Avoid Transparent Resin?

[warzan 31215xp 4]

Hi All

I think I may have found a reason for us to avoid transparent resin going forward.

I have been printing with grey abs style resing with basically zero issues.

I then tried a transparent red and it as just ok but not one I’d recommend.

I then tried a completely transparent resin and all the details in the models I was printing disappeared.

I thought it might be an issue with the file, but I think I have worked it out.

Th UV light is spreading through the resin causing more of it to cure than it should.

This is basically filling in the gaps on the stone texture leaving it essentially flat.

I will pay the extra couple of pounds to stick to the grey abs style resin from here as it is by far the best and has worked in both the elegoo and the photon without issues 🙂

let me know if I’m barking up the wrong tree!

[blinky465 17208xp 0]

I never thought of this! I wish you’d posted two days earlier – because I just received some clear resin for messing about with LED lights! But it makes sense – you’d probably need to dial down the exposure time for clear resin (just as you need to crank it up a bit for black).

I got clear because I’m casting heads and weapons with voids in them and stuffing LEDs inside. Usually I use light grey and it lights up a treat, but I thought that – for weapons especially – clear might be a nice alternative. I’m not sure that it is (though I haven’t actually tried it yet).

But it’s a good point – clear resins won’t block the UV light from previous layers the way coloured resins do! I think I just wasted the best part of twenty quid….

[shingen 13941xp 0]

@warzan, what kind of resin are you using (as in what brand/type)? What are your settings?

I’m just at the bottom of 1l bottle of elegoo’s own transparent resin and can’t really see if any details being lost on my prints, I doubt any are. I’m set at 50s exposure per first layer and 10s on following layers. The only issue I ran into is that the resin sometimes has problems with retaining ideal geometry on large, flat surfaces, but I don’t think any coloured resin would do much better here.

What I noticed, however, is that the longer you cure it (specifically under strong UV light, after printing), the less transparent it becomes.

If any of you is interested I may upload some photos of printed models (I believe I have some unpainted prints).

[cazboab 2397xp 0]

Transparent/translucent resin cures faster, so you need to drop your exposure times a bit, how much will change a lot depending on what type of resin and machine you have, but with anycubic green transparent in my photon s, I’ve been running at 0.02, 60s for the first few layers, 3.8s regular, and my details look okay:

[shingen 13941xp 1]

Coincidentally, Prusa just published video about postprocessing transparent prints (both ABS and resin):

[bobcockayne 20739xp 0]

@warzan thanks for that, I’d been wondering if some of my problems were in using the red transparent resin (it was cheaper) and had been considering the base grey next month.

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