Tips for surface finish on top of support?

[laird]

You don't have to make it so complicated. Both the Zortrax and UP/Afinia printers use a raft on top of support before the object and both of these printers are class leaders in this department. Zortrax having copied the UP. Works fine on all sorts of irregular shaped prints.
Leave support the way it is and simply add a raft on top. The interface layer (raft) should follow the contour of the object.

And how do you add a raft to the top of support in S3D? Trying out a designed support now. Does the auto part alignment feature ever work? Figure something that was imported with the same coordinate system would be easy to align...

If your layer height is 0.2m, in your modeling software you can make a 2mm thick shell around your object, offset by 0.2mm, then trimmed down to only cover the lower portion of the object. It works well. The details of how you do so will depend in your modeling software. Then the support will hold up the shell, and the shell will hold up the object.

The result looks great! But it's a fair amount of work. So it'd be great if the support generator were smart enough to do this instead.

[dennisjm]

Just to re-iterate how much I'd really like some type of feature for solid infill a the top of the support layers, I just printed a model that I had to create 12 processes to print.

Step 1, slice the model.

Step 2, go through every layer and find where a new bottom surface started, make note of several layers below and above those layers

Step 3, Add a new process for every alternating point between those points.

Step 4, modify every other process to have 100% infill (actually I think I used 95 or 90 or something) and then all the ones in between only had around 25 or so.
Multiply layer number by layer height to get starting and stopping mm for each process.

Step 5, Reslice model, fix all the mistakes I made, carefully look and make sure I did it right before printing.

I'm happy that I was able to do this with S3D but at the same time it was really annoying. Hoping for a feature still.

Model has lots of pointy things on the bottom, fingers, spikes etc and I wanted those to be nice and clean on the bottom just as on the top.