January 2022 Product Update - Additive Support Structure Improvements

[keqingsong]

The ability to create support structures is an important part of Fusion’s Additive Manufacturing workflow for FFF, SLA and SLM machines.  

Today Fusion 360 creates FFF supports, when generating the toolpath. When creating an Additive setup for SLA or SLM (SLM requires Additive Build extension) machines, Fusion 360 can create various surface and solid support types on demand: Volume supports, Bars, Polylines & Base plate supports, depending on the 3D printing technology.  

In this release we have made several improvements to these surface and solid support structures.  

Base Plate Supports now gives users the option to fill the inner contour using a Rectangular or Honeycomb (hexagonal) pattern in addition to a Solid fill. 

When creating a “Custom solid bar” support (available within Bar Supports, Down Oriented Point Bar Supports and Lattice Volume Supports) you can now choose the “Polygon Corner count” to make the solid bars triangular (3) vs circular (8 or more).  

For all Volume Bar and polyline supports, within the advanced area filter subsection, you can now control the “Jut distance” when deciding to apply or ignore certain overhang faces to be supported or not. 

For Bar Supports and Lattice Volume supports with a Custom Anchor Density you can now control the Minimum and Maximum Z height where you want supports to be generated. Sections of the part that are below the minimum or above the maximum value are ignored while generating the specified support structure giving you greater control over what type of support is applied where on your parts.

In this release we renamed the “Add Bars to Skeleton” to “Add bars to Medial Axis” to better clarify the support action. We also added several new options to better control the generation of Bars on Cluster geometry such as down points, corners and borders.

Another new option in this dialog allows you to control the maximum angle when creating bars with tree structures   

Learn how to add support structures