Xeddog

Wow. MAJOR brain fart on my part and I should have known better. I made the setting visible and it was indeed checked. After UN-checking and re-slicing, I get exactly what I was after. To make matters worse, I sliced this same piece for printing on a different printer, and the towers were not present. At that point I was fairly certain it was a slicer setting, but a the time I did not have time to investigate and it slipped my mind. So thank you very much for resolving my issue.

I know about the different settings, and I think I actually understand what they do. The bottom line is that I think the Layer Height setting in the shell section should be a hard maximum layer height limit to keep from exceeding what your nozzle is capable of. The screenshot is just an example, and frankly is probably beyond my printers capability, but it does illustrate what I am talking about. I would be attempting to smooth out the top dome part of the model without affecting the 0.2mm layer height of the body. With a maximum variation of 0.16mm, that gives me 0.04mm layers at the top of the dome which is good (at least it would be if my printer could actually do it). But the lower cylindrical body also gets the 0.16 variation in the other direction, or 0.36mm which is very NOT good even if my printer could do it with a .4mm nozzle.

Not using towers.

I had to look that one up. "Support Horizontal Expansion" was defaulted to 0mm.

I have been using Cura for a long time, and this has been an issue for a while. As the subject says, supports going up to nohwere. I have attached two screenshots, and the STL file. One screenshot is the part Pre-slice in the Prepare pane. The other is after the slice with Supports everywhere in the Preview pane. There are three support towers that go up to nothing. I see quite a few of these in many different models of many different shapes. To make matters worse, it is difficult to get support blockers in place that will actually remove them. Placement of support blockers has to be very precise, and most often also removes needed support material in the process. But the main question is - why are those supports being generated at all? EDIT: I am using Cura 4.6.2 at the moment, but as mentioned, I have had this problem for several past releases. High Rize Cable Manager.stl

Also check machine settings to make sure "Origin at Center" is NOT checked. And in the FWIW department, you can increase bedsize dimensions to 360x360 with no ill effects. I have been running mine like that for a few months.

I was just trying to get a better handle on adaptive layers so I loaded a model to play with. I sliced it with adaptive layers off to see what I got. Then started changing one Adaptive layer parameter at a time and re-slicing to see the result. I noticed that when using adaptive layers, the layer height parameter specified in the Quality section is used as a midpoint and not a hard limit. So on this piece, layer height was set to 0.2mm in the Quality section at the top, and when I sliced using Adaptive Layers, the height on the curved surfaces decreased as expected. What was not expected is that layer height for straight parts was increased a like amount. In one test, with a setting for layer height of the 0.2 mentioned, curved portions of the model had layer height decreasing down to 0.4mm, but the straight vertical parts INCREASED to .36mm. That was too much for a .4 nozzle. So did I miss a setting that limits the amount of layer height increase? If that is the way this works, then I would like to suggest an additional parameter that specifies a hard limit for height increase to keep from creating a file that is doomed to fail when printing.

Thanks for the reply. I know about the import/export option, but even that is still a pita, and still incomplete as the machine profiles are not included. Just make one small tweak to a a profile and then you would have export it, then go to each of the other computers and import it. That is, of course, if you remember to do it. It would just be great just to have one place to store them and all instances of Cura have access to them.

I have been digging around looking to see if Cura has a configuration option to specify where profiles are saved and cannot find anything. I run Cura on one of three different computers depending on just how lazy I am. One is a Windows 10 Pro machine, and two others are Ubuntu Linux machines. It's a rpita trying to keep it all up to date on the three computers, so it would be GREAT if there was a directory specification or something that would allow me to store all of this on my NAS for use by all computers. Things like filament profiles, printer profiles (including start and end gcodes), print settings, plugin settings . . . all of it. Is there currently any way to accomplish this? I am assuming that this doesn't exist, but personally I think it would be a good upgrade for a (near) future release.

That would be sweet.

I'm still having problems with some settings that just disappear and just will not display. Latest example - Print temperature and print temperature initial layer. I tried everything I could think of and finally wound up recreating the profile.

I found out why skin overlap wasn't showing. Well, not why exactly but . . . In the Shell section of the settings window, if I have top/bottom pattern set to Concentric, the skin overlap disappears. Change top/bottom pattern to either lines or zigzag, skin overlap re-appears.

Thank you for your response. What isn't broken in windows! 🤬 I wonder if there are enough people that would be interested in something like this to make a formal feature request???? Wayne

Does Cura have any command line options for startup? The example that comes to mind is that I usually have two instances of Cura running, one for each of two printers. I have to start Cura twice, and when they are launched they both have the same printer activated. I would like to be able to have a launcher icon for each printer so I wouldn't have to change one of them. Both printers use the same sources for stl files, but each printer has it's own destination file for gcode files so it would be good to keep all of that info too.

No it does not. I have removed/re-installed Cura, made the settings visible/hidden several times, restart Cura, not to mention expand/compress the settings sub-section. it just does not show up.

I have had this problem with a couple of versions, including 4.3 and now 4.4. I make the skin overlaps visible, both percentage and/or amount, and they just don't display in the settings menu on the right side. It happens on both my Windows 10 Pro machine, and my Ubuntu Linux machine. Any ideas on how to get it to display?

Thanks. That's what I thought. I just wanted to make sure.

I was just looking through my Marlin configuration and see that Arc Support is used to process arcs via G2 and G3 gcode commands, and Bezier Curves via G5. I have looked through several of my Cura generated gcode files and there are no G2, G3, or G5 commands in any of them. One was a cylinder so I would have expected many arcs in that one. So if Cura doesn't generate these codes I can disable them in Marlin and save a little memory. Wayne

I keep getting this panel at Cura 4.3 startup on my Ubuntu 18.04 Linux machine. The problem is, I don't have any profiles named Mini or Mini_user. I used to have a profile called Mini, but it was deleted long ago, possibly even before installing 4.3 but I could be mistaken about that. I would really rather not go through the hassle of backup/restore for all my profiles, etc., because something always gets dropped, or it just goes horribly wrong. Is there an easy way to get rid of this panel at startup?

Attached is a screen shot of the printer settings for CR-10S on the left, and a custom FFF for the same printer on the right. Even though there is a huge difference between some of the speeds, the maximum X and Y speeds are still below the 100mm/s max that I am trying to use. Acceleration is 500 for the CR-120S definition, which is a little slower than the 800 - 1000 I normally use, but still doesn't seem like near enough to account for a threefold increase in print time. Default XY Jerk is 10 which is what I normally use anyway.

I have a model that I use to see how my printer is doing. It is a 100mm tall cylinder with a 20mm OD and 10mm ID. Today, I decided to run it on two different printers. One is a CR-10S, and the other is a Monoprice Mini with E3D V6. Slicing the model for the Mini gives me an estimated time of 1hr 29min. Slicing the same model for the CR-10S with almost the same settings gives me an estimated print time of 4hrs 36min. I know these are estimated times, but they were not that far off. I have been through the settings several times, and there is nothing that can account for a 3-fold increase in time for the CR-10S. Speeds are the same (100mm/s), and the acceleration/jerk settings are a little lower on the CR. 1000/10 on the Mini and 800/8 on the CR. Even with the speed set at 100mm/s, my uncalibrated eye says the CR isn't going anywhere near that speed. Any ideas what gives???? Maybe something about incorporating the Creawesome mod? Thanks, Edit: I just created a Custom FFF printer with the same settings as the CR-10S and reran the slice. The estimated time was 1hr 40min. It does look like something in the Creawesome mod.

I use a couple of slicers (mainly Cura), and have just found that I cannot use Copy/Paste in the machine settings. I use Copy/Paste to keep all slicers gcodes common. EDIT: I just found out that ctl-c and ctl-v work using the keyboard. Would still like to mouse it though.

In Layer view, where are the options about what to see like travels, helpers, etc.? EDIT: Nevermind. Found it.

Marlin has a mechanism to prevent cold extrusion. It won't move the extruder unless it is at least 170C, so no grinding the filament. But since you mentioned the preheat commands, I always let Cura insert the appropriate temperature commands ahead of my start gcode so the bed and nozzle were at temperature for printing before my start gcode was processed. At some point, Marlin started letting the nozzle temp drop about 10 degrees (for PLA. ABS was more like 25) while running the G29 bed levelling. The bed temp stays very stable, but the nozzle temp dropped. So I added M109 S{material_print_temperature} ; wait for extruder temp (Note: not layer_0) right after the G29 command so the printer would wait until the nozzle temp was at the correct temp again. This works, but screws up everything. Cura no longer put the M109 command ahead of my start gcode so the nozzle was cold until after the G29 command. I guess this is a good and bad thing. Good in that the nozzle isn't just baking the filament during probing and oozing it out. Bad in that I have to remove this statement if I use another slicer which is a whole other issue (think supports 😡 ). I used a G4 S10 before I found the Cura snippet, but it has to be changed for each print temp. The higher the print temp, the more dwell is needed. Is this the intended way for Cura to work? Wayne

I agree with the eyes comment. Imagine my 70+ year old yes. 🙂 As for the layout, I have been trying the 4.0b2 and I have to say I still prefer the 3.6 style interface. I like your ideas about making the menu floating and dockable. I like that idea a lot. But I also realize this is a slicer and free to boot, and my guess is that the programming staff is . . . not numerous. This is a company that makes their money selling printers, not software, so the emphasis should be on slicing to make their printers perform better, and beautification secondary. And that is my main concern right now as supports for the last couple of releases have been driving me to other slicers for certain models. Like supports for an overhang where the supports start in mid air, or some supports that start on the build plate the way they are supposed to but don't get within several layer thicknesses of the model and are just wasted plastic. And I have had numerous problems with support blocker and custom supports. Wayne