Had many views, but no replies to my previous post. I still need assistance in two parts of 3D printing.
I want to be sure I’m following the correct steps for using the Saturn. I want tu be sure I do not do anything wrong that might damage the printer.
How important is it to fix all the islands in a sliced file before moving on to printing.
Chitubox online help files are sadly out of date. None of their files show procedures since they updated to the 2.x version with a different user interface/
Hello David, I see you’re still needing assistance with the 3D printer, and I’d love to help out. While I can’t validate the steps for using the Saturn yet, as I still need to check out the equipment with an instructor, I’d be happy to assist by inspecting the sliced file. Hopefully, that will help you get the model printed successfully. I should be available at noon during the weekdays next week if you’d like to meet sometime.
Hi David, following up on this to see if you’re still have trouble printing.
Did you try to print the boat file I fixed for you? How did that come out? If you have other files that experiment issues send them to me and I can take a look.
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I was away from Austin for part of the time and had health issues when I got back and let this slip into the background
The issue that I am having crops up in every file I have attempted to prepare for printing. I need to find a solution I can work through on my own, I simply lack the knowledge.and experience at present.
It is unreasonable for me to expect to ask you or anyone else to review every file I prepare to print. I need to learn how to deal with this myself.
The issue that has me blocked involves islands in the sliced file. I go through the steps to add supports to a file, slice the file, and run the detect islands feature. No problems to this point. I can see at this step that there are X islands and on which layers they are found. The problems occur when I go to locate these islands and fix them. Sometimes I don’t find the feature that needs support, sometimes when I do find an area there appears to be no way to add a support, and sometimes when I think I have added a support correctly the island is still there when I reslice. Looking on both Chitubox and Youtube adds to my confusion as I see opinions ranging from “you must support every island before printing” to “Islands do not matter, delete them all and print”. This has led me to a state of confusion and frustration.
When you repaired the file I sent you, it showed more than 10 islands. When I was uncertain how to proceed, I went back to simpler file, a model railroad car transporting container freight. After slicing, there were 5 islands - 4 of which I found and fixed with supports. I deleted the other island and proceeded to print. The first print came out warped, as I had not printed on an angle. Correcting the error led to a successful print.
I went back to the first file and froze up again over how to resolve the island issue. Finally last week I settled on adding supports on one location and deleting all the others. The print was successful.
But I still have no idea if I did the right thing or just got lucky.
Starting with the right file to print.
Files for 3D printing have specific requirements such as they need to be watertight(no holes), no overlapping geometry, and ultra thin walls/features are bad as well. Some 3d modeling process are not designed for 3D printing purpose which is why they’re just not going to print/slice correctly.
Most of the websites on my class presentation are curated specifically for 3D printing so i would recommend you start your file search from there.
With that said, it’s worth to use the Repair function in Chitubox if you’re unsure if your file is good to go, it can fix some minor issues.
Islands
Islands are just free flowing geometry in your model that isn’t supported. The detect island function in Chitubox is overly sensitive that it can pick up tiny geometries within your model that won’t affect your print quality. So use it as a reference but don’t stress over having to support every islands it finds, if it’s only picking up a few after you ran the auto generate support function, just go ahead and delete them and try to print anyway.
Hope this helps, if you’re still having issues, find a few files that you want to print and we can meeting in person to go over the file prep process in detail.
