Support Structure not printing.

[mrtomatoballs 0]

Hi there,

I'm quite new to Cura and Ultimaker.

For a school project we have to 3D print a piece of outside furniture made of tubes.

I made my model using Sketchup and exported it to a .dae file.

This is the formate that my teacher told me to use. After failing to export the model I decided to export it as a .obj file.

I was able to get the model in to Cura this time.

As my model consists only of thin tubes, I needed a support stucture. So I ticked the add support structure box. But after starting printing, I soon found that it wasn't printing the support structure. My teacher didn't know why, as he had never tried printing a .obj file.

Does anybody know how i could make this work?

Thanks in advance!

Tom Hodgson

Ps. I'm using the Ultimaker original, Cura 14.07 and Sketchup 2013.

[Labern 774]

In Cura on the RHS there is view mode. select layers and if support structure is going to be printed you can see it there before you even try printing it.

there are a few settings you can adjust for support structure. sometimes it doesn't print if the item is thin or small or if its at a set angle.

If you select FULL SETTINGS then go to OPEN EXPERT SETTINGS then you see a section called Support. there you can adjust the support amount and the overhang angle. Without seeing you model its hard to know what wrong. but you can adjust those the look at the layer view and see if it will print the support.

Sketchup Also saves as STL file. STL is the most widely used format.

If you look at the X-Ray mode it will show up any problems with your model in red.

 

[gr5 2,196]

Sketchup is difficult with Cura but I've used it many times with success. YOu can't have any duplicate walls or intersecting walls or missing walls or holes in your walls or interior walls. Any of those will show up red in Cura xray view.

Even if you do you can often just check "fix horrible A" or B and that often fixes it. You can tell in layer view as labern says above. Don't try to print it until you look at it in layer view. Check *every* layer - slide through the layers one at a time.

 

[Labern 774]

In sketchup if you install the clean up 3 plugin and solid inspector. These are a must if you are using the files for 3d printing to make sure it's a solid.