I know I’ve done this before, but I cannot do it today…
Tall thin models can wobble back and forth as the upper layers are printed.
In the past, I have manually painted supports at a few spots on the vertical sides. Just little “dots”, part way up the side. Then tree supports did not actually touch the model (support x/y distance very small), but stabilized it and restricted movement if it was pulled to the side by the moving nozzle.
Today, I cannot get Studio (or OrcaSlicer) to generate supports on (or near) a vertical surface. I think I used default support distances and angles in the past, but I’ve tried adjusting most of the support options with no success. Am I missing something obvious, or did the slicers change since I did this last?
The menu hasn’t changed but I am not seeing supports I expect.
I found an old post of mine with an example. A tall thin tube, which I actually printed with two supports on opposite sides to keep it steady:
I was able to reproduce this model with supports on 2 or 3 sides again today.
But then I created a “cube”, with a 3mm x15mm base, 100mm tall.
I can paint supports anywhere on any side or corner, but there are no supports after slicing.
I also made the shape 200mm high, still no support generated.
I added the tall tube to the plate with the “cube”, the tube had supports, the cube did not.
This is indeed a mystery and I’m afraid, I’m stumped.
The only thing that I can think of that might explain this is if your supports are too thin for the slicer to reach. The only place I can think of where one might experiment with changes is in this section under supports.
Perhaps increasing some of the diameters might get the slicer to behave a different way.
I’m assuming you already tried organic manual supports and let me guess, the slicer ignored you. That’s because based on your screengrab, it looks like your fin is perfectly vertical. The slicer ignores this because it thinks that a vertical fin doesn’t need support.
Mind you, there may be a better way but this is the one I used. Note that it only works for the side being pulled on by gravity and it may distort other parts of your model. But at list for your fin, supports will be forced to print.
So here’s one way I used to get around this.
Take the whole model and use the rotate tool to move the model off it’s vertical access by just a small amount. This will force the slicer to work for you not against you.
Then you set the support to Tree(manual) and Organic.
Scroll down and set the tree support branch distance to some value, I chose 5 but you want it to stand some distance away from the fin for easier detachment.
You are going to have to experiment and I might suggest either cutting your model so that you don’t waste filament and have quicker prints therefore more opportunity for trial and error.
I acknowledge that is isn’t precisely what you want but it’s the quick version. There is another method that is more complicated. If this suggested doesn’t work, let us know and I’ll try to post a tutorial of how do achieve model support by engineering artificial supports using primitives.
