Support Separation in dimensional increments, not layers.

[bonmot]

This is an old thread. But I see there is a value to it.

I am facing the same problem. S3D does support very well and automatically for printing statue type of objects.
But when a big flat surface needs a support, if a half layer could be added to the last layer of 100% filled dense support layer, that would improve the quality of the layer above greatly!

This is just simply inserting a half layer in between the top of the support and the bottom of the part above it, without affecting anything else.

1 layer of gap for a flat surface is too big. It is true that the plastic won't droop anymore, but still enough room to be dragged around by the nozzle.

I just bought the software 3 days ago. It is a great software, I like it very much so far. But the main reason I bought it is I have seen many great video on youtube about the support. But now I realize that those videos don't represent my "engineering" type of printing which normally has flat overhangs.

I believe 1/2 layer is going to solve this problem. I am new to this software. I apologize if I missed something in the software already doing this.

Thanks

Paul

[zemlin]

It works great to print support at 1/2 layer of separation, prints come off the support beautifully and the parts look great! ABS doesn't peel up from support either.

Would you mind explaining in more detail how you do this?
Thank you.

[Trax]

Nice looking print! I definitely get what you guys are saying, but if you are printing the support and object at different heights, there is a lot of extra work involved. Like you said, you would need to move the Z-axis twice as much, but you also have to worry about collisions. The entire layer isn't at the same height now. So when moving from object to support, you would also need to add something like Z-lift to ensure that the nozzle moves up, over, and then back down to avoid colliding with the elevated support/object.

thats wrong, you sinpli first print the finner layer and than the thicker one and no problem

[KDan]

Rather than having a final support layer that is somewhat lower than the height for the rest of the layer, I think it might be easier and better to just modify the extrusion width (extrusion rate). This would probably work a bit better with direct extruders than bowden setups, but it seems that the objective should be to hold up up area needing support with a little sag as possible, while minimizing the contact area and bonding strength. A final support layer that has more of an "O" cross section is going to have a much weaker bond with the next layer up than a typical flattened "(¯¯)" cross section.

[KDan]

Rather than having a final support layer that is somewhat lower than the height for the rest of the layer, I think it might be easier and better to just modify the extrusion width (extrusion rate). This would probably work a bit better with direct extruders than bowden setups, but it seems that the objective should be to hold up the area needing support with as little sag as possible, while minimizing the contact area and bonding strength. A final support layer that has more of an "O" cross section is going to have a much weaker bond with the next layer up than a typical flattened "(¯¯)" cross section.
My thoughts are that if you print a sparse final support layer, and then one separation layer, you'd get much easier support removal than what we get now with one separation layer, and less sag than two separation layers. Best of both worlds perhaps.