Support Lab
A desktop support-authoring tool for experienced resin printers. You decide contact size, penetration, shaft geometry, and load path. The app never auto-places, auto-orients, or “improves” your work — it just makes precise manual work faster.
Scroll to the builds below and pick Apple Silicon or Intel yourself — browsers often guess wrong.
If you already know where islands form, how tip Ø trades off with scarring, and why orientation is half the print — this is for you.
Nothing is added, moved, or deleted unless you do it. There is no silent support generator running in the background.
Supports stay editable definitions — contact Ø, tip length, shaft upper/lower, foot boss, penetration — until you export.
Resin profiles, layer settings, and printer transfer remain in your slicer. Support Lab owns the geometry authoring step only.
Professional viewport habits, millimetre-accurate contacts, and bulk edits that behave like CAD — not a slicer’s afterthought panel. Each capability below gets its own still or short loop as we ship them.
Click a surface contact; the pillar routes tip → joint → vertical shaft → plate foot. While you hover, a height line traces the whole model at the contact height. Every dimension is live-editable. Presets (light / medium / heavy / custom) set starting values — never lock you in.
Move, rotate, and scale a part after supports are placed — pillars, braces, and contacts stay attached and remapped with the model, and straight tips stay straight. A support the new pose drives into the part gets a tilted tip that clears it (one Undo takes it back); one that can’t be cleared turns red for you to fix. Most slicers lock orientation once you start supporting; here the gizmo stays open so you can refine the pose without rebuilding the lattice.
Drop in a revised STL under the same object — supports, braces, and placement stay. Tips that no longer touch the new surface light up so you can Try repair or fix them by hand without rebuilding the lattice.
Add intermediate knuckles along a plate shaft and drag them in XYZ — dogleg around geometry, stack brace attachment heights, or shape a load path without splitting into separate pillars. Add and remove joints from the selection bar; Delete removes the selected knuckle first.
Two-click spans between surfaces or onto existing support spines. Standard bridges keep tip/joint anatomy; strut profiles are shaft-only helpers for bracing without extra knuckles. Delete a parent pillar and attached dependents go with it.
Marquee a cluster of plate supports and generate X or diagonal struts between nearest neighbors. Tune diameter, max distance, neighbor count, and stacked rows along the shaft — live preview before you commit. Loners still link within max distance so isolated pillars are not left free-standing.
Line, rectangle, circle, and path layouts with spacing or count control, margins, and live preview before commit. Density is your call; the tool only removes repetitive placement work.
Array a part as instances: change scale or rotation on one, and every linked copy updates with it. Independent duplicates are still available when you want a one-off.
Inspect and edit support anatomy in a dedicated editor — contact Ø, penetration, tip, shaft, foot, presets — without digging through opaque property lists. What you see is what exports.
Select a support and the floating bar appears: swap library types, open the full editor, eyedropper-match another pillar’s geometry, and assign viewport colors for grouping. Joint add/remove sits on the same bar when a plate shaft is selected — no digging through side panels for everyday edits.
Viewport materials built for reading form: normal-map shading, 3D checker, clay and ceramic looks. Spot flatness, undercuts, and contact quality before you commit supports — display only, never baked into the STL.
Parametric rect / circle cages with floor, walls, and arch or honeycomb openings. Size, thickness, and density stay editable; export with the model when you need a protective frame for the print.
Place solid lettering on the build plate — straight or along a drawn path with bezier handles. Size and extrusion stay parametric; edit content, font, and the curve from the inspector. Duplicate like any other object; export with the model when you need labels, marks, or branding in the print.
Multi-select, rectangle/lasso, select-similar by preset, duplicate, retarget type, and delete in one pass. Undo/redo covers the full support graph — same expectations as desktop engineering software.
Toggle (or hold) a mode where the model goes transparent and contact footprints draw at true physical diameter. Read diameter and penetration in mm; spot weak or disconnected contacts before they cost a failed print.
Layer-step occupancy with bridge tolerance and optional grounding from existing support columns. Markers land on undersides; place a pillar from a marker without leaving Supports mode. Tunable layer height, cell size, min area, and bridge mm.
Z-up, millimetres, build plate, Fusion/Blender/3ds Max/Maya navigation presets, and a ViewCube whose right-click menu turns the view in 90° steps. Materials and overlays stay viewport-only — they never alter export geometry.
Orbit, pan, and zoom with a SpaceMouse on macOS and Windows — the same six-degree puck motion you’re used to in CAD. Preferences → SpaceMouse sets speed and per-axis reverse so the directions match how you work. Button 1 frames the selection.
Binary STL out: combined supported mesh, or oriented model + supports as two files with identical baked coordinates. Transformations are baked; contacts overlap by configured penetration — no microscopic gaps for the slicer to “fix” later.
Author geometry where you already do. Support in Support Lab. Slice and expose in the tool you trust for resin and printer I/O.
Install notes
macOS builds need macOS 13 Ventura or newer and are
Developer ID signed and notarized — Gatekeeper should accept them after
a normal DMG install. The Windows portable .exe (Windows 10 / 11, 64-bit)
is still unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn on first run (expected).
Support Lab.app to Applications.
You should not need the old xattr quarantine workaround.
If macOS still blocks the app, use
System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway, then try again
— and tell us so we can check the build.
The portable .exe is unsigned, so Defender SmartScreen blocks the first
run. On German Windows the dialog says
„Der Computer wurde durch Windows geschützt“.
Do not choose Don’t run / Nicht ausführen. After the first allow,
Windows usually stops asking for this file. You can also right-click the
.exe → Properties → check Unblock if present → Apply,
then run again.
v0.3.2 Early access — pick Apple Silicon, Intel Mac, or Windows yourself. Needs macOS 13 or newer, or 64-bit Windows 10 / 11.
Friend build: ~14-day seal from release; when it expires, download a newer build here. macOS builds are signed and notarized.