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On today's episode let's talk about supports in Cura. Supports are the plastic that go underneath overhangs so it doesn't droop or fall. And there's two types of supports I want to show you. The standard support and the experimental tree support. I'll talk about both of them and today's Filament Friday. This week's Filament Friday is brought to you by these patreon supporters. Here is the test print I'm going to use. I found it on Thingiverse by user Zapta. It's got 90 degree overhangs and it's got a base that I want to avoid. So let me show you how I'll set up supports on this guy. Here's the model brought in to cura 3.6. Gonna slice it at a 0.2 layer height. Let's look at the layer view and you can see, this is the model, it's got the base, the tower going up, and then the overhangs. And this is where we need the supports. Once we get to this 90 degree overhang. So let's enable supports and then we'll see how that looks. I'll just scroll down on the settings here to the support menu. I'll check the box "generate support" and you see a whole bunch of menu selections show up. The first one is support placement. Right now I got it set to everywhere and you see it goes over the top of the base. So it's gonna put some plastic down here that may leave little nerds. If I choose touching base only it'll print here but never touch the base. But then I have a big gap. So I'm gonna use everywhere because I want that supported. Overhang angle, 50 degrees. Anything greater than 50 degrees it's gonna automatically get supports. Zigzag is the type of support. I like zigzag amongst all these because it uses less plastic. It's essentially building walls here that you're gonna bridge across on your print. But I'll show you how I can put a top layer on this in a minute. 15 percent is the support density but if I change the 25 you can see those bridges get shorter. I like 15 percent. Works fine for me. It's less plastic to remove, less nerds. Now we go down to support brim. This has been mentioned by people in previous videos. It puts a brim or a nice base underneath so it sticks to the bed. You can do a brim around the whole thing like I've showed or you can just do a brim under the support. At the top you can see there's a gap. One layer gap. See it moving here? Where the support isn't printed. And that's this support Z distance. Now I set it to 0.12 but it defaults to one layer. Basically it jumps up to a layer or down a layer so 0.12 is like the minimum I tend to print at so I just leave it there and then it automatically adjusts. The XY distance here is the distance from the part to the supports. Now it seems like you might want this bigger but let me show you why I like the 0.5. See these overhangs here? Those overhangs are very very minor but if I go up to a bigger gap say 2 millimeters, it even warns me orange. Look at the overhangs. These aren't going to stay. They're gonna just sag and become plastic that could stick to my model. So I like just using, close but no cigar type of setting, 0.5 millimeters. Infill layer thickness, I'm just gonna use the stock setting. But the next thing is to enable support interface. There's a top and bottom roof or floor and the floor is one I don't use because see those a little bit of plastic here that would possibly create nerds. If I go floor it puts a whole bunch of plastic down which creates a whole bunch of nerds. So I don't know exactly why you would need this. Maybe in certain designs it works. I tend to just leave it off but I do like the one on top. And what it does is it makes this concentric top on the supports themselves. So up to where it stops printing you get that gap. But now I have a support all the way across. If I didn't do that I end up with this zigzag like I showed, you but I found you can still get some sagging in there. So the biggest concern is will this to remove easy with this top piece. I'll show you it's not too bad. So I like putting on a roof. These are my final settings so now let's look at an actual print. Here's a print using these settings and let's see how easy this thing breaks away. I like using some needle nose pliers. Just grab it and pull, that way I don't cut my fingers or anything like that. Depending on where you pull it can make or break your supports and you want them to break away. But you want them to come all together so in this case I did at the middle and it ended up breaking into like three pieces here. And here's the top support or how I said you might be worried about it coming off? It came off quite easy. Here's another one where I went to the middle so I pulled the bottom. That came off and then when I pulled the next section it came all as one piece, so that was good. But then I finally figured out if I pulled on this model from the bottom I can get the whole thing off in one movement. So there you have it. Those are the supports. You can see it's a little bit saggy underneath. That's probably the best I'm gonna get, but there's nerds. See the nerds? This is what I don't like about this method. That's where tree supports comes in. Here's what we just printed. It's got the supports going over the base. So now I want to enable tree support. So let's go over to the menu. The first thing I do is uncheck general support or generate support. The whole menu disappears. Then there's tree support which if you don't have it click on the gear. Type in tree. There's all kinds of settings. Select tree support. But the rest of these settings I don't even use. So I don't even enable them. So just tree support I click. Hit close and then when I click on trees support. Look it. All the menu, even though generate support isn't checked, all the menus shows up. So all these same settings that we use before are going to be used with tree support. It's just it's a different method. So if you want to change any of these settings you can you can go change zig zag or whatever you want. Now Zig zag realy doesn't matter for this but the distances and that, they're all available to change. So now let's prepare this using tree supports and let's take a look at what this produces. Look at this monster. It looks like a mess. But it makes a lot of sense once you see it grow. So let's slide down the slider here and you'll see it starts to grow from the bottom but never touches the base. It bends over grows like branches of a tree over the top of the base so I don't have to worry about any of those nerds. And then it builds this thing almost like a vase mode until it gets to the top. And then the top, it puts you know the roof on it. And I've got my supports that I wanted plus the same gap and everything else so this should be interesting to see if this is easy to remove or how much better or worse this turns out. So let's print this guy and if you notice it was 39 minutes to print this. It was 46 minutes the old way so it's actually slightly faster even though it looks more complicated. And here's a tree support version. Look at how this thing turned out. Not much different than what the simulator showed there. And as far as removing? Well I just pinched from the top on this guy. And as I wiggled each one I found that the whole thing came off other than this little piece. And I bent that down and then pulled it. It was easier to remove. The bottom looked very similar but the base. Clean, no nerds. no nothing! Underneath they look very similar. Just a slight amount of sag which is what you would expect. But on top look at this guy. Now this is one I actually used the bottom roof so if you're wondering if that was any better, it left even more nerds like I said. Aand here's the tree support nice and clean. So between the two I like the tree support. And it's easier to clean up. Look at all these pieces for the standard versus a couple pieces for tree support. This was a really simple print to try it on but I printed a bunch of them so I could try and experiment with different things. And tree supports seem to work really well with this print. So hopefully this helps you set up your supports in Cura. If you like what I'm doing here maybe check out some of the videos that are popping up. If you want to help support the channel Patreon is one way or just buy thru the affiliate links in the description below, it all helps a lot. And if nothing else, click on that CHEP logo and subscribe. I'll see you next time right here at Filament Friday.