X/Y Support Distance Priority

When printing with soluble support is is important to use 0 as your z support distance and x/y support distance to get good quality suppported surfaces. But, when printing using soluble support only for interface layers, the x/y clearance still must be maintained so that the support structure doesn’t touch the model. In this case, if an arch or filet is being supported, the x/y distance will keep the curved surface from being properly supported. Cura (and I think Prusa) has an option to override this special case called “Z overrides X/Y.”

In Bambu Studio (and OrcaSlicer) there is no way to override the X/Y Support Distance in cases where curved surfaces need to be supported. This makes it impossible to properly support a filet or other arch while also maintaining an X/Y support distance for the rest of the print.

In Cura, you can see the behavior when “Z overrides x/y” is selected. The fillet is properly supported.

In Bambu Studio, without this option the filet is not supported. In order to support the fillet, the x/y distance must be reduced to 0, in which case the support infill will also bond to the verticals of the part, making soluble support interfaces impossible to use. Instead the entire support must be soluble which results in wasting expensive support filament and requiring an order of magnitude more filament changes.