yellowshark

This is on 14.01. Once you have loaded your model, before you duplicate it, you have to set the setting; once duplicated the setting cannot be changed as far as I can see. So, load model, got to Tools menu and you will see both options, select the one you want, then duplicate the model. I have just tried 14.03 and it seems to let you change the setting after duplicating - I say seems because I have not tried to print. Maybe I am wrong but above is certainly my recollection on 14.01.

Hi Jonny, no problem my friend. It is very good of you to have revisited the problem and tried it yourself and gracious of you to apologise. For my part I also apologise to you for the terseness of my reply, not appropriate but frustration overcame me. I guess it is not dissimilar to the Cuban missile crisis . And you have saved me some work as I downloaded the latest software yesterday and was going to test it today thinking that maybe my problem was a 14.01 thing and it had been corrected in the later releases. It just shows that different uses of the software can cause misunderstanding. How many people multiple print a "large" number of copies - using nylon - using print one at a time? Not very many I suspect, indeed maybe only one!

I am also an ex software developer, again maybe so what. It might be useful but overall I am not in favour of a voting system for decision making. It would be churlish to think that the CURA developers/owners/authors/strategists – whomever – do not have the best interests of the users at heart. They are the custodians of the software and are the people who know where they want to take the software and therefore, at the detail level, really are the only ones who can make those decisions. My issue that caused this whole fracas is a good example. My problem is multiple object printing using nylon. How many other forum members multiple print with nylon? Very very few I would guess. So zero votes in favour. On the other hand the Cura strategists might have a plan to make CURA the best nylon printing software on the planet.

Hi Axel, this is a subject I have been focussing on in recent weeks. It is quite important for some work we are hoping we will get. I suspect this may not be particularly useful but so far… I tried reading a pic file with Cura and then saving the Cura rendering as an STL file. For whatever reason I cannot get Solidworks to process the file: I need to pursue this deeper We needed to be able to process an EPS (vector drawing file) but Solidworks does not read them. So I downloaded a trial of Adobe Illustrator which reads EPS files and writes AI files which Solidworks can read (allegedly). But I cannot get Solidworks to open the AI file – I need to call Solidworks support this week. Also AI will output DWG&DXF files but I had only partial success with those. Although I do think that was as a result of fount incompatibilities which in theory can be managed. I have read that AI can let the designer draw in 3D so it could be a good method for artwork although at this stage I have no idea if .ai files would hold information that would allow a 3D modelling software package to render the result in 3D. Unfortunately AI will be a dubious solution for most at 500-600 euros p.a. Like you the only success we have had so far is to take a .png file and outline it in Solidworks. It was artwork rather than a real photograph but we got a good result with about 30 minutes of outlining. Next step is to try embossify.com!! If I get anywhere in the next few weeks I will repost – otherwise I will have given up!

Thanks for that George, certainly agree that one man's rose may be another's thorn. My view is with Anon, ultimately the developers will decide whether it is a fair and useful request that warrants the investment in time.

Oh well NIck, I suppose it takes one to recognise one. All I want to do is to use an existing good feature, which is not just present in Cura, for what is was designed to do. Daid, requesting a change is not seeking to dictate development. I am sure you are experienced in software development on a commercial scale and you will know I am sure that users submit requests for software change/correction for a huge variety of reasons. Equally the owners/authors of the software will accept or reject those requests again for a variety of reasons. What the vast number of software development teams have to deal with is that they do not have the resources to test their software far enough to prevent bugs - accepting that zero defect software is a holy grail - particularly true in software like Cura which is tailorable by the user and of course used across a variety of hardware/firmware configurations. .

Hi can you please advise how a customer can submit a Cura change request.

Well different cultures between the countries I guess. On the few other manufacturer user group forums I frequent (not 3D), one addresses questions to employees by name, if known, or to the company in general maybe by department. The individuals represent the Companies not themselves on the forums and answer accordingly unless stating in the answer that it is a personal view. I will repost accordingly.

Can you please provide us with information on your settings for your 1st layer. Bed temp., print speed, layer depth, extruder temp. Are you sing the bed or do you have glass/fibre plate fitted. Did you use anything to improve adhesion - tape, glue, hairspray etc.Were you using a brim, how many lines. Have you been through the bed levelling process? You are probably suffering poor adhesion. Did the areas where the blobs were show the filament to be raised off the bed? How well did the filament lay down on the next few layers?

Hi Nick thanks for that. Could you just explain a bit on how that affects it. I ask because, and my memory is a bit hazy on this, I think the gantry setting may have been zero but I had to enter gantry settings in order to be able to set the option “print one at a time”, which I wanted to do for this print s it was commercial. I guess also I am struggling to see a connection between gantry settings and why Cura would choose to assign individual skirts around each copy of the model (as it did for me ) or choose to assign one skirt around the group of models.

Hi Daid, if I have this wrong then sorry, but I do not think I have it wrong. Your moniker gives the very strong impression that you work for Ultimaker. You write software for Ultimaker. If you do not work for Ultimaker then my apologies to Ultimaker. But I am sure you do and if you do, whether you like it or not, as an employee of the Company then participating on this Ultimaker user forum you represent the culture, the values and the service of that Company. The very least you should do, in bold type, is to make it clear to all that your participation is as a private individual and any views you have or comments you make are not associated with or representative of Ultimaker's policies and operations. If that IS the case I would appreciate it if you could advise how a user formally requests a software change request with Ultimaker as maybe the forum is not the best way to do it.

Robert, you are of course right, clearly I was not happy but should have bitten my lip maybe. Actually I do the same as you, I nearly always manually extrude at least 30mm of filament before starting. But I do then have to wait for the bed to rise to the printing position and it also often takes several cm for the filament to get sticking to the bed, so I always like to have a decent size of skirt so that I know that when it moves to the print position everything is settled. Also like you I avoid brims where possible, particular on the piece that led to my request. The top oval edge and the bottom oval edge are filleted to give a nice smooth rounded edge. Using a brim makes the bottom edge sharp and would require a lot of sanding/filing to get it smooth again. On one model maybe, but this was a production run for a client and it was not possible to use a brim = more printing cost or smoothing = more manual finishing cost. But yes I think you are right, if one was using a brim then extending the brim would be good for laying down the filament as long as in surface area it was no bigger then the skirt, which in my case would I think have been OK - although I did reduce the skirt a bit to try and help with the fitment.

Wow I have not see layer delamination like that. But I agree with Jonny, 100mm/s is awfully fast especially if you have any sort of blockage. I would chop the speed at least to 50mm/s and see what difference there is.

Hi Conz thanks for that. I have had a quick look but will read thoroughly over the weekend and see if there is anything there I can use - I do not use combing. Having read it I do wonder if setting the minimum travel distance on retraction to 0 might help but for me that causes other issues as I tried it before and got multiple retractions per second which chewed up the filament and blocked the extrusion path. I know if I drop the speed to 20mm/s it does at least for the most part disappear but why would I want to that when I can run it in Slic3r at 60mm/s without a problem!

Excuse me JB but your last sentence is out of order. Of course I tried to move the objects, several time, to try and fit in the extra ones I wanted to have on the bed. All that happens though (at least for me) is that there is a shadow box around the object and when that shadow box hits the shadow box of another object, they do not overlay, the adjacent object is moved, in my case of the build platform. Please go back to my original and post please tell me where I was complaining? Show it to me and I will apologise to you, whoever. Don't be an idiot and wrongly confuse me about complaining - about a problem that does not exist. Of course it exists, I am seeing it. I posted a simple polite request to fix something that did not seem right to me, was impacting me and was illogical NOW, if it exists for me because I am doing something wrong then be constructive not arrogant. Politely tell me I am wrong and explain to me how I do it. All I get is a terse arrogant response from Ultimaker, followed up by you defending them

Daid, fine I was just trying to be helpful, unlike yourself. Forget about the option, just write the code properly and remove the multiple skirts which are a design error and use a single skirt - which is what should be happening and what your customers want.

Nick on your first point: having a skirt around an object increases its surface area. If for example you can get 6 copies onto the bed, with reasonable tightness, then with the skirt replicated around each copy means there is no longer room on the bed to achieve that. Yes to a certain extent you may be able to help the situation by reducing the radius of the skirt but that only goes so far. And, with my limited experience on t-glasse nylon, you really do not want to do that as you need a really decent sized skirt to get the filament sticking to the bed. Sorry I do not understand your 2nd idea re the changing the print head size, perhaps you could rephrase Cura does not give you a group skirt - that is my point!

On mine it is the movement for multiple walls that causes it. As the nozzle moves from the current wall to the next outer wall it drops a small bump of filament. So you end up with a small line at right angles to the flow of the filament. On Slic3r I tried it with option of printing the outside wall first and moving inwards instead of outwards: no bumps

Oh dear those pics make me want to gripe. Why are Ultimaker spending all this time redesigning a perfectly good GUI instead of sorting all these basic bugs such as retraction not working on the first layer and not being able to print a curved surface without leave blobs all over the place.

Hi guys, no I did not see the house being printed - which is why I did say right at the end about it being a "tall storey". Sorry guys that is English vernacular for " a lie", nothing to do with skyscrapers No I did not think to look under the table, I was picking myself up off the floor after seeing the table legs! Yup the ground floor ceiling showed the typical hanging loops of unsupported filament across a long bridge, so safe to say that there is nothing sensational there. The roof did not overhang the exterior walls, it sat on them, so you could argue that was a bit of a cheat. And indeed maybe the table was printed separately and the guy fibbed, unintentionally or not. I must say that the more I think about it I just cannot believe the table was printed in situ - it just had to be printed upside down on a separate run. There were quite a few other objects on display with tricky geometries that were extremely good and far better than those I saw at the show last year on the same company's stand. Earlier I was chatting with another attendee and I said to him at the time that the house was not printed by the Cube - I saw them at the CTC show last Autumn and was seriously unimpressed with the results I saw. So yes I was rather surprised, to say the least, when I subsequently discovered it had been printed by the new version. At the end of the day the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. It was stated that release is 6-8 weeks, I might just go back for a personal demo with a couple of my nasty STL files - and take my camera too!

OK this if following on from the Multiple objects with brim thread. That logic makes sense. If you are using a brim then you want added adhesion and so adding a brim to all copies makes 100% sense. Doing the same with a skirt does not make sense. A skirt has one use - to ensure the extruder pressure is equalised and that filament is flowing well. If you select multiple objects then the sensible solution is to put one skirt around the group of objects. The current method of putting a skirt around each member of the group means that you significantly reduce the number of objects that can be placed on the print bed. If nothing else can we please have an option to assign a single skirt. On a similar subject, can we please have an option, like Slic3R, to print a skirt when a brim is selected. If the model is small, then without a skirt, before you know it the brim has not seated properly, filament all over the build area and a failed print..

Just love the "plate" at the rear! How many times has my print started in the bottom left when I thought I had placed it in the top right

Yup I have the same issue too. Cura seems to be is very poor on these curved surfaces unless you slow the speed right down (using 14.01). If it wasn't for its garbage retraction I probably would use Slic3r more again - conversely Cura's retraction is awesome in comparison.

You need more layers at the top when you reduce your infill %. If I am running 40% - my norm - then I find that 0.6mm is fine, although with .3 layers I go to 0.9mm as I am just used to always using a minimum of 3 layers - my Slic3r background. With 20% infill you need several more layers to get a solid layer laid down for the last two or three to sit on. I cannot be precise as I rarely go beyond 40%. Trial and error will get you there. I have never seen pillowing. Most of the time my fans are running at 70% by 0.6mm unless I have some nasty overhangs at the bottom of the geometry, in which case from layer two the speed is 20mm/s and fans 100%

I went to a 3D Systems seminar/demo day today – primarily to check out their EU 350 scanner. I saw one of their true colour printers (only 6 million colours mind you) printing a large bottle with powdered nylon, I think, with a print time of 3 hours. I guess it would have taken us 6 hours at least. But, close your eyes, in that 3 hours they had 7 bottles on the bed and could have fitted probably 10. So yes I am saving up, at EU 900,000.00 it’s a snip J Getting back to the real World I saw a very detailed house, probably 1:100 scale, maybe a bit bigger, printed by their unreleased and not quite ready Cube3. By a margin as a big as from here to the moon it was the finest piece of 3D printing I have ever seen from our type of printers. The walls had clearly been surfaced mapped with a brick pattern and were awesome. A set of table and chairs, printed at the same time, could be seen and the legs were no more than 0.8mm, 0.4mm?, and were absolutely pristine. The roof, red, also had a great tile pattern, again gobsmackingly executed. Great finely detailed doors etc. Lots of different elevations. As I said, I was a bit like Toad seeing his first car, unbelievable. The whole thing had been done in a single print without using support. The ready but unreleased Cube Pro is the same printer but with a larger bed, fully enclosed and setup to print PLA/ABS/Nylon. Cube 3 with one extruder is around Eu1000 raising to Eu 1900ish for 3 extruders. Fully specced Pro version with 3 extruders is I think high Eu3000s. Now I know their materials are expensive but if that quality represents lack of failures, the price drops seriously. Now of course the whole thing might have been a very tall story but…