Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

3D printing takes time.

Newer printers aren't really much faster and often you'll find that the marketing for "superfast speeds" is a combination of them using a very thick layer height (eg 1mm) and also using vroom or fast lifting speeds, which isn't bound to a specific printer body.
It just means they are using 180mm lift speeds instead of 50 or slower for their normal layer lifting speeds.

Otherwise it will take hours, that's just part of 3D printing and unavoidable at this point in time.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

cody.d. wrote:
Could I recommend getting a flexible, magnetic build plate? Rather than having to scrape models off the build plate you just pull off a magnetic sheet flex it and off pops the models. Means you don't have to relevel the build plate which is a really common cause of print failures in my experience.

They're like 10 or 20 from amazon, well worth it.

If you're having to relevel the build plate that often then you've not set it up correctly to start with and/or your scraping method is dangerously bad. Once setup the build plate shouldn't need re-levelling for ages.

flex plates can work well and they can be a source of errors. In general if you're printing with rafts and presupports you shouldn't need a flex plate to get the model off. I think flex plates have a place if you are printing flat on the build plate, but otherwise you shouldn't need one at all.

For easy FEP cleaning watch this (his other videos are also great). This video covers pretty much any printer, even those which don't have this tank clean feature built in

Oh very true! I forget about RGB as I got in with the Mimi 4K so I was part of the monoscreen revolution and never experienced the RGB system.

But yes if you had a much older printer or picked up a super super cheap RGB then that would have much much longer exposure times than the current mono-screens.

So basically the RGB screen block more UV light going through them than the mono-screens. The screen is only there to block/permit the light passing through it from the UV light source. So RGB have more layers to them which means more light gets blocked so the UV light has to remain on for longer to expose the resin.

I believe resolution also improved because of fewer layers and thus less light scatter.


How fast varies because of layer thickness, UV power levels and UV wavelengths, but in general I'd say you could at the very least halve your exposure time for a mono-screen.

I currently do around 1second per layer ---- but I'm printing at 0.02 layer heights (20um)

 bbb wrote:
Joined a Patreon since the creator offered their entire back catalog. Spent the last few days downloading so now I have 39 gb of stls... will I ever use even 10%? So far it seems I've grafted 3d printing into my miniatures hobby seamlessly...

Big tip - get 7zip and start zipping those models. That will cut 39gb to 19.5GB!
Also I'd check out what kind of presupports they provide. Eg for many creators now they provide .stl and .lys or .project (chitubox format I honestly forget its actual term so it might be different).

As the proprietary file types keep supports and model as separate things what I do is delete the .stl and keep only the .lys versions. I can use those in lychee and if I want edit the supports or leave them as-is. So the .stl version has no importance to me.

However if they provide the chitu versions I delete those and keep the .stl as my computer does not like running chitubox at all.



So basically instead of keeping both versions I keep only the one I will use. In theory you could even remove the unsupported stls and keep only the lychee/chitu versions as models and supports are separate so you can always just go back to the bare stl if you wanted. However I like keeping the basic stl since:
1) sometimes there are versions of files provided which are not presupported (eg combined versions). Esp from smaller creators who have more limited time/budgets so not all parts may be presupported.

2) The basic STL will work with any slicing software or 3D editing software. Proprietary ones could always end up with issues in the future. Eg a new update renders the old versions incompatible; or they shift to paid only access or such.

Keeping files organised is a big thing. I also make sure I've always got at least 1 render of each model stored in the ZIP and stored in a regular "Renders" folder. That way if I want to find a model or see what I've got I can check the renders folder for the images so I don't have to unzip everything. Including renders in the zip just helps with keeping a single store of all the mode's info, and sometimes there are lots of renders for parts and such that I might not want in the renders folder.

I tend to organise render folders by month and source. So I might have one for each month of a patreon and then one for purchases from that creator etc....

So a few things

1) Different resins need different exposures to work best. Using a good calibration print to calibrate the exposure value helps a lot.

You can use the Ameralabs town print found here: https://atlas3dss.com/learn?v=b0c4bc877c29

Just open, slice, print, wash, dry and then take photos of all 4 sides and the top.
No need to presupport it; just print it as is at your chosen settings.

NOTE when taking the photographs to share because you take them BEFORE you give it the final curing; the resin is only part cured and thus a skin-touch hazard. So Nitrile gloves on when handling.

From there if you were still getting strong presupport adhesion it might well mean that you can reduce the tip size. Presupports are generally made for "mass market" so they are thicker than a well calibrated, mechanically good resin needs.

2) With resizing if you resize a presupported STL you've got about 10% either way (up or down) to play with. Going smaller will make the tips smaller to a point they simply won't work; going larger the tips will work, but will start to separate harshly and leave far more scarring and cleanup.

If you are using a lys or chituproject file then you've still sort of got the 10%; only now you can use the original supports and edit them.

This is important since sometimes going smaller (esp by a lot) might well mean that some areas get too dense with supports and they fuse together during printing (acting like one big support); and going up might mean that a support that was just ok at supporting an island; is now not quite where the island starts.