Support Removal Difficulty Estimator
Material, support style, and interface gap all stack together to decide whether supports snap off clean or fight you the whole way.
Why PETG is the hardest common material to support
PETG is naturally stringy and slightly tacky when hot, which makes it fuse to support material more aggressively than PLA's cleaner, more brittle release. TPU is worse still — being flexible, its supports deform instead of snapping, which makes clean separation difficult regardless of settings.
Tree and organic supports touch less surface
Tree-style supports contact the model at small, deliberately placed tips rather than broad grid walls, so there's simply less contact area to separate and less surface marking left behind — a meaningful advantage on any material, but especially the trickier ones.
Interface gap is the setting worth tuning first
A larger gap between the support and the model (or a dedicated support interface material/pattern) makes removal dramatically easier at the cost of a slightly rougher surface where the support touched — increasing this gap by even 0.05–0.1mm is often the single biggest lever for stubborn supports, before changing anything else.