Why does my model need support?

3D printing is a very powerful tool that can let you print some amazing things, but it has one big limitation: they can only build from the bottom up. This means that sometimes you need to add easily breakable support material for pieces to sit on while it’s being built. Imagine you are building a snowman or a snow fort. You can keep stacking snow higher and higher to make it really tall, but if you try to give it an arm made out of snow it’s going to fall off while you are trying to build it.

How do we fix this? Some shapes may be easier to build from different sides (like if you wanted to build a snow pyramid you wouldn’t try to build it from the top, you would build the biggest part on the bottom) so you can fix some of them by rotating your model to the right position. Other times you may need to add support material, which you can do by selecting “BUILD" while editing your print.

Imagine adding a cardboard box underneath your snowman’s arm to hold it up, except with 3D printing you can remove that support and it will stay up after it cools. Supports are only there as extra parts to hold up your model until it can become solid. 

You will see when adding support that there are two options: build plate or everywhere. Sometimes your model needs to add support material on top of itself to hold up some pieces, which is typically harder to remove, so we suggest against it if you don’t need it.

Feel free to reach out to us at [e-mail] if you need any advice on a particular design!