Transcript:
When I first got into 3d printing supports for terrifying to me, I saw them. As this sort of mysterious thing that often wouldn’t stick to the bed would make post-processing a pain and usually would render my part either completely useless or at least just looking downright bad over the years supports have begun to bother me less and less with the evolution of slicing software getting better and better and my overall understanding of how and when to use them accordingly also improving. Now if you have a dual extrusion 3d printer, then you have the luxury of printing with PVA if you’re printing with PLA, which PVA is a water-soluble support material, which makes supports much less of a headache. Because when you print with it when your parts completed, you can just then submerge it in a bucket of water, and then, after a certain amount of time, the supports are just gone and you’re left with your finished part, but for the majority of us, especially those using hobby level 3d printers, we don’t have the luxury of using PVA. Because we have a single extrusion 3d printer for the majority of us we’re stuck using the same material for our main part, as well as the support or the scaffolding material, which means that it does require a little bit of thought and planning in order to make sure that you have them implemented in a way where it supports your model but doesn’t make it a complete nightmare to remove now. Curro supports have really evolved over the years and for most use cases, if I just use Kira’s default, slicing parameters and their default support settings. I just tell it whether I want the supports from just the platform, or if I want the supports everywhere. And I hit Fleiss. Usually it does a really good job, But there are some times where the predefined supports, or the algorithm generated supports. Just don’t make a whole lot of sense to me Recently When I went to go print this awesome model of Ryuk that was modeled by foetus. Mint, it was a pretty much support list model with the exception of one part under one of his legs that he did supports. Well in Kiera. If I told it to do supports from the platform, it would not get in between his legs since it was within the print, and if I chose to do supports everywhere, it had supports all over the place and sure you can use things like support blockers. Bolton Akira. But in this situation that would have been a really big pain What I ended up doing was using a plug-in that exists for cure That allows you to actually generate custom supports its super nifty and again, although cure does a really good job 9 out of 10 times, if not even more than that, there are times where being able to generate custom supports is incredibly valuable. So in this video. I’m gonna show you guys how to easily install the plugin how to use the plug-in and what a huge difference it made when printing that Ryuk model, this is something that I think is incredibly valuable and a really awesome tool to have in your arsenal of 3d printing tools. I hope you guys are looking forward to the video. Let’s get right into it. So hopping over to Kyra. This is Kyra 4.6.1 you’re gonna head to the top right under the marketplace and scroll down to where it says custom supports that is the custom support plug-in, and if you click on that, just go ahead and click install a window is gonna pop up and just basically prompt you to accept and it will install just about instantly, and once you install, you do need to click the quick. Kyra Button, which will close out of Kyra and reopen it and then it will be activated and the plugin will be available. So this is the model that we’re working with here and this model only needs supports under the right leg. The one that’s actually up at an angle isn’t a steep enough angle to where supports are required, but the other leg on the right side because the leg goes straight out, there’s some area a little small area underneath it where it’s gonna need some supports to help out with the first couple of layers. And so just to show you guys if you hit generate supports and hit everywhere in Kyra and go ahead and hit slice. I just want to show you guys what it outputs automatically. So this is a 23 hour and 19-minute print and it’s using 223 grams. And then if I go to the preview window, you can see exactly where it’s creating support, so it’s creating supports under the entire left leg, the entire right leg under some of the skulls, and yes, you can use support blockers to basically say, do not generate supports here or here or here, but because of how much supports it’s trying to generate that just doesn’t really make a lot of sense and what does make sense is creating a custom support. So if you click on your model on the left window there, there’s the custom support icon which kind of looks like a Tetris piece. You click that, and then go over to your model and click where you want the support to be placed and it’ll create a block now with that block, you can manipulate it just like you would any model and Keira, so this will allow you to scale that block. You can make it, you know, wider or taller, and then you can also use the. Move functionality to move it up or down or wherever you need to, so all you’re gonna do is take a little bit of time and size the support block accordingly. So for me here. I’m just trying to figure out what the correct height is, and I position it by moving it a little bit below the knee. That’s where I really need. The supports to start, and it doesn’t take very long to just get one of these blocks put in place. I think I spent a total of I. Don’t know two to three minutes, just stretching it and moving it around until I was happy with the overall output and again it’s just a little bit of moving around the I guess. Camera angle or the view. So that way you can make sure that you’ve got the block place correctly so here. I’m getting closer to being happy with the finished result, but when I changed the angle, I can clearly see that. The box is not in the middle of the leg, so I’m going ahead and making it a bit smaller and what I’m happy with the width of it. I’m just gonna go ahead and slide it a little bit to the left, which makes it, so it’s completely centered with the leg and the last thing I want to do here is just make it a little bit taller, because if you look on the bottom where the foots at you can see that it’s not fully going down, covering that opening, so that looks pretty good, and I think I’m happy with the end results on this one now. Incurious supports. There’s a bunch of settings that you can choose from so you can activate and deactivate them by clicking on the little gear wheel and then clicking on these boxes to make them pop up. And you’re kind of quick menu now when you’re using custom supports. You actually want to make sure that the generate support box is not checked. However, you do want to check that box while you’re working with. The custom supports because you can change values like support density. So if you want the supports to be a little bit denser, you activate supports, change it to 20 or 30% and then just deactivate it before slicing so that way to only create it only slices for those customs support blocks and Kure doesn’t automatically generate all those additional support supports that you saw previously. So now that you see here, the print’s gonna take 17 hours and 7 minutes compared to 23 hours and 19 minutes and it’s only going to use a hundred ninety two grams of plastic, and as you can see, there is the little box under the right leg that we created, which is so much better and much nicer than what Kira had automatically put, which was just supports everywhere, so I went ahead and printed both of these models out just kind of show you a left and right comparison of what Kira’s default ones look like versus what just placing the custom support looks like, and it made a huge difference. The one with the custom support took two seconds to clean up, while the other one required much more to remove all the different supports that were kind of woven within the legs of the model so again. This is something super easy to do something valuable, and you might not need to use it often, but there are times you will need to use it and it is something that you will. Thank me for knowing if you didn’t know it already. You now know how to do this so anyways. Let me know what you guys think in the comments down below. If this is something that you’ve used before or something that you find valuable that you’ll try out, don’t forget to Like and subscribe for more great videos and make a video every single Saturday, So there’s always new content for you guys to watch and on that note, guys. I look forward to seeing you guys in my next video. This has been Daniel from Modbot and I am out peace guys.