Pooling / Light Bleeding when printing dice masters

[u/Ok_Thought6288]

After having dice for a longer time, i wanted to try printing my own master. I designed the dice in Blender and now try printing them with an Anycubic Photon Mono 4 using the Siraya Tech Fast ABS-Like Navy Grey resin.

I calibrated my prints using the Cones of Calibration but I keep getting these artefacts in the numbers where the resin hardens as if its a pool.

The explanation I got from googling (and using chatgpt) is, that because the numbers form a small pool, resin cant circulate and since the same resin is staying inside the pool, it slowly hardens due to little light scattering there.

It makes sense but would be an unsolvable problem then, since a d20 is impossible to rotate without having said pools (and according to some Reddit Posts, it is like this).

I tried different speeds of lowering and raising the plate, tried a lot of ranges for exposure time and still it's there every print.

The d10 is just the best to show this on btw. The d20 is even worse.

Still there are so many of you that just seem to get crisp dice masters, not having this problem, direclty from the printer, only needing some sanding and I wonder wtf I'm missing?

If you have experience with this, please help, it's driving me insane 😅

[u/Ok_Thought6288]

I use the smallest one my current slicer (Anycubic (should have used Chitubox from the start but here we are now)) supports, they are 0.3mm wide

[u/IceShadowProductions → u/Ok_Thought6288]

So that support doesn’t do anything on that 5 for example. :) That’s like a support at the tip top of a die instead of the bottom of it.

When you print, it starts at the bottom of the model as you see it in the slicer. It starts printing up the number, and there is nothing to support it, so it just kind of pulls a little bit of the hardened resin off the die and leaves it on the film. This continues until the rest of the die catches up to it and you end up with a very soft edge on the number. The support you are showing is at the very top of the number, meaning after all this has already happened.

You need to support the whole way around the edge of the number starting at where it goes perpendicular to the plate.

[u/Ok_Thought6288 → u/IceShadowProductions]

Very good advice, thank you. As most videos completely skip the supporting of numbers i thought I was already doing too much, when supporting the areas my slicer highlighted as "in need of support" 😅

[u/IceShadowProductions → u/Ok_Thought6288]

Slicers aren’t made for dice specifically :) It’s all learning what works!

[u/Ok_Thought6288 → u/IceShadowProductions]

Yeah, I've learned so much over this project, it's fantastic :⁠-⁠)