A sitting KAWS figure I downloaded off the internet [16] came off the Mars 5 with a thick crust of over-cured resin, welded to the build plate hard enough that getting it loose took real force, and I was hoping it would not crack before it came free. The exposure was fine (§M4a had done its job). What I had gotten wrong was the supports, and that print had none at all.
Printing directly on the plate
After calibration I did the obvious-seeming thing and printed models with no supports, their bases flat on the build plate. As §M4a explains, the first layers of any print get the 30-second bottom exposure instead of the normal 2.6 s, so the print welds to the plate. When the model itself sits on the plate, its own first layers get that exposure.
Over-curing makes those layers wider, denser, and harder than intended. The light bleeds sideways, layer after layer fuses into a dense slab, and the bottom few millimeters of the model no longer match what the designer drew (the community calls the flared version of this "elephant's foot"). The model's whole footprint, which is a large surface area, is also welded flat to the aluminum plate.
What supports are for
I had thought supports were for overhangs, basically a necessary evil, but when I read up afterward, I found that they do three jobs:
- They lift the model off the plate. The 30-second layers all land in the support raft, which gets cut away. The model itself is built entirely at the calibrated 2.6 s exposure, so its dimensions stay accurate from the first real layer. This is why §M4a could say the bottom-exposure setting "doesn't affect part quality" in my workflow.
- They make removal a non-event. The raft is popped off the plate and the model is clipped free, so the model itself never has to be pried off aluminum.
- They let the model be oriented for quality instead of stability. This one turned out to matter most.
Orientation, the part nobody tells you about
Once the model hangs from supports, it can be printed at any angle, and two rules came out of my testing. The first is to put the important faces up, or at least away from the supports. Every support tip leaves a small dimple on the model when the support is clipped off. On a functional surface a dimple might not matter, but on a face, a curve, or any surface people will look at, it does. So the supports attach to the back or bottom, where nobody looks.
The second rule is to tilt the model, somewhere around 45°, which does not change the layer height but does change how a given surface gets sliced. A surface lying nearly flat in the build is crossed by only a few layers, each leaving a wide step (the stair-stepping visible across the top of a dome printed flat-side-down). With the dome tilted, the same surface is crossed by many more layers, so each step is smaller. Tilting, which is standard practice, also shrinks the cross-sectional area of every layer. That lowers the peel force as the layer separates from the film, which is one more reason tilted prints fail less.
What supports cost
Supports have disadvantages too:
- Resin. Supports are printed from the same resin as the model, so a heavily supported plate yields fewer models per bottle.
- Dimples. For pieces where smoothness or aesthetics are the point, support placement becomes careful, slow work, and a badly placed tip can ruin the surface that mattered.
There is also an exception to "always use supports." For some functional parts, printing directly on the plate is a feature, not a mistake. The over-cured bottom becomes a strong, rigid base, and if the part is a flat structural piece, that is what is wanted.
In this project the deliberate plate-direct prints have been the calibration-cone plates themselves and some of the flexure bodies [builder, 2026-08-06]. The flexure bodies are the uncomfortable case. §M4a called out flexure hinges a few hundred micrometers thin as the features that succeed or fail on dimensional accuracy, and nothing here measures what a 30-second bottom exposure does to a flexure body's first layers. Until something does, printing those parts plate-direct is a working choice and not a validated one.
Islands
On a couple of attempts, parts of the KAWS figure's head didn't print, which was a failure mode I didn't know existed. Wrong orientation plus wrong support placement had created what resin printing calls an island, a region of a layer with nothing below it (not model, not support) to build from. The printer exposes that region anyway, but the cured resin has nothing to attach to, so it stays on the film or floats off into the vat, and the layers above it inherit the hole.
The print comes out fine everywhere except the missing chunk, which on a figure tends to be somewhere very visible, like the head. The fix is to orient first, then support, then run the slicer's island check before starting the print. Most slicers will highlight unsupported islands when that check is run, and I learned to run it.
Current state of the printing pipeline
By the end of this stretch the workflow had settled into the shape it still has: calibrate exposure per resin (§M4a), orient important faces up, tilt near 45°, support from the non-critical side, check for islands, print, clip, cure. The KAWS figure eventually came out clean, without the thick base and with its face intact. The STL is not mine to redistribute, so see [16] for where to get it, then drag it into the chapter's 3D viewer (stl_viewer.html) to inspect the model.
The KAWS print was the qualification run, and the next print, a much less forgiving model with fine details in every direction, was the real test of all of it at once. That print, the Evangelion, is §M4c.