3D printed supports

11 Articles

More On Wave Overhangs For 3D Printing

August 16, 2026 by 5 Comments

We’ve heard of wave overhangs before. It is a new technique for printing horizontal overhangs with no supports. Building on some other techniques like arc overhangs. The idea is to teach the slicer not to try to draw overhangs in the middle of free space. Instead, when the slicer realizes there is a horizontal overhang, it tries to “grow” the overhang from the main part. You can see an overview in the video below.

For example, imagine printing a letter ‘T’ vertically. The stem of the T is no problem, but when you try to print the arms it will normally need support. But if you could just print the arms starting at the stem with slight overlapping, the arms could grow as they hang onto either the stem or the last overhang line.

That makes sense, but it only works for very simple cases. Arc overhangs can fill more complex cases, but suffer from little dimples at the center of each arc. The realization for wave overhangs is to replace the arcs with waves as you would see in a pond. The waves diffract around holes and corners.

Perfect? Not quite. They are still experimenting with settings, but there seems to be some increase in warping. If you want to experiment, you can download a fork of Orca and contribute your results to the community.

We looked at this technique earlier, but we haven’t seen much about it in practice yet. Let us know in the comments if you’ve tried it and how it worked for you. There are more details in the paper on the subject, or you can jump right to the software.

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Touchless Support Leaves No Mark

January 22, 2026 by 13 Comments

[Clough42] created a 3D print for a lathe tool and designed in some support to hold the piece on the bed while printing. It worked, but removing the support left unsightly blemishes on the part. A commenter mentioned that the support doesn’t have to exactly touch the part to support it. You can see the results of trying that method in the video below.

In this case [Cloug42] uses Fusion, but the idea would be the same regardless of how you design your parts. Originally, the support piece was built as a single piece along with the target object. However, he changed it to make the object separate from the support structure. That’s only the first step, though. If you import both pieces and print, the result will be the same.

Instead, he split the part into the original two objects that touch but don’t blend together. The result looks good.

We couldn’t help but notice that we do this by mistake when we use alternate materials for support (for example, PETG mixed with PLA or PLA with COPE). Turns out, maybe you don’t have to switch filament to get good results.

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Manual Supports For 3D Printing

April 21, 2024 by 14 Comments

[MakerSpace] wanted to 3D print an RFID card holder. On one side is a slot for a card and on the other side has recesses for the RFID antenna. They used these to control access to machines and were milling them out using a CNC machine. Since there were no flat surfaces, he had to turn on supports in the slicer, right? No. He does use supports, but not in the way you might imagine.

Inspired by creating cast iron using sand casting, he decided to first 3D print a reusable “core” using PETG. This core will support future prints that use PLA. When printing the actual item, the printer lays down the first few layers and pauses. This allows you to stick the core in and resume the print. After the print completes, you can remove the core, and the results look great, as you can see in the video below.

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An Alternative Orientation For 3D Printed Enclosures

February 2, 2024 by 29 Comments

When it comes to 3D printing, the orientation of your print can have a significant impact on strength, aesthetics, and functionality or ease of printing. The folks at Slant 3D have found that printing enclosures at a 45° provides an excellent balance of these properties, with some added advantages for high volume printing. The trick is to prevent the part from falling over when balance on a edge, but in the video after the break [Gabe Bentz]  demonstrate Slant 3D’s solution of minimalist custom supports.

The traditional vertical or horizontal orientations come with drawbacks like excessive post-processing and weak layer alignment. Printing at 45° reduces waste and strengthens the end product by aligning the layer lines in a way that resists splitting across common stress points. When scaling up production, this orientation comes with the added advantage of minimal bed contact area, allowing the printer to auto-eject the part by pushing it off the bed with print head.

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A Comprehensive Look At FDM Supports

March 27, 2023 by 14 Comments

When we first started 3D printing, we used ABS and early slicers. Using supports was undesirable because the support structures were not good, and ABS sticks to itself like crazy. Thankfully today’s slicers are much better, and often we can use supports that easily detach. [Teaching Tech] shows how modern slicers create supports and how to make it even better than using the default settings.

The video covers many popular slicers and their derivatives. If you’ve done a lot with supports, you might not find too much of this information surprising, but if you haven’t printed with supports lately or tried things like tree supports, you might find a few things that will up your 3D printing game.

One thing we really like is that the video does show different slicers, so regardless of what slicer you like to use, you’ll probably find exactly what different settings are called. Of course, because slicers let you examine what they produce layer-by-layer, you can do like the video and examine the results without printing. [Michael] does do some prints with various parameters, though, and you can see how hard or easy the support removal is depending on some settings. The other option is to add support to your designs, as needed manually, or — even better — don’t design things that need support.

This video reminded us of a recent technique we covered that added a custom support tack to help the slicer’s automatic support work better. If you want a longer read on supports that also covers dissolvable support, we’ve seen that, too.

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3D Printing Support Gets Down To Tacks

February 10, 2023 by 9 Comments

If you use supports for FDM 3D printing, you might find that some designs are more amenable than others to automatically-generated supports. [Slant 3D] , for example, shows a cool-looking eagle with a downward-curved beak that comes to a point. Using traditional supports would allow the print to succeed, but didn’t allow the beak to form correctly. To combat this, he uses something called a “thumbtack” in the design. There are several flavors, as you can see in the video below, and it widens out the small part yet has a tiny contact with the actual part so you can easily remove it.

One of the thumbtacks looks more like a Hersey’s kiss to us. It makes sense. The point can touch the part to support and the fat base gives a nice target for the automatic support feature in your slicer to grab. There’s also a spherical base so you can rotate to odd angles. The final thumbtack looks like an alien spacecraft and provides multiple contact points.

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Cura Plugin Offers Custom Support

January 19, 2021 by 7 Comments

[Chuck] likes the ability of Simplify3D to add support to parts of a model manually. However, not everyone wants to spend $150 for a slicer, so he’s shared how to install a plugin that allows you to do the same trick in Cura.

The plugin is “Cylindric Custom Support.” That doesn’t sound very exciting, but you get five choices of shapes you can create custom supports easily. There are also size and angle parameters you can use to customize the effect.

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