Meshmixer 2.0: A Better Way to Generate Support

[nick-foley 5]

Worth noting - if you cancel the auto support generation while it is calculating the initial supports, meshmixer crashes. It seems to have an autorecover though.

 

[yzorg 9]

Support made with B9creator app. (just ignore the size warning when using big models)

B9creator gives multiple adjustable features for every single collumn.

Its very convenient to add an remove collums. you can change thicknesses and orientation after placement.

only disadvantage i see is:

There are no branching-style columns possible. Just single ones.

Here you go Lennart:

 

[meshmixer 0]

I wanted to follow up and thank you all for the feedback. We just released meshmixer 2.1, and there are a lot of improvements to the support workflow. In particular:

1) you can leave the tool, save/load a .mix file, and come back and continue manually editing the support

2) you can merge the multiple-overlapping-shells support structure into non-self-intersecting solids

3) your parameter settings are saved when you exit the tool

4) the sliders do a bit of rounding to a reasonable number of digits of precision

5) you can draw a 100% manual support structure, no need to auto-generate at all if you don't want to

6) you can draw posts that connect to the ground, which was not possible before

We did also tweak the auto-generation algorithm quite a bit...it usually makes better structures now, but still does get stuck sometimes, so manual cleanup/tweaking will still be necessary.

More to come!

 

[gr5 2,176]

These changes are great.

I'd like to see rotation easier. Can't I just tell it that Z is the "up" axis instead of "Y"? Some kind of permanent setting so I don't have to rotate before adding support and then rotate it back in my slicer?

There's also a bug in the rotation feature for some (large) parts where the rotation tick marks are too tiny to see or maybe they are off the screen.

 

[aaronalai 2]

Downloaded! Thanks for the update :mrgreen:

Edit:

I just spent about 2 minutes with the auto support and am already really impressed with the changes you made! I can very very easily make supports that are affixed to the printing platform now, this adds so much more utility to the program.

Thank you for all your hard work :-P.

 

[lennart-bruggink 3]

I wanted to follow up and thank you all for the feedback. We just released meshmixer 2.1, and there are a lot of improvements to the support workflow. In particular:

1) you can leave the tool, save/load a .mix file, and come back and continue manually editing the support

2) you can merge the multiple-overlapping-shells support structure into non-self-intersecting solids

3) your parameter settings are saved when you exit the tool

4) the sliders do a bit of rounding to a reasonable number of digits of precision

5) you can draw a 100% manual support structure, no need to auto-generate at all if you don't want to

6) you can draw posts that connect to the ground, which was not possible before

We did also tweak the auto-generation algorithm quite a bit...it usually makes better structures now, but still does get stuck sometimes, so manual cleanup/tweaking will still be necessary.

More to come!

 

Capital news!

Keep at it!

Cheers!

Lennart

 

[yellowshark 153]

I tried Meshmixer again at the weekend and it did the job for me.

(previous version; I see a new version released in the past day or two)

 

I would have struggled with the overhangs on the "holes" for the window frames as they are curved, so well pleased.

 

One thing I would say though is that after cutting away the supports the surfaces were very rough. It did not matter on this as I knew the window frames would conceal the surfaces. But if the surfaces were exposed, then it would have taken a lot of hours of filing to get the surfaces presentable.

 

[Darth_Biomech 4]

There was no answers in this thread for more than a year, but ah well, I risk to post anyway...

My meshmixer looks like that:

Window is gray, model is invisible, and if I load one of my models there, it hangs up my entire PC (and start to using my CPU like hell) until I ctrl+alt+del it to unfreeze it and get to the process manager (ctrl+shift+esc seems to not work normally during this)

None of buttons of meshmixer interface is also doesn't respond to me (but standard menu panel on top seems to work fine)

Upd: Fixed all of the above. Apparently, restricting connection to the web by firewall was bad decision... somehow. I added app to whitelist and it started to work normally.

Edited September 14, 2015 by Guest

[LePaul 321]

I still use the original blog tutorial from time to time but find MeshMixer is extremely difficult to pan around in and move objects in. I struggle with just getting the object to show on the build plate. I've been hoping CURA would make some gains on what MeshMixer can do

[damfal003 0]

An interesting new program is Autodesk Print Studio, which seems to be a sort of upgraded version of Meshmixer. It's in open beta or something I think, and is part of their Spark platform.

It generates similar support structures but has a much nicer UI, have yet to print using it but looks promising.

(It's meant to be a slicer in its own right but you can export STL)

[LePaul 321]

Good to know

Let us know how your printed version of those supports work out