Question about changing how support material works

[nrbelk]

I am printing an item that uses a lot of little "bars" spaced about 2.5mm from each other. It will act as a barrier that small gravel can't pass but water can.

Anyways, I printed it horizontally to keep it closer to the warm bed to help avoid cracking/splitting issues (it would otherwise be 5" tall).

When I setup the support material (lines, 2.5mm separation) and look at the layer view, it is making them by zigzagging for each small bar. The printing time for this small piece would probably but cut in half if I could just tell it to print the lines in that entire area instead of zigzagging for each bar.

I couldn't figure out how to do this or something like that. Is there something I can do?

[Tincho85]

Use a different slicing software. When I have to print something with lots of supports, I use Cura. It handles them they way you are asking.

[marcom]

Hi, nr - Couple of things to try:

- First, are you sure you need support? Some small structures can get away without support.

- If not, can you redesign the part to avoid using support? E.g., if you are doing circular bars, can you do rectangular bars that won't need support instead? (not sure if this is feasible since I don't know what the part looks like)

- If I am picturing what you wrote correctly, and you are using MatterControl, try changing the "Infill Angle" setting to see if you can change from zigzag. I believe the default is 45 degrees, try 0 or 90 (check the preview to see which one gives you the right orientation)

- Finally, if you need more control you can try a different slicer like Slic3r (free) or Simplify3D ($). The nice thing about S3D is that it has some more control over support than others.

Hope this helps. If you have a picture of the part design (or at least the problematic area) maybe I or others can help further.

[bot]

If you were using simplify3d, you could expand the support by 1.25mm to make it all one contiguous region.