Manual Support Generation

This manual process will allow you to generate struts as supports and as cross-bracing in place of auto-generated supports. Use the following guidelines when doing this:

1. Review strut creation here. Learn the workflow and the shortcuts for creating struts.
   
   1. Use default settings for optimal support removal and stiffness. Parameters are open for you to change when optimizing your stacked print.
   2. Adjust Normal should be on to make support tips normal to the surface. This prevents supports intersecting a surface at an off angle, which would create larger cross-sections than desired when removing supports.
2. Click on View on the top right, and check the Down Face box under Shading. This allows a color visualization of down-facing regions to avoid under-supporting when manually creating your supports.
3. Start between the first and second row of parts when creating your struts. Use ctrl + Click and select two points to generate your strut.
   

   1. You can create struts on or between struts.

   2. Check that the angles of the struts are self-supporting. To be safe, 40°-90° from the horizontal should be fairly self-supporting; otherwise, use a strut for support.

   3. With down-face visualization on, you can generate struts to support the down-facing regions and any initial layers of a part.

4. When struts are created, that strut will be replicated across the entire array.

Repeat these steps until your parts are fully supported. When creating struts on the bottom facing regions of parts: Go to the VIEW module on the top right of 3D Sprint. Go to Clipping section and click on Z-Axis Clip once. When using clipping tools, turn off outline if your stack has a lot of parts. Drag the Z-Clip plane upwards until you see a thin section of the bottom face surface you want to support on the second row of parts.

Roller over to zoom.

Looking at a downward angle like the image at the right, hold down CTRL and click on a point on the clipped bottom surface and then another point on an existing strut on the top surface of the first row of parts.

Roll over to zoom.