Why don't you use Cura slicer?
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Just coming back to say that I've been making an effort to use Cura more with the latest releases and I'm happy to report that some of my prior complaints have been resolved.
The new bridging parameters especially have been a big help. It's not as plug and play as Slic3r, there are a lot of settings to tweak and tune, which is both good and bad. The defaults worked good for me on short spans, but poorly on longer ones. Somehow Slic3r always seems to automatically do well, but with some more testing I think I will have a good handle on it. With the Tweak at Z plugin, you could vary the bridging settings as dictated by sections of the model. It's not automatic, but I appreciate the configurability.
My next favourite aspect of Cura is the per move type jerk and acceleration settings. It's helped shave quite a bit of time off prints while still maintaining quality where it matters. And the time estimates are more accurate.
Firmware retraction support can be added with a plugin now, but it would be nice to have that in the main release.
The variable layer height functionality is there now and works well, though it is more automated than I'd like.
There is still no small perimeter speed setting to help with holes, but I've found using lower acceleration values works well enough to allow for good small hole performance and still allow for higher speeds on straight perimeters.
My biggest complaint right now is GUI performance and slicing speed. Even using the menu tree can be a frustrating experience at times, and certain models with certain combinations of settings can result in very long slice times. Over 30 minutes at times! My laptop is a top of the line MacBook Pro from 2013. A little dated now, but Slic3r chews through the same model in less than a minute. As I said this is likely due to certain settings causing slicing to slow down so much. Optimizing perimeter order, try different line thicknesses, etc which slic3r lacks. So I am getting what I ask for, but even with default settings slicing is slow enough that enabling auto slicing is just asking for frustration.
All and all it's come a long way since my last list of complaints and I look forward to seeing where it goes from here. This is in no small part thanks to @burtoogle Good work!
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Hi @Phaedrux , thanks for the feedback. With regard to the bridging capabilities, it's really a work in progress and looks to stay that way for some time yet. I still have several PRs (Pull Requests) waiting to be incorporated into Cura related to bridging and a bunch more that provide various other tweaks and bug fixes. The Cura "guardians" seem to be so busy these days that it takes months for any PRs to even get looked at let alone merged so it's a slow old business.
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I've just uploaded the latest version (3.3.1) and am really struggling to get this set up for multiple extruders. I've managed to create a printer with 4 extruders (actually it's a 3 colour but a mixing one so I use 3 tools which are primarily a single colour and a 4th tool which can be any combination). Anyway, that's by to by - as far as Cura is concerned, it's got 4 extruders and I'll sort out the mixing ratios.
I've created a material under "preferences - materials" which is my default PLA for which I use slightly different settings to the "bundled" filaments. That's no problem but under "profiles - material", there is an initial print temperature and a final print temperature which are lower. I want these to be the same. i.e if I print at 195 deg C , I don't want it to start at 185 deg C. I can't see anywhere else to change this other than for each individual profile which uses that filament, rather than in the materials section itself. Not only that, I can't see how to change it globally. That is to say, using the same filament in all 4 extruders, I have to go into each extruder tab and change the initial, and final print temperatures 4 times. Am I missing something?
The real big pain is setting up a profile. I made a duplicate then started changing settings and doing "manage profile - update with current settings" but here is where I run into problems. I've set layer height to 0.3mm and that's what it says under the "global" tab. However, when I click through the tabs for the 4 extruders, the layer height is set to 0.15mm and I can't find any way to change that. When I edit the profile and click through all the extruders, they are all set to 0.3mm but when I update the profile then go into "manage profile" they are all set to 0.15mm. Why doesn't the global setting of layer height get applied to individual extruders ?
Then there are all the other settings. In print set up. For example, under "Shell" I counted about 30 settings. I can't see any way to change these globally for all 4 extruders. I can't believe I have to set say, wall thickness, 4 times. The same for infill - 24 settings but if I'm in "Custom" and change say the infill percentage, it only affects one extruder and I have to click through all 4 tabs and change it 4 times.
Similarly with speeds. I've gone through all 4 extruder tabs and changed all the speeds to either 60 or 50. Then I update the profile using these settings but when I go into manage profile, it shows me the global speeds are 100, 40, 80, 30 and I can't find anywhere to change them.
Has anyone here used Cura with multiple extruders? If so, can you help?
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- No slowdown when printing bridges.
- Too much options.
The difference between theory and practice is less in theory than
the difference between theory and practice in practice.
Expensive tools cannot compensate for lack of experience.
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@dalton said in Why don't you use Cura slicer?:
- No slowdown when printing bridges.
- Too much options.
1 - the options are there to slow down the walls and/or skin when printing bridges.
2 - there's lots of options right now because they are experimental! When we know what is useful and what isn't perhaps the number of options can be reduced or set to good default values. However, as what is a good value for speed/flow/fan, etc. differs from material to material so it's unlikely that all of these options can have defaults that work for all materials/printers/models.
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So, actually I am using Cura from the start (which is not so long ago anyway and I started with 3.2.1). I like it more than any other slicer I tried so far (ideaMaker, Slic3r PE, KISSlicer - I wanted to try IceSL but never got it to work due my ancient graphics card
).The only thing I am missing right now is a feature that I found in ideaMaker and liked a lot: change any setting at a given Z-height. Cura allows to change a few settings through built-in post-processing but I would like to have at least the option to change arbitrary settings. One use-case I had in the past was that I wanted to print a model with low infill at the bottom and 100% infill at a specific area that needed maximum rigidity - possibly but not necessarily going back to a lower infill further up.
I know I had other use-cases but I cannot remember them right now.Manuel
Duet 3 6HC (v0.6) with RPi 4B on a custom Cartesian
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@wilriker said in Why don't you use Cura slicer?:
The only thing I am missing right now is a feature that I found in ideaMaker and liked a lot: change any setting at a given Z-height. Cura allows to change a few settings through built-in post-processing but I would like to have at least the option to change arbitrary settings. One use-case I had in the past was that I wanted to print a model with low infill at the bottom and 100% infill at a specific area that needed maximum rigidity - possibly but not necessarily going back to a lower infill further up.
This is possible via the use of infill meshes. You can change all infill parameters for an arbitrary region within a model, I use that for reinforcing areas around holes like this example:
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@burtoogle Narf! Would I have known this earlier I could have used this for the print that is going on right now
EDIT: At least I know this for the future, thanks.
EDIT2: Good or bad: my print failed so I can now slice it anew with my new knowledge.
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Modifier meshes are the best kept secret of Cura unfortunately. Very useful but a little obtuse. Easier to use than the slic3r modifier meshes at least.
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In cura I don't like the auto gcode calculating, it should be like S3D, once I have my settings dialed in then I can proceed to rendering the Gcode.
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@paboman said in Why don't you use Cura slicer?:
In cura I don't like the auto gcode calculating, it should be like S3D, once I have my settings dialed in then I can proceed to rendering the Gcode.
It's an option, you can turn off the auto-slicing. RTFM, perhaps?
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@burtoogle
really ?
where that option is? -
@paboman it's in the main settings. Auto-slice
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@phaedrux
finally! great, thank you!
