anthonyt

Was the ultra-clear PFA slippery enough to allow your filament through?

Thanks for your reply. I intend on printing a larger model with fine details and do not want to design all supports in myself, especially for all changes. I have already tried the "expert settings" for support (shown on the right side window of the screen capture). All sensible ranges have been tried (i.e. from 0, 0.01 ... 1,10) for each settable parameters, and none of them extend the support up to the middle block. There seems to be a problem with Cura creating a support structure for small items. Doubling the scale of my model allows Cura to build the support structure. This model is currently not printable with the Cura-sliced gcode. I have tried Slic3r on my small model and that full support is built, now I am trying to get the rest of that gcode ported over to work on the UM.

I am having difficulty getting a full support structure under all overhanging parts in my small test model. Here is a screenshot showing that a large overhang is missing under the largest middle section: Are there some special settings to get full support structures under every piece of the model that overhangs? The model exists here if you'd like to test it: http://unihedron.com/projects/ultimaker/overhangtest.stl

From this thread: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/3713-cura-13112-ignores-minimal-layer-time/ lluminarti says: Expert -> Open Expert Settings -> Cool Head Lift I can confirm that this setting greatly improves the look of the sphere top! Almost no blobbing.

tHANKS Thank you very much for that workaround, it worked perfectly on Cura 14.09: Tools -> "Print all at once". Load one model. Right click on model and "multiply object". Tools -> "Print one at a time". File -> "Reload Platform". Now I can print a full platform of objects one at a time.

Unfortunately, that did not solve my problem of fitting 12 parts on the platform. And, it seems to have exaggerated the problem of manual placements; when only two parts are on there (like in my picture above, Y axis movements on one part causes the other close part to move very oddly. Moving one part away slightly (in the Y direction) causes both to move to the front of the build plate or the other part to move closer to the moving part.

Thank you for the confirmation. Bug submitted here: https://github.com/daid/Cura/issues/978

Thank you for the explanation. Your orange circle is on the Y axis, and the green circle on the X axis. The fault exists in my tests where Y-axis manual movements cause extra wasted space to be added. Only X-axis manual movements obey the proper outline overlap rule. Do you agree with me that there is a bug with manual-placement in that it does not use the auto-placement rule set on the Y-axis?

That sounds great! (I'm running on Linux). Would you mind trying my model and auto-place 12 of them on your build platform? Here is the link to my STL file: http://unihedron.com/projects/modelview/models/top4x1.stl

That's not the problem. I tried it anyway and it did not help. The problem is that manual placement considers the gray area of surrounding objects instead of only considering the actual part shape. I think there are two bugs/feature-requests: Manual-placement should only use adjacent part shapes, not adjacent part-gray-area (or whatever it is called). Auto-placement should allow all empty space to be utilized on the platform. See my example above that should fit 12 parts but instead leaves a hole.

Sure "all at once" will solve this problem, but if printing fails part way through, then all parts are garbage.

Autoplace properly allows interpenetration of one gray area into another gray area as long as one gray are does not penetrate another part shape. Why are autoplaced parts moved FARTHER away from eachother when a slight manual movement of one part AWAY causes the other part to mover FURTHER AWAY? Are you saying this is normal behaviour? This seems like a bug to me.

Thank you for your comments. I am "printing one at a time". I tried "importing one more item" and autoplace moved every other piece to weird locations including off the build plate instead of putting that piece where it would fit in the corner, see image below: The gray shadow seems much smaller than the apparent Cura rule for manual placement. Please try it for yourself. Everytime I move a part so the gray area is still 1cm away from the first part (and its skirt), the first part part jumps 1cm further away. In fact, try this: Place one part on the build plate. Multiply that one part 1 copy (a second part will be placed). Then grab that second part and move it 0.5cm away from the first part and notice that the first part moves even further from the second part as shown in the image below. Therefore, manual placement does not observe the same rules as autoplace. Rotating parts does not help in my case. I agree that I am trying to cram a lot onto the plate, but there have been times when autoplace put a part in that bottom corner and left another location free, so I know it can be placed there. This makes me think there are differences with the autoplace and manual-place spacing rules. I think I know the problem now; Manual-place erroneously uses the gray area as the boundary for "all" parts even though it should only use the gray area of one part to the surrounding actual part shapes, and Autoplace only uses the gray area of one part at a time to the actual neighbouring parts (as it should) except for some locations like in my example of that corner part.

I am trying to fill up the platform (using the right-click multiply-object feature in Cura 14.09) with parts that would seem to normally allow 12 pieces on the platform, but only 11 are allowed (warning reported: "Could not create more than 10 items"). See screenshot below. Then while trying to manually move the parts around, many of the other parts jump to very odd locations including overlapping eachother. Any ideas/solutions on how to fill the build platform completely are very welcome.

Thanks. I understand now. I guess the infill does not affect those bumps. I put it back at 100% infill and could not get the bumps that you had. I also reduced the filament diameter setting from 2.85 to 2.50 and the only effect was to have a much thicker object. I am using Cura 10.04-RC1. I am not sure that I can help you but am glad that you got rid of the bumps / nodules. Can you share with us the exact changes you made to your settings? I also noticed you used a different colour plastic ... that might be a factor also.