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To reiterate my point that you shouldn’t be afraid of supports. Look at the number of supports on this build plate, and then look at the finished model. I didn’t post process or clean the model up in any way. I just removed supports, glued a few of the parts together, and took a picture.
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Something to keep in mind is that FDM and Resin printing is _very_ different. A print that may not require supports on an FDM printer may need supports on a resin printer. The opposite can also be true.
With that said, what supports you need, and how many, depends a lot on the model and a lot on the orientation on the build plate. If you have good resin, and your printer calibrated decently, then you shouldn’t fear supports because most will easily break away with little to no visible marks. Brittle resin, or improper calibration, will leave lots of circular scars (cavities) when removing support, so be mindful of your materials and setup.
Is this a tree canopy from PrintableScenery, or one freely available that you could provide a link to?
I don’t have experience with this particular printer, but from the looks of it, its not much different in principle or operation than any of the other MSLA printers (Elegoo, Anycubic, SL1, etc…)
In general I would say they are pretty straight forward to use, but they can be messy.
I would recommend buying a “lunch tray” like this:
A pickle container like this:
If you have an FDM I recommend printing:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3841061
and
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3240821
(You will need a UV lamp for that ^)Lychee Slicer is a pretty good slicer (if somewhat slow); however its always-online-phone-home and subscription service put it firmly in the “I’ll pass” category. Thankfully the more recent versions of Chitubox (1.8.1) have solved many of its problems (and as far as I can tell, its stability issues), though its still not that great at hollowing compared to Prusa.
I do have a larger build plate printer that I can run tests on; that being said I would love to have others contribute to this document.
I am learning as I go, and new slicer features can make some of the tips/tricks obsolete. If you have anything you would like to add or correct, please feel free to do so.
Ok, I think I see the problem. This is something you have to watch out for, even more so with Chitubox.
In this model when you hollow it out, there are actually small pockets that hollow out that are not connected to the main section, this means that they are closed sections.
The most important ones are on the bottom (see Hollow1 and Hollow3). You can solve these by putting some horizontal holes (see Hollow2).
Unfortunately there are also some very tiny pockets that you can’t really drain (because you can’t really poke a hole there). (see Hollow4). For this I would try hollowing in PrusaSlicer instead, since it will try and not hollow out these tiny spaces.
If there are _any_ closed sections that are hollowed out, those sections cannot drain and the resin that gets trapped in them will eventually cause enough pressure to bust open any print.
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In an effort to avoid scraping utilities: Look at my profile name (click on my profile, the part after the @) and add @gmail.com.
One of the purposes of this document (and this topic) is to have a good place for trouble shooting and knowledge gathering. I would love to help you figureout why your parts are splitting. If you could upload photos (and potentially email me your saved Chitubox project file, exactly as you have it, supports and all) I can do my best to help.
I will say that 100% of the time I have had cracking it has exclusively been because of the lack of drainage. Usually tiny little pockets that Chitubox hollows when it shouldn’t. I have cured the walls and floors for up to 8 hours in front of a UV lamp (I forget its curing sometimes….); and while they did yellow quite a bit, they never once cracked.
You don’t really have a choice for slicers. Typically a resin printer has its own custom slicer (like Prusa), or they have worked with Chitubox to add support for their printer to that slicer. With the Phrozen Sonic Mini its the latter case, you will use Chitubox (as most resin printers do).
Unfortunately Chitubox is not the best slicer, or even comparable. Its buggy, it crashes a lot, and the support generation is sub-par (requiring a lot of manual intervention).
Fortunately there is a solution to (most) of those issues and that is to use Prusa Slicer. Pretend you have an SL1. Position your model, hollow it, drill holes, and generate supports. From there you can “Export the plate as STL including supports” and then load that STL into Chitubox and just slice it. I would change the Pad Wall Slope setting in PrusaSlicer from 90 to 45 though, this will make removing your prints 10x easier.
A lot of the information in the document will need to be updated when the resin slicers eventually support infill. Chitubox is one of the few that already supports this but you can’t make drain holes when you hollow with infill (which makes infill 100% useless).
That was my original use case for my resin printer too, but the first time I held a E_TRP_Stone_Floor printed on an FDM in one hand, and one printed on a resin printer in the other, I knew I could never print them on FDM again. So I set out to figure out what the actual cost is, and what the best settings are to get the most out of it.
I am glad that you find it useful! I am trying to make resin printing less of a mystery and at the same time gather feedback and tips from other users.
Keep in mind that the Phrozon Sonic Mini has a slightly smaller build area than your common MSLA printer so there might be some larger items (like the QC or G walls) that won’t fit or will require different positioning.
