After printing some calibration pieces to get my printer dialed in. I tried to print a yard crane with the auto supports in Anycubic Photo Workshop. As with slicers for FDM printers, the supports it produced were excessive to say the least. I could not get the supports off without breaking the crane itself. So I went to YouTube and watched some videos on supports from folks who print miniatures for table top games. So numerous videos in, and $100 for Lychee Slicer Pro, I printed the crane again, this time placing the supports myself, and using the setting recommended by the pros. The result is below. I still broke the crank handle off on one side (they are incredibly tiny) but i will make one out of wire for that side. Sorry for the crappy photos.
Congrats on your first success! I remember with my first resin print I had to take a moment of "wow" that I could make something so detailed at home. Hope this sets off a good journey for you. Cheers -Mike
Nice print! I stopped using auto-generated supports early on, figured out a few things about the "geometric" models I was printing. Particularly, aligning as many edges as possible at a 45-degree angle to the build plate let the majority of the model support itself. Go here for a discussion and a few pictures: https://glenn.pulpitrock.net/blog/posts/2022-06-12_cab/#fabrication Yep, there's a certain dimension past which a part becomes just too fragile. I recently tried to print a N scale air horn for a member, way to small to reliably survive even the wash. I'm currently working on a depot, here's the first print of the walls in N scale: Yep, walls were way too thin. Thickened them up a bit, much better result: Still some issues, the windows are floating, turns out an 'interference' fit can still render separately. I came up with a way to embed the window frames in the walls for the next print. Of note, I'm trying out printing the walls directly on the build plate, seems to work okay. I get a bit of flare on the bottom layers, but I'd rather sand that off than get the droopy-ness of periodic supports. The great thing about 3D printing is, you can do design like Space-X - iterate through it until it doesn't explode so much...
