I’m trying to figure out why this keeps happening with all of my prints. Whenever a support touches the model, it distorts and looks “unraveled” for lack of a better term. I’m using stock settings. Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a way to fix?
One of the best solutions here is to use a different filament type to support, so they don’t adhere to each other the same way. IE: PLA supports for PETG prints and vice versa.
That might be a bit too steep of a learning curve for someone new to 3d printing.
@vegetable.nine What you’re seeing is pretty normal. Unfortunately, the areas over support will never be perfect. Stock settings for support have a setting called “Top interface spacing” which is a space between the support and the model so that the support is able to be removed easily. You can play with the different support settings and you might be able to tweak it to get a better result. The wiki page has information about all the settings.
What kind of supports are you using. If you’re using the stock setting, for organic shapes you may find that tree support will work better. I’ve had good luck with Hybrid tree support when printing curvy shapes but there is a limit.
Here a two videos to get up to speed quick.
This one is a very advanced topic that covers painting on supports manually but sometimes, its the right tool to use.
Also, I couldn’t help notice that it looks like you’re using 0.28 layer height. Have you tried using the variable layer height tool? Or simply change the layer height to 0.20 or lower for the entire print? If you’re new to 3d Printing it can be tricky to learn how to use at first but it’s worth the effort. Put simply, it will allow you to paint varying layer heights in regions of the print that are giving you trouble like you describe. The tool has the added benefit of speeding up the print in places that are just straight vertical lines but allowing slowing down and printing finer layers were needed such as on curves.
If you do use variable layer height, you’ll want to verify that the layers you micro-managed in that process were in fact executed in the slice. Most tutorials skip over this very important point. How you do that is as follows:
Here’s a quick walk-through of the menus.
After you click on the region you want to change the layer height. You can also use “adaptive” but then it will automatically adjust everything. In this example, I clicked on the ribbon on the right.(Covered in the video linked above)
And after you slice the plate, this is what it looks like when you click the drop-down menu and select Layer Height. Layer Type is the default so remember to change it.
This is extremely informative! Thank you!
An added benefit of the variable layer height is that the amount of thermal energy in the layer can be much reduced, making cooling and hence solidification much quicker.
In fact, to further aid cooling you may want to lower printing speeds. Bambu sells their printers for their speed but for me, a hobbyist, it is really their printers stiffness and accuracy that is making all the difference.
You may also want to look at water soluble filaments for support interfaces in the future. While I failed miserably with PVA on my past Tarantula, and hence did not try it on the X1C, Fiberlogy’s BVOH is working very well for me in combination with the variable layer height. It allows setting the z-distance to 0 without having to worry about post-processing.
