Printing overhang geometries

Overhang areas are sloped faces that protrude beyond the base of our model. We actually already faced a similar concept, undercuts, when studying milling issues:

Figure 15.1: Undercuts for milling

As we may recall, undercuts are geometries that cannot be reached by the cutting tool, they are a huge limitation to milling processes even if we already found several possible solutions to fix undercuts in Chapter 7.

In this section, we will focus on additive manufacturing to find out whether undercuts are an issue that affects FDM printing as well, and if so, how.

Facing overhangs (undercuts) in 3D printing

Before jumping to the answer, let’s get back to basics – additive manufacturing, instead of removing material from a solid block, creates a shape by stacking multiple layers one on top of the other.

For this reason, generally speaking, 3D printers don’t suffer undercut-related issues nearly as...