On some 3d prints you want to actually manually place your supports and not put
supports throughout the whole print because that's a lot to remove and a lot
of wasted plastic some of the slicers like simplify 3d or idea maker allow you
to do that to actually put supports where you want it well what about cura
cura lets you do it with a plugin and I'll show you how to use it today's Filament
Friday, this week's filament Friday is brought to you by these patreon
supporters. to demonstrate manual supports in Cura I'm going to use this
iron man shooting statue I found on Thingiverse from user Melic. I loaded it
into cura version 4.3 but I'm going to reduce it down to 50% of its original
size I'm also going to turn it 45 degrees this will make it easier to put
manual supports where I want them on this model once it's sliced here's the
model I'm going to scroll down there's three areas that I think it needs
supports one under the hand here another one here between the legs and I'm not
going to comment and what that looks like and also under the arm here where
you see these little islands of plastic those need supports. the rest of this
model I think will print without supports pretty cleanly so I'm gonna
enable supports I'm gonna set it to everywhere and then these are my
standard settings 45 degrees it won't go through them again I did in a previous
video but here's the supports all over the place it's just everywhere in this
model it's going to take a lot longer to print and use a lot more plastic and a
lot more cleanup so I don't want to do this if I don't have to so let me change
the settings and show you one other option they give you which is touching
the build plate now will this fix it no because all it does is what's touching
the build plate which is the hand here you'll go straight down the build plate
everything else is off the platform so all the areas that I wanted to support
aren't supported a way around that within cura is the support blocker what
it does is allow you to put these blocks all over the print and wherever that
block is it will not put supports now it's just like an STL file you can
resize it move it so you position it where you don't want
supports and then when you do supports and I'll change this back
to everywhere where that block is it won't print supports so you can see the
head is clean so what you have to do is put these blocks all over your print or
you don't want supports there's another option instead of putting blocks where
you don't want supports how about putting blocks where you do want
supports that's what custom supports does but this isn't standard in cura
you have to load it from the market place so go up to market place scroll
down to custom supports this is a plugin click on install and then you have to
click on their license agreement and then quit cura and restart it now will
show up on the Left menu so you click on your model and you click on custom
supports and then you place the blocks where you want support so here's the
locations that I designated I'll put blocks in each one of these then you
size them and reposition them the same way I did the support blocker so let me
just show you on the hand here I'll do it real quick so I up size it to 400%
then I slid it so is centered to the hand down sized it to 300% and then
repositioned it so it touched all the points that I want the supports to touch
and here's the trick you don't check the generate support box and then it'll only
generate supports where those blocks were like here on the hand that I just
showed you positioned so now I'll scroll down and you can see I have very dense
supports but I did that so I can get the real tiny pieces of the hand and then as
I scroll up this thing will form right around the hand supporting where it
needs to like the little shield that's outside the hand ironically if you want
to change those support settings you have to enable support so the menu shows
up and then you can change things like support density I had it at 80 I'll
change it back to 60 and then also the support interface for the top and bottom
I took that off and this is why because when I had that enabled it was missing
the tiny piece of the finger and I like the more dense 80 percent versus a 60
percent so I set those back and but here it is without the interface and it looks
much smoother so now I need to reposition the center one and also the
ones under the arms so let me just show you I already did
and here's the finished product so here's the blocks and when I slice it it
gives me the supports I want that a little islands under the arm are taken
care of and in here in the center it's handled and then also on the hand it's
just like I showed you before I didn't change that but I did set it back to the
80% now I forgot I actually reduced it down
to 40% of the original size before I printed because I wanted to try smaller
but look at the time it's a little over three hours three and a half hours and
five hours and ten minutes if I do the full supports so not only do you save
you know plastic and removal time but you actually save print time using this
as well so to me there's a lot of advantages to
using these manual supports here's a quick time-lapse of it being printed I
use atomic filaments candy-apple golden pearl filament it looks really good here
on Iron Man overall it's a decent print it's a point to layer height 25% infill
and I printed at a 50 millimeters per second using my profiles so overall not
too bad now let's see how hard it is to remove these supports actually because
they're solid I could just twist them and as long as I don't break that hand
that should work pretty well so I kept twisting until I felt it loosen and then
I could just pull it right off the top of it seemed really smooth the hand came
out good the fingers look really good the shield next to the hand not too bad
now I needed to do the arm this one was a little bit tougher I had to keep
wiggling back and forth of different points I could feel it breaking away but
I figured if I just keep going back and forth it should work and finally once I
did it from the center it popped and when I pulled it off the top if it
looked good and the underneath the arm not too bad a little bit of cleanup
might be needed you can see a little bit of sagging but overall pretty good
support structure this middle section was messing with me it just got breaking
into smaller and smaller pieces I'm not even going to go down that road so I
finally got the supports off and then I could look over this model there were a
few spots that probably could have used supports but overall I think this came
out really good if you haven't tried custom supports I
highly suggest you try it out give me your honest opinion in the comments
below and if you don't like it just uninstall it you don't have to keep the
plug-in in a previous video I showed my support settings and also tree supports
I'll link to that at the end of this video but this manual support feature
that's a really nice addition to the support within cura this isn't my best
print and there's a little bit of cleanup for the supports word but it's a
lot less cleanup than if I would just done the overall supports now is it as
good as say what's in simplify3d or ideamaker or maybe some other slicer I
don't know that's up to you guys to judge but if you're a cura user I really