using PLA or ABS. I have had even better results on a 3D-Gence P255 printer.
At least not in the way that cura handles this type of support which is arguably a lot different from the tree support used for SLA/ DLP machines.
I have not used any flex filament yet though so it might become a problem with those since from what I've read you usually want to keep retractions to a minimum with flexible filament.
Still, tree support has been so amazing in post processing my prints that it made me come back to Cura even though I initially got S3D to not be dependent on Cura! And Cura still has a lot of shortcomings that S3D does better but tree support really made me tinker with Cura again instead of S3D.
@ the devs
please make tree support a thing like in Cura! Less time for post processing cuts a significant amount of cost in production!
The competition among slicing software is fierce and not implementing features that even free software has started to adapt makes me wonder if a continued investment in S3D is worth my time/ money!