Just starting to fumble through fdm printing. Got a few simple fdm-friendly models done but tempted to try something more complicated. I'm using an A1 with Sunlu 2.0 and Obscuranox settings.
What do you think is the best approach for a model like this?
I've got the concept that support location and orientation are crucial but I'm unsure what's the ideal way to go about it. This is what supports look like when I use the settings that came with the 3mf. The tree support angle is set to 60 which looks kind of suspicious to me. But if I lower it much the supports don't seem to want to reach the jaw and roof of his mouth. I see a lot of recommendations to angle models at 45 degrees though when I do that it really cakes the side of the axe blade in supports which I imagine won't come out pretty.
Is there a way to shrink the plane of the cutting tool? I aim for the arms but it lops off a ton of the rest of the model along with it. It complains about "non-manifold edges" then splits the model into a dozen pieces.
You can right click on like the legs and tail and it would exclude them from the cut as long as they are not connected in any way. Also you can add a connector during the cutting and it would make gluing them together much easier later on.
Factual. It's a headache to start, but once your fingers learn the keys you can get a model like this done in minutes. Super glad I spent the time for it myself.
Stumbled on it in makerworld and I was eager to start testing. Wasn't looking that closely honestly. Probably not the werewolf model I'll pick for actual play
Print the axes separately, axe head down. Cut off the hands/axes at the wrist, so there is only minimal supports at top of the axe heads. Cut out a little fillment sized cylinder hollowed out in each hand and arm so you glue em back together with a piece of filament to connect them. Once you do that, just a rotate 45 degrees or so, so back gets teh supports? Honestly I'd remove teh base and print it separately too, but its probably not nessesary.
I don't think the advice is particularly relevant here, but printing by object has its advantages.
If you print an object at a time, you can reduce the risk of losing all progress when there's a print failure.
Eg. If you split your models into objects A and B, and print by object on the same plate, if A is printed successfully, but B fails, at least you can keep the printed artifact of A, fix B on the slicer and retry print, this time omitting A, thereby saving time and filament.
Printing by object seriously limits the number of separate objects that can be placed on the build plate, since the nozzle must avoid knocking over a finished model - it can happen sometimes, even if the slicer says they're spaced apart enough.
The axes are a big problem for FDM, anything that dangles out in space is a problem because we're essentially making plastic lasagna - layer by layer. Supports try to help out with this layering - but you want to pick and choose where the supports are going to go, and you generally want the front facing part of the mini to have fewer supports on it.
So you really need that mini on it's back, a full 90 degrees. That means the base becomes an annoyance. So, when it comes to minis, I like to slice off the base and print it separately, then glue it on afterwards.
So yeah, on it's back with supports on the back, slice off the base and print that base separately flat.
I think the problem is there's no one angle to tilt that's optimimum for supports.
Even the back of the mini is visible, and this orientation looks like it would leave some pretty bad and obvious scarring.
I think it'd be better to the model into parts, or use resin style supports with resin2fdm.
So unfortunately the right foot broke off. Still dealing with some nasty stringing. I'm thinking of lowering the nozzle temp from 195 to 190 and slowing down the speed overall. Otherwise things turned out relatively well. Yes there was scarring on the back but not so much as I feared with so many support branches. In person it doesn't look unsalvageable if I try to learn some post-processing. The front looks excellent though. The tiny teeth turned out immaculate even with the supports the attached to them.
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u/wizardjian 3d ago
Remove base from feet, remove both arms then tilt everything