Are there good "average" resin printer settings?

[stumbley]

For those of you with resin printers, have you managed to work out the "best" settings for printing body shells? I've just finished calibrating my printer, and have gotten a successful test print, so I'm ready to take the plunge and start printing some bodies.

Is there a "magic bullet" set of settings that produces a good shell? What layer dimension? 0.2mm, or lower? Anti-aliasing? Pixel blurring? Gray levels?

As usual, with 3D printing, there's a lot of variables. I know every resin is different in terms of burn-in times and such, that's just something I'll have to figure out, especially if I blend resins for increased strength. But in terms of layer lines and keeping detail, what have you found to work best?

Any advice will be greatly appreciated!

[Kevan]

Siraya Blu is probably best out of the bottle for bodyshells.

Whatever resin you use will need validating with a validation print, I prefer the XP2 test as it only takes 10 minutes so you can do a few in an hour. Manufacturers settings are a good start, my Anycubic Photon Mono X is set at 70% power and for Siraya Blu I'm getting good prints at 3 sec exposure.

I print at 0.04mm layers, my printer can't use AA or any of those other settings below 3 second exposure...it's a firmware problem.

Do your validation prints and don't go searching for videos and other 'experts' settings, validation prints will teach you a lot more in a vastly reduced time...and keep it simple

[Barc 1]

I use 4 initial layers at 40 seconds. All other layers at 2 seconds 0.05 micron layers.

I started using Sirya tech, “blue” for body shells, it is very viscous though and needs to be heated above 25 c before you start printing. It is fine for body shells but does not seem to capture the detail required for figurines. As it is expensive, I just use it only for body shells.I mix it 50/50 now with regular resin and the shells seem OK, and the resulting mix is less viscous and I went back to my default setting for printing.

I think Kev advice about the test print is good, but honestly I have never printed a test yet, This probably has resulted in a couple of failures that perhaps could have been avoided. I.e my first print with straight up “Blue” was a failure. Maybe I am just lucky and have never had any prolonged problems, and usually after doing a few tweaks the second print is a success,. With straight up Blue I use a 3 second exposure and reduce my lift speed to account for the higher viscosity fluid.

[Kevan]

Using Blu for figures is a waste, Siraya Fast is cheaper and designed for finer detail. I didn't used to do validation prints...and wasted a lot of resin and time and arsing about with settings before trying a validation and learned more in an hour than I'd learned in weeks!

[Barc 1]

Yes the Blu is too expensive for figures and the fact it doesn’t capture details as well just confirms the fact that figurines are not in its wheelhouse. Cheaper, standard resins do the job just fine with respect to printing spectators.

[stumbley]

Thanks for the info! Will definitely use a validation print.

[stumbley]

Another question: do you use auto-generated supports, or try to do an "island" search to see where they're absolutely necessary? And which slicer does the auto-generation best?

[Kevan]

I was going to add a long winded reply but it'd be best in it's own thread... https://www.hrwforum.com/forum/hrw-a...he-uninitiated