When I load this into Prusa Slicer, it won't add supports even though I've chosen to add supports everywhere. I trimmed the model down to do a test print of the difficult part, and this is what it looks like in slicer.
I thought by choosing Supports Everywhere it would handle this but it's not, and the model print is messed up. I'm very new to printing, so I'm not sure what I should do to fix it.
Did you try panting on supports where you specifically want them?
I'm pretty new to this, so I'm learning as I go. I know that's a thing you can do, but I thought by clicking "Supports Everywhere" it would automatically do that for me. When I clicked Supports Everywhere it added that green rectangle you can see under the male extrusion on the right side. But it still didn't seem to do anything when I printed this test piece. If I'm manually painting supports, how does it work? Do I paint the surface underneath the overhang? (e.g. the floor on the right side, the bottom part of the female connector on the left side?) Or do I paint them on bottom of the overhang itself? (downward facing surface on the bottom of the male connector, downward facing surface on the top part of the female connector?) Or on all surfaces that the support will touch? (downward facing surface of male connector + left wall, entire interior of groove on female connector)?
When paint tool is selected, all you'll see is the one part you're working with, you can rotate how ever you want to paint wherever you want.
You can also turn on smart (paint?) and set tolerances, then clicking a surface will paint as much as the tolerances dictate
Why not lay it down on the flat side so it doesn't need supports?
Good question. I’m not showing the whole model. I did a small cutout of it as a test since this is the difficult part and I wanted to see how it would print quickly. No matter which side I lay it on there will be overhang
Make sure support generation is actually ticked in the settings (not just the drop-down), especially if you're using a lot of custom profiles. You may need to set slicer to advanced or expert mode to see all the settings