Printing a design that does not have a flat bottom

I have a design that no matter how you rotate it, it won’t have a flat bottom. I figured I needed to enable “Generate Auto Support”. I don’t know how auto-support works, because there is no water-soluble filament here. In any case, I imported the .stl into Snapmaker Luban and generated a G-code. It created a large round disk at the bottom of the design, but there was no structure. I would appreciate some guidance on this topic.

Depending on the angle of the slant, you may not need support. You only need support if the next layer can’t be printed on the previous layer.

As an example, if you were printing a “V”, even though there’s only a tiny point at the bottom, you could probably get away without supports.

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Of course, you’ll need an anchor of some sort, hence why it put down the large disk below your object.

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Luban had supports, but you have to create a custom print profile. Click on the gear next to the Print Settings drop down, and clone the profile you’re using. In the cloned profile, you can enable Generate Auto Supports, and select “Everywhere” or “Touches Buildplate”. Everywhere is allowed to create supports on top of your print if required, whereas Touches Buildplate will only generate supports on the build plate. Touches Buildplate makes for a better finish, but there are some models that require Everywhere. Use the layer slider to examine parts of the model that might start printing in open air, and see if they’re properly supported before starting the print.

While you’re customizing, you can also change the Bed Adhesion between skirt, brim, raft, or none. Skirt is enabled for the built in profiles, and that’s what created that disk on the buildplate. I generally only need a skirt if I’m printing tall narrow objects.

Snapmaker only has a single extruder, so the supports will be the same material you’re printing with (likely PLA). It does cause some surface roughness, and they can be difficult to remove.

Luban is meant to be noob-friendly. If you’re familiar with other 3D printing software, feel free to use that instead of Luban. There are plenty of posts in the forums about alternate tools for 3DP, Laser, and CNC. As far as I know, Luban is the only tool that does all 3 in a single software package.