Quality of life feature requests

#1

I’m really liking the program, but there are a few things that are preventing me from removing other programs from my workflow still.

  1. Improved camera controls. Currently I find it counter intuitive that there is no middle mouse button navigation for panning, and that the camera swaps from anchoring to the model to anchoring to selected support. I understand the benefit of changing the anchoring, but an option to toggle this would be nice.

  2. Model clipping is pretty severe during autosupport generation, and supporting in general. I understand computation times would increase to prevent this, but I struggle to imagine an occasion where model clipping is desirable. Often the clipping can be corrected with very minor tweaking, too, which makes it more frustrating to have to fix.

  3. I’m finding that the autogenerated supports chronically misses islands in the model in favour of supporting overhangs. Every time I’ve used it I have to move the support to where the island occurs instead of where it is generated, which is usually at the set critical angle (if that makes sense). This seems counter-intuitive for a sla/dlp profile!

  4. When placing single supports I would like an option to have the angle of the tip customisable before placement, i.e. 90* instead of 45*, and have the length of the tip customisable instead of just the diameter.

  5. This one is minor, but having some logic for autoselection of the target directory that the save file is in would be nice, (potentially even where the stl was imported from if there is no save file). It’s a minor annoyance but adds up during workflow.

#2

I just purchased this software after a friend recommended it and I was surprised to see some of these things that Tuna mentioned.

The two big ones that I think need to be addressed are #2 & #3 that were mentioned.

Model clipping with auto-generated supports is not great in the test I print I was setting up. I was not happy at all with this. I spent about 20 minutes cleaning up supports that were intersecting with a number of parts of the mesh I was attempting to print.

The islands is another issue for sure. I don’t think I had it as frequently, but I did see some cases were islands were ignored in favor of overhangs as Tuna mentioned.

Are there any additional settings that might be missed that would help the supports avoid intersecting the critical geometry? It’s unacceptable for my prints to have supports that intersect the mesh geometry.

The program has some nice features otherwise though, I really appreciate the mesh highlighting where overhangs are located. It’s very convenient.

#3

Hi both,

Thanks for the feedback; appreciated.
I’ll answer per point:

  1. Camera functionality is mainly based on how rhino3d works. Use SHIFT + right click to pan.
    We haven’t had the time yet to look if this can be expanded to more keys. Probably yes but it depends a bit on interaction. Currently supporting improvements have more prio.

  2. Yes we are aware of this and working on it to expand the functionality of the algoritm.

  3. There is a global filtering algoritm that works from bottom up. I will add a checkbox to always keep islands.
    For now, you can highlight the islands after supporting. (bottom left checkbox)

  4. Thanks. Will be added. There are some other requests for the tip.
    For now, you are able to drag the joint of the support so the tip is under the desired angle

  5. Will check it. However windows boxes are notoriously bad in this… :frowning:

#4

1# On the point on camera functionality, it does seem like there is a bug related to the anchoring where it will swap to an unknown point within the model, and then begin to swivel around unlogical areas of the workspace. I assumed this was anchoring to the supports I had selected, and have started to deselect before moving the camera, but it seems to have an inconsistency in the logic around swapping the anchor back and will occasionally choose a random point to anchor to.
At the moment I would actually just like to be able to not have the camera anchor swap at all. That would probably fix the entire frustration around camera controls.

Understandably you have priorities for fixes.

3# a follow up on that checkbox, I have had a few crashes when I’ve tried to use it, and currently avoid touching the checkbox. Do I need to unselect something before clicking it? Ie deselect overhang highlighting?

#5

3# which version of the program are you using?

There were some bugs concerning this in a previous version i remember.
Otherwise; are you able to reproducer the crash? I could quick fix it for you if so.

#6

This is minor, but when I click on delete support, it pops up a box to confirm, and I have to hit ok. It would be nicer if I didn’t have to hit OK for something that I asked it to do. That is what the undo feature is best at.