It wasn't shortly after I built my Printrbot 1405, that I found that printing models with lots of overhangs, wasn't going to work all the time. While 3D printing can do overhangs fairly well on it's own, printing straight lines in mid air while cooling to print some overhangs, it wasn't ideal for many other overhangs. Some overhangs would consist of spots that would have to float on nothing in order to wait for another layer to attach it to the rest of the model. So to remedy this, I had to use supports. When slicing models like this, and adding supports, little did I know there was a lot more to the concept than just adding such to the model.
The first slicer I used to add supports was Slic3r 1.1.6, and while I could print everything fine, getting the supports off the model was another story. Long story short, I ended up using an exacto knife to remove a lot of them, sometimes losing part of the print, and end up with a print that looked pretty chewed up. Obviously this was not a solution I was willing to live with. By this point, I decided to start looking around for other slicers, and methods to make my models look great in the end.
The number one solution for supports in the 3D printing world is Skeinforge. I spent a little over an hour trying to get a good working configuration, before putting it on the back burner. I'm still looking forward to getting a configuration setup for this with my 1405. When I do, I will definitely post my settings, and how I came up with each an every one. The reason being is that I couldn't find a single reference to Skeinforge settings when using a Printrbot, and second because while the documentation is fairly straightforward, it's written for a engineer, and requires a good amount of math to tweak it perfectly. So while this is considered the best solution for supports, I have yet to vouch for that accusation.
When I took a break from Skeinforge, I tried out a few more ideas. The first was a nice application called Meshmaker, buy Autodesk. This app is completely free, but written to interface with a Makerbot Replicator. Even without a Makerbot, you can add their own custom supports to your models in Meshmaker, and then export them to STL. It has a few other nice features for 3D printing, but supports being the main one. While the supports were pretty nice, and easy to remove, it still wasn't perfect. I was still left with some marks from having to cut the supports off. Still, I keep it in my repertoire for certain models.
Lastly, I ended up doing a full circle, and going back to Slic3r. This time I found that many Silc3r users found that the supports from version 0.9.10b were a lot easy to remove. I didn't really understand how they could be so different between versions, but I went ahead and sliced a model with the older version, using the same settings as the newer version. After I finished my print that was covered in supports, it was very surprising to see that they could literally be "brushed off". Each support was very easy to remove, and even the hardest ones I didn't have to use anything more than my fingers.
TL;DR Summary
So to summarize, if you are looking for a good slicer to add supports to your 3D prints, use Skeinforge (by popular demand), but until you get a working configuration, use Slic3r 0.9.10b for support slices.
Slic3r Support Settings*
Pattern: Rectilinear
Pattern Spacing: 4mm
Pattern Angle: 0
Interface Layers: 1
Interface Pattern Spacing: 4mm
*You can probably set these to work better, but all my config tweaking time is going towards Skeinforge.
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