>>34668
>no im afraid adding a mere 1mm layer makes it way more rigid
I'm not sure I understand exactly what you are doing(printing), so this might not fit, but, as a general rule try to make everything you print (after you get the shape you want)a "mold". Not the finished product. Why? Filament is weak unless you spend a fortune on picky hard to print stuff. Mold materials, as you stated, are cheap in comparison and the mold can be thin, with honey comb or slat supports on the outside to strengthen the mold. The outside supports could also act as print supports.
The counter to this is, it's damn difficult to get the object into mold form for printing. I suspect, somewhere, there's software to make negatives of whatever you are printing. I haven't got to that point yet. I know there are negatives of basic shapes you can enter into another shape, like a erasing negative mold object brush if you can imagine that. If you could make the, let's say, face, then push it into a block as a negative mold brush...that block would be the mold.
Once you print the mold you wax it or use some other mold release then you can experiment with all sorts of materials you pour, put, push into the mold.
I'm willing to bet once you have this negative mold brush, or shell creation task thought out and the actions needed in software to do it then it would be fairly fast and routine to do this.
Kiwi lite a neuron in my brain when he talked about this using meshes. He talked about how fast it as to make them and thin shells. You could do the same with this molds. Print fast, use less material and rapidly printing prototypes is the key to rapid advancement.
A quick idea I found about NASA chain mail. Some people are printing these sideways. The faces of the chainmail are vertical, then stacking them side by side, with one side of the loops being on the floor.
I could see how this could get you far better resolution and pack way more chainmail in the same space. Possibly you could print one layer, then have another over the first, and another, etc. This is if you could work out the supports so that they could be removed without screwing up the whole thing. One layer with vertical faces I know can be done.
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