Specifying FDM supports

High-end FDM printers often use a separate material or a higher filling level, or both, for their supports. Here's how you set them up.

Updated over a week ago

As DigiFabster slowly moves upmarket, so do our calculation templates. Specifying FDM supports is just another example. 

If you start to set up a new FDM material now (or open an existing one) you will notice there are three new fields:

  1. Filling level of support: by default, this is 15%, so roughly 15 percent of the space taken up by supports is filled with support material. For most printers this is enough, but should you have noticed that DigiFabster always underestimates support material volume, then this is where you can tweak it. 

  2. This is for those printers that use two different materials at once: one material for the model itself, and a, usually soluble, second material for the supports. You can set up the second material, which is used for the supports, here: First specify the density, e.g. PVA 1,3 gr/cm3.

  3. Here you specify the price for the support material per gram. 

2 and 3 are interconnected, they need both to be filled out to function correctly, 1 can function autonomously.
If you use the same material for model and support, please copy/paste from the model material. 

That's it, hope it helps :-)

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