We’ll ignore the fact that my printer did not complete the skull…I came home 5 hours in and while it was still running, there had been about 4 head crash/alignment errors…so, still a challenge, I’ll consider a completed skull the ‘golden moment’ and be happy with other successes. So…to actually create stuff…there sure is a big difference between what I made in sketchup, and what the printer spit out…
Yeah, within reason. Vases are awesome. Things that are under about 3" in diameter, up to 6in in height are Golden. Larger than that, all bets are off. The model was 20mm a side, printed 1:1…if I turned off support and doubled its size, it probably would have looked much better.
It’s hard to print that small. All of the ‘hairs’ and blobbing make me wonder - is the temperature a bit too high? Also, I’ve noticed that for small protrusions (e.g. 1/2mm to 1mm) you can print text sticking out the side of something and it’ll be fine without support, and be quite readable. For example, the writing on the side of http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:202525 came out great, with no support. And peeling off support really sucks.
Well, I’m certainly still learning, that’s for sure. I’ll print again with no support… It pretty much means there’s no such thing as ‘defaults’ for a print, you have to look at the model and make decisions on how to slice it.
That’s my experience - for every design, you have to think about how to orient it, how to slice it, etc. Sometimes you want thick layers, which print fast and are strong, and sometimes you want thin layers which look great. Sometimes you need lots of shells and internal structure to make a part strong, other times one shell and minimal or no interior is sufficient (and is cheaper and prints faster). 3D printing gets easier and easier with every generation of software and hardware, but it’s not “click to print” easy. And it may never be - you’ll always need to design for printability, just as engineers have to design things for any other manufacturing process - injection molding has its own requirements, as does CNC milling, etc. But the rules aren’t impossible to master. The main one is that it’s best to avoid support when you can, and to do that you have to design objects to sit on the build platform and avoid any steep overhangs. That is, you can lean out by 45 degrees, or have small protrusions like your M, but you can’t stick straight out very far without support.
Agreed, I’ve often wanted the ability to tell it to stop, and move down just a smidge.
For small prints I think the key is to go way down with temperature, about 30 to 40 degrees below normal. And print slow of course.