Regarding your last point, avoiding support is the best strategy, I have had so many problems with removing support I have an aversion to support material at all! One thing not to be afraid of is to design your part as mutiple parts that screw, glue, or clip together. Its tempting to try to make it print out all as one part, but sometimes you can make a nicer looking part as multiple pieces. This also means that making minor changes means you can just reprint one or two pieces rather than the whole thing, and it also opens the opportunity to make your part multi-colour if the aesthetic is important and you don't have a printer with multiple extruders.

Super close to 1 mil Angus!! Very happy for you man, thank you for all the help over the last few years. I started up a 3DP Shop thanks to some of your help. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help in the future.

I've always been lazy and just use simplify 3D as much as version 5 craziness angered me version 4 just works 99% of the time

Cura also has settings for interface layers and some small adjustments pay huge dividends (included my settings). Would be interested to see a follow-up with support interface enabled. Love your vids Angus! Keep it up! Awesome resource for the community. My settings: Tree supports, touching build plate 40deg branch angle 0% density 1 support wall line Enable support brim w/3mm width .2mm support z distance .4mm support top distance ⭐️enable support interface ⭐️enable support floor ⭐️enable support roof ⭐️ .12mm interface resolution ⭐️ 100% interface density ⭐️ concentric interface pattern

Bambu studio sets the Z distance between tree support and model to 0 (if you click yes when choosing tree support). Maybe that's why they were stuck. I'm not sure the other slicers do that.

TL;DR: "Preferences" -> "Configure Cura" -> "General" -> untick "Automatically drop models to the build plate" Really quick tip for anybody getting angry at Cura for dropping the parts to the build plate automatically (as I was before I looked at the settings): There's an option in the menu bar, "Preferences" -> "Configure Cura". It should start you out on the General tab (otherwise switch to it) and under the heading "Viewport behavior" there should be a checkbox for "Automatically drop models to the build plate". Uncheck that if you don't want the lowest part of your model to touch the build plate (i.e. hang it in midair to generate supports underneath). Extra tip: if you don't want to switch that option on and off all the time, you can manually drop the model by selecting it, using the "Move" tool (or pressing 'T' ) and setting the z value to exactly 0. Hope this helps somebody :)

CONGRATS ON ONE MILLION!! I've been here since 800k, and although it has only been 4 or 5 months (I think), I have really enjoyed seeing you grow. Thanks for always sharing so much information, and inspiring me to get a 3d printer, which I now have. Thanks for inspiring others, too. I think you really have achieved empowering creativity through technology. Good job, Angus, and congratulations once again!!!

Haircut looks great, Angus!

As somebody who has only been doing 3-D printing for about a month, videos like this are still helpful. I’ve had a few prints so far where I overestimated the support I would need and ended up breaking parts of the print or making them impossible to reach, The worst one of which took almost 2 days to print.

Very interesting video. Did Cura’s supports fall more in line with Prusa’s if you inverted the angle? As I’m sure you’re aware, the reference is swapped compared to Prusa Slocer. For example, 30 degrees in Prusa is 60 degrees in Cura. Love the videos. Keep up the great work!

I bought PC parts from microcenter yesterday and built a new rig. Super easy and within $20 of the best prices I could find online. Love it there

Angus, try the snug supports in prusaslicer. They are way easier to remove and use less material.

As a beginner to 3d printing this is was incredibly helpful. Perhaps as a part 2 you can also include information and advice on model placement and orientation to help with better print quality and support use. For instance, you mentioned the sharp downward pointing angle and how it must have support. I would assume something like that could be greatly assisted with rotating the model. Placement and orientation is definitely an area I find to be tricky at times, especially when I need t set supports.

Hello Angus, I wanted to message you in anticipation of you crossing the 1 million subscriber marker on KZfaq. Whether it’s a big deal for you or not, it’s a very large accomplishment and you have earned it. Congratulations and best wishes. I loved the video too, found the same results with Bambu slicer. Took me a while to figure out that the threshold angle is backwards on that program haha.

Love your vids! I'm very exited to finish this one! Also your so close to one million! I will be happy to see my favorite youtube to hit that milestone! Nice haircut btw!

Thanks for this video Angus! I think it's a great video for beginners and refresher for people who have been printing for a while! Heck, I even learned something today too! Keep up the great work man!

I'm at the point where I'm exclusively using my Bambu printer and I do find their supports very easy to work with. I experimented with printing a 1:285 scale Zeta shuttle, from Rogue One, using a 0.2mm nozzle - and was able to get the supports off the less-than-a-mm-thick laser cannons without destroying them! I had to be very careful of course, but it worked. I agree that the tree supports aren't awesome, though; and if aesthetics matter you'll want to try and make the supported surface the less visible one. I think of BaSl's supports as better than PrSl's, but I suspect that's more to do with the printer itself than the slicer proper, since my experience with Prusa Slicer's supports was all on an Ender 5. So, thank you for including them in this! And while I knew what changing the overhang angle did, I'd never figured out when I'd *want* to do that, so thank you for the mini tutorial there, as well.

Very nice! It remembers me the old days of 3D printing, when you could find models with "baked in supports". It was a life saver as most support generation was really disastrous back then.

Excellent overview man and I really love that you encourage people to create designs that don't need support when they can at the end. Its a good habit to get into especially when you start getting more and more into running production/ batches with your machines. 💪🏼

Thank you for everything you do for the 3D Printing community Angus.

Amazing video again Angus. What a wonderful guide. Loved it. Thanks for putting it together!

Designing parts that don't need support is a challenge I enjoy. Especially TPU when you can use its flexibility to create living hinges in the print, giving it some origami traits. One of my designs needed support so I made the pieces myself and put them into the design because I didn't trust the slicers to make them. It works well, the 3 support pieces easily snap off after printing, helping ensure the end users get perfect prints each time.

I'm just getting back into 3-D printing after a bit of a hiatus, So videos like these are incredibly helpful!

Im new to printing but ive been using paint on supports with great success so far

I've been splitting PLA models in my slicer to prevent use of supports, then using dichloromethane to weld them together. The joints are very, very strong and you need microscopic amounts of solvent so it's not a hazard.

I am surprised you didn't include Simplify3D v5 in the list. S3D v4 had some of the best supports for a very long time and I was wondering if they had gotten any better. I am fully on PrusaSlicer now but I print a lot of things with supports and that may have made v5 worth the money.

Another option I almost always change in PrusaSlicer when I need support is Style: Grid to Snug. I find this support generation to create less waste, is easier to remove, and fails less often.

These are my favorite types of video, your other common slicer settings video has saved me so much time

That's a useful overview, Angus! Amount of flags and sliders may repel from exploring, especially if you only see the results in 3 hours. Knowing whats important and what can you achieve helps a lot

I appreciate all of your videos for help, as for this one I feel that the settings don't translate exactly to cura 1 to 1 so as a beginner it's hard to know what to change, it would be cool to have a short video going into the settings of each slicer showing what to change.. again love the videos thank you for all your help!

I think it's important to know that the major thing that controls the angle of overhang that can be printed unsupported is the ratio of the layer height to the line width (nozzle size) Use a 0.8 nozzle with a 0.08 layer height, you'd be shocked now much hang-out you can get away with. I regularly choose thinner layer heights when I want to avoid using supports.

Congratulation for 1MILION Subscribers. Keep it up man.

Congrats on 1,000,000 subscribers! 🥳

As an end user, I feel like the Voron team has mastered the "design your parts with no supports" philosophy, going as far as designing built-in brides and parts that are meant to break away or be cut away after the print is done. Truly one of my best printing experience

Since this is all needed regardless of gravity orientation (or gravity at all), I'd suggest that it's not a support at all, but a platform. Maybe you'd call it semantics, but a support is to resist gravity, where as a platform provides a surface to print against, which sounds like it's more technically correct. The best kind of correct.

I've used your link for designing support into the model many times. Not just designing the support in, but also adding it later in the program of choice. It's become a regular answer for me to post to StackExchange's 3D printing section. I'll have to add a suggestion for readers to the SE to subscribe and get you over the million subscriber mark.

If you can use soluble support then a trick you can use to cut down the cost (soluble is very expensive) is to print your model in the base filament and only print the interface layers with soluble. This has a side benefit of speeding up your print because you are not doing head changes for every layer.

back when I was using ideamaker I remember that the big "selling point" was the amount of manual control you had over the print result. So I think it's fair to assume ideamaker is designed in a way that it assumes the user will place manual supports as the UI for them is pretty well made.

When I print D&D minis, I still use MeshMixer, its supports work very well for them. For everything else, I'm still wrestling with Cura to find something that works for most of my models...

Congrats on the 1,000,000 subs!!!

Meshmixer's tree supports reign supreme still. What an unrealized gem. On average uses half the material and they come off so nicely.

Congratulations on achieving 1M subscribers. It's amazing. Well done.

Great video. Ideamaker allows you to manually add custom supports which might address that downward pointy part.

Hey dude, I am new in 3D printing and watch your video's, they are great and really helpful, besides that your a great guy, have a nice day 🙂

I literally searched for a video like this but couldn't find it. But now i see this, great.

IdeaMaker you can add manual supports to specifically cradle and support sharp points like the one in your maker coin.

I’m surprised no slicer is using local adaptive layer height to increase the printable overhang angle. It shouldn’t be that difficult to have it print the outer edge in two or more layers, and then the rest of the layer at ”normal” layer height. That way you can get away with really steep angles.

Success with supports for quality and ease of removal relies partially on layer height of the print and the z height gap between the print and the model. There's a ton of power in Cura for playing with this and some tuning with z distance, support interface density, and even x y distance can save a ton of print time, material, and cleanup effort. It seems like you talked about tuning in Prusaslicer but didn't bother to tune the support settings in Cura causing your supports to be more difficult to remove with Cura than it needed to. There's also plugins like manual cylindrical supports that can target the areas specifically needing supports too.

There is an option (gradual support infill steps) in Cura to makes the support more dense a few millimeters below it touches the model. It gives much better results without wasting too much material or time.

I bought my first printer ( Anet A8 ) after seeing your video ( many moon ago ) I bought Simplified 3D after seeing your video iI now have S3D v 5.01 and i wont change because i can easily predict my result everytime I think that you should have include it into your test !

Thank you so much, very good explanation

Congrats on 999k subscribers, I can’t wait to see you make it to 1 mil

Great video and I appreciate your dive into the different slicers! I really enjoy using Bambu studio for generating tree supports. At 14:13, it shows your Top Z-distance set to 0 mm. As of course you're aware, increasing this distance even slightly will allow you to remove the support material more easily instead of directly fusing it to the support layer. 0.2mm is the default distance and allows removal. If you want the 0mm distance, a support-specific print material such as Bambu's Support W (printing with multi-filament such as Bambu's AMS) is a great option as it does not lend itself easily to weld to the printed PLA.

Great content, really good info, thanks!

I've always been impressed with the support material in the Zortrax Z-Suite slicer. It seems to leave the nicest surfaces of the slicers I've used while still being easy to remove.

Autodesk Fusion 360 actually has some pretty interesting support features. They might be more suited to SLA than FFF, but it's worth a look.

Impressive video as always Thanks for sharing your work with all of us:-)

Omg hello Angus. Fellow Aussie here. Huge fan of ur vids and really find ur advice helpful. Thank you so much for providing these videos. They help me with my prints a lot.

For me Cura has the best supports. I really tried using Prusa/SuperSlicer because everybody is superhyped about those. They are good but not for me I think. Cura's standard settings for supports are bad. With little tweaking the regular tree support is ok (sometimes doing crazy stuff) but the new christmass beta is amazing without any adjustment.

I see that LTT shirt. I picked up the $100 ender 3 from Micro Center and I've been really happy with it.

Great video! Another thing that helps a lot is the "snug" setting for PrusaSlicer, it saves a lot of print time and material. (Perfect timing 2.6 alfa is released the same weekend as this video😂)

Been using Cura trees for a while, and when you play with density and size to get light support. And good interface with the part.

Great topic, i just started and your guidance is appreciated!

Oh hey I also printed that Egyptian cat statue. But I printed it on its side with supports because I knew I was gonna file it afterwards to make it look like stone. Worked really well though!

12:50 LOL here we are 3 days later and PrusaSlicer 2.6.0-alpha2 is out, "It brings the most anticipated Organic supports..."

i do love the xmas alpha cura trees.... its been wonderful for me so far with lots of tweaking

Microcenter is an unbelievable place that is so widely unknown still it seems like. I am so grateful i live 20 minutes away from one. It's heaven on earth

Re: the tree support in cura I had the same issue with single point contacts and pushed the 'Support floor density' up to 50% and used the support mod to add traditional support towers with the tree support

Check out the “snug” support option in PrusaSlicer. Way better than their original supports. I’m surprised they have not made it the default.

I have been using IdeaMaker for a little over a year now and its supports have been the best compared when I used Cura and Prusa Slicer.

I have been playing with Cura's tree supports in the alpha release. I had quite a few failures until i realised that it doesn;t cap off the supports by default. So you can end up with a tall support building up fine but because there was no top on it the thing it was meant to be supporting fails. There is the option to include a top but you need to make sure there is some infil in the supports otherwise there is nothign to build the top on.

Love the video Angus. It would be awesome with your new partnership with Microcenter to test the real differences between their PLA, PLA Plus, PLA Pro, Tough PLA, etc. They have unfortunately saturated their own lineup with confusing products without a clear indication of the actual differences beyond marketing buzzwords. Even their PETG has PETG Plus and no clear distinction in the description.

I can always turn to your chanel for good reliable answers

Have you tried PrusaSlicer's Snug supports? It's basically the same support columns, but they keep the supports a lot closer to the model and the interface layer is more cradle-like. I've gotten better surface finish with it and often it's easier to remove. Also, the Cura, PrusaSlicer 2.6 (when it comes out), and probably Bambu Slicer* all base their supports off a fork of Cura's tree supports. Thomas Rahm forked Cura, did a bunch of the work, the Cura and Prusa teams ended up working with them on the supports and are integrating it into their own slicers. Prusa said that their team came down with flu/*vid/etc. late December and they wouldn't get an alpha out in time. *Bambu indicated they found the supports from Cura, so I assume they are also using the same support setup, maybe with different set of settings.

Around 11:53 you mention printing stands out of support structures only. I've been doing some explorations lately too, and I'm finding I can make remarkably good filter structures by setting my top and bottom thickness to zero, and playing with infill settings and wall thicknesses. It's remarkably accurate.

Man I wish I was closer than 8 hours away from a microcenter

Nice to see someone include ideamaker. I like the approach in this slicer, although they probably need more feedback from big makers to improve what they have.

Ty, This will help me so much :)

1 million wohooo congrats!!!

Angus is adorable. What a smile :)

Worth it for the opening joke alone!😂

I can’t wait for the newest release of Prusa slicer…. Arachne was a big upgrade, and tree supports are going to be an equal step up.

One thing that drives me crazy is how some slicers use the support degrees values % differently. 30% vs 70%

CONGRATS ON 1MILLLL!!!!!

By far, the absolute best support I have ever seen for fdm is the tree supports in the flashforge oem slicer. I really don't know how they do it, but they come out better than any other fdm tree supports I have seen

I've used Cura's standard supports in conjunction with the support enforcer/blocker mod (one of them is official Cura, the other isn't, I forget which) mainly through a process of elimination. The dual extrusion printer we have _really_ doesn't like the GCode from Slic3r lineage programs for some reason, and IdeaMaker's supports were just _awful._ I've had some pretty decent results (as in, the workshop said "Yep we can use this in production") when I used the breakaway support material E3D sold a while back but is now discontinued. It stuck to ABS _just_ enough to support it, but it wouldn't weld to it like HIPS would if it's set to the same distance. It's a total pain when it's encased by the model, of course, and I've reminded the CAD guys on a few occasions to not do that. We have a couple of Markforged Onyx Ones now, and although I wish Eiger had more features and avoided stupid things like creating tiny support towers, it's a really solid package. Sometimes you get these slinky or accordion like things when you peel off the supports.

New haircut? Looks great. Good supports are critical for almost every form of 3D printing - thanks!

curas support interface gap is tied to layer height too. makes it hard to get supports to both support the print and release well. PrusaSlicer's supports are definitely my preference.

Never have been this early to a maker muse video,guess i stayed too late up tonight haha nice video as always i like tree support on cura

You need to create a short just for the "Print a stand" tip as it is a great bit of lateral thinking.

The second best option is to build the supports into the model.

I think the Bambu print's supports actually resulted in a better quality final model once you pried it all off. The lines and integrity of the coin surface looked a lot better. I don't mind putting a little work into cleaning it up if it makes the end model better.

I wish their was a microcenter in utah

PrusaSlicer just announced "organic supports" (their implementation of tree supports) and improved automatic detection of areas that actually need support, for the upcoming PrusaSlicer 2.6 (the alpha is already available).

Nice. I need to make my video of my support system. All I will say is I had to print an item which was 969 grams, and CURA wanted to use over 350 grams of support, (I only wanted to use 1 x 1KG spool) and I did supports in 32 grams and had better results.

No discussion on SNUG vs standard supports in PrusaSlicer? SNUG supports are a game changer 😮

Disappointed that Flashprint slicer was not included in this video. The slicer doesn’t have the amount of options that Cura and other slicers have but it does have 2 things that I find very convenient. The supports come in two types: linear and tree. Automatic generation of both is available including options to do supports touching platform only and overhang angles. Several options for building the supports are available such as thickness, distance from model, etc. But this slicer has a very convenient feature in the support generating simulation. You can edit the supports! You can automatically generate the supports in the simulation and if there are weak supports in an area, you can add extra. Or you can remove supports that you didn’t want. Or you can bypass the auto generation altogether and put supports where you want them. This slicer also has the option for hexagonal infill which I find to be very strong. Not sure if other slicers have that. I know Cura doesn’t. The cons are that this slicer is only for certain printers and although you can edit the specific code out of the file, you run the code on other printers at your own risk. Despite the limitations in the slicing options (some very frustrating), I’ve had better prints from this slicer than Cura, however, I haven’t used this slicer on my other printers so the performance could be printer related and not slicer related. I’ve definitely had better support generation from Flashprint.

Using tree supports on the Bambo X1 work incredibly in my opinion. Had the X1 for just a few weeks, but I will probably never use any other support on this printer. I thought the tree supports in their slicer were one of the greatest benefits!

PrusaSlicer 2.6a1 was released just before your video was published, of course :)

In my case Ideamaker detected the sharp corner and gave it a support at the bottom of this corner