Polyline support properties

Sets the type of polyline.

From left: Open wall, Patterned open wall, and Solid wall

• Open wall is similar to Patterned open wall without actual pattern selected, except it is simpler and has no dedicated, shaped connections.
• Unless explicitly thickened, both Open wall and Patterned open wall are meshes without volume, intended to be exposed with a single beam pass where the thickness is formed by the melt puddle's diameter. If treated as regular meshes, as opposed to supports, this can be a source of complication during toolpath generation.
• Solid wall counts as closed mesh with a valid volume.

A stand-off distance between the end of supports and the part surface they connect with. Can be negative to sink support structure tips into the part if necessary.

Determines how many steps will be used to smoothen a polyline. The smaller the distance, the stronger the smoothing and the more triangles will be used.

Switches the drawing of the resulting polyline supports through the placed anchors between discretely angled and continuously curved.

Specifies the thickness of a solid wall.

• Solid wall only

Support entities can be made conical with a wall angle of up to 45° from the vertical in either direction.

To achieve the conicity, the angle is applied at the top, creating support that is either wider or narrower at the bottom.

Applies a radius to the ends of solid walls with thickness instead of leaving them square.

• Solid wall only

Controls the hole pattern

• Open structure only
• See Structure properties

Fragmentation creates gaps in normally continuous polyline support. Gaps make support easier to break off.

• Fragments

• Connection

Choose from three options to reshape the volume support to avoid or target other part surfaces (including no reshaping) using a hard knee shape or a smooth spline.

• Straight down
• Angled Block Support
• Along a spline

Only available during editing of an already generated support entity

Set the type of the support structure

• Diamond
• Oval
• None

Width and height of the hole shapes

• For Diamond and Oval only

Distance between neighboring holes to the sides and to those above and below.

• For Diamond and Oval only

Values beyond 0 turn single-pass polylines without thickness into full meshes with volume.

If the structure is set to become thickened, a value can be set to specify the thickness of the top connections separately, allowing to create conical transitions between structure and part.

If the structure is set to become thickened, a value can be set to specify the thickness of the bottom connections separately, allowing to create conical transitions between structure and part.

Set a tolerance in millimeters up to which a gap between the structures is not going to be stitched. A value of 0.01 mm is recommended to keep as default.

Polyline supports will be at most this long, measured from the downskin they originate on. If necessary, they will terminate in mid-air, not reaching the bottom plate.

Configure polyline supports to have solid bases to improve strength for supports spanning greater Z distances. Applies the pattern along the vertical expanse only for this distance from the top connection and leaves the rest unpatterned.

• Open structure only

This overrides the width of the vertical fragment-lining strip as given by the connection properties value a in the illustration below.

• Can be set to 0 to have no such strip at all.
• A value of -1 disables the override.

Generates a single configurable stringer along the vertical centerline of a polyline or polyline fragment, strengthening the polyline with a backbone.

• Does nothing for closed polylines (eg. created by Polyline on cluster contour).
• See Stringers

Addresses cases when an undercut would cause a support structure to come closer to a wall than the cluster's wall offset can provide for.

Applies information provided by a 3D heatmap to lighten or strengthen structures locally.

Any polyline or polyline fragment that would be generated with a length smaller than this value is not generated at all.

Fully fills bottom-most row of structure perforation if it's truncated by the bottom connection strip to make the strip stronger overall

• Disabled by default to not interfere with custom support scripts created with earlier Netfabb versions that did not have this parameter yet

Toggles stringer generation

Detaches the stringer from the support by this distance

The stringer stops this distance short of terminating at the actual support's top end.

The stringer stops this distance short of terminating at the actual support's bottom end.

Toggles contour fragmentation

The polyline gets fragmented into segments at most this long.

Polyline fragments get spaced this far apart from each other.

The bottom borders of fragments will be at most this long. Can be used to create W-shaped fragments as seen from the side.

Type of connection

Select from: Strip, Trapoid, Breaking Points, Triangles.

• Strip: A continuous band connecting to the part all along its upper edge
• Trapoid: Triangles with truncated tips
• Breaking points: Like trapoid, but with another, inverted row of trapoids stacked on top, forming X-shaped connections
• Triangles: Triangles that simply terminate in corners, for very delicate support attachment

• Does not apply to Strip.
• For Triangles, this only applies to the vertical line at the beginning for the polyline, or contour.
• For Breaking points, this is the "waist" of the X-shaped connections.

The width of the vertical strip on the far right can be overridden. See Structure properties > Border width.

• For Strip, b and e are simply cumulative.

• Does not apply to Strip.

• Does not apply to Strip.

• For Strip, b and e are simply cumulative.

The interval between ribs

The width at the base of the ribs. The ribs are always equilateral triangles, so changing the width modifies the height accordingly.