Gero

The pictures shown here show the result you get with the Ultimaker Cura aa0.8 PLA Visual Quality Profile. Ultimaker printer, Ultimaker software and print profile, Ultimaker material, PLA silver. It only took two prints to find out which setting was responsible for this. The "small top/bottom width" setting ensures that only straight lines are printed under new outer geometries that are based on infill. This ensures that unevenness is no longer smoothed out as with zigzag patterns, but instead builds up and stands out through the outer wall. Unfortunately, I have to realise once again that Ultimaker can no longer guarantee that the results will be of the usual quality. New profiles and settings are tried to be adapted to the value judgement regardless of losses, apparently without being tested, as it only took us two prints to find this out. Another project in which we have to explain to the customer that the printing was done with equipment with quality problems. I now consider it lucky that Ultimaker support didn't respond to our enquiry about the Professional Plan and we invested in other equipment instead. In the meantime, we have started the process of selling our Ultimaker print farm. While we used to rely on the reliability of Ultimaker, we can hardly wait to no longer have to deal with Ultimaker's questionable developments.

Here is my thought on this: In what order are the walls printed? You can find the order under the "Walls" tab. "From inside to outside" and "From outside to inside". Cura decided about a year ago that they wanted to be the only slicer that now prints the outermost wall first. In theory, this has somewhat more precise components, but leads to corresponding error patterns occurring during the retractions if the nozzle flow is not immediately present. Therefore, make sure that the sequence is set to "from inside to outside".

I have found the reason why the layers are sometimes printed somewhat irregularly in some print objects and therefore affect the visual quality. Despite the setting of the order for the walls "From the inside to the outside", there are still some layers in some objects where this setting is not applied and the outer wall is printed first.

nice to see that the prime tower is being improved again. unfortunately, i still miss the adjustment that automatically places the prime tower closer to the print object. at the moment, the position still has to be adjusted manually using the x-y coordinates. doesn't the cloud slicer from makerbot also adjust the position of the prime tower? about the plugins, a support painting function would be a great improvement. i'm curious to see what else is coming.

i agree, the new profiles with higher speeds are not quite "ready" yet. if we look at the layer adhesion at the higher speeds or how well several outer walls adhere to each other, our first impression is that the material flow and nozzle temperature still need to be adjusted. otherwise, a strong decrease in the strength of the components is to be expected so far. however, the engineering profiles are working very well so far. simply because printing is still slower here. since the profiles only print a little faster here, there are no problems in this respect. due to the quality of life improvements in 5.5, i'm clearly on 5.5 right now, but i'm only using the engineering profiles for the time being. it runs quite reliably with them.

Printed with Tough PLA Black. Here I have the project file. UMS5_BigSpoolHolder_HalterV1_TPLA_test1.3mf

have also found this. Was printing done with the new Balanced profile? I think with the higher speeds there are still slight problems here. In this case, the material at the 0.8mm nozzle does not have enough time to completely close the layers

Yep, apparently there was an error in the printer configurations. Resetting cura fixed the problem. 👍

Most slicers can now import STEP files. Cura still hides this function behind a paywall. Unfortunately, this is another aspect that makes other manufacturers look more advanced.

@MariMakes sure, here you go. As can be seen in the picture, Tough PLA with the Balanced settings was selected for print core 1. However, the object is printed with the settings of PVA Generic, which is deactivated in print core 2. Hence the long print time of over 9 hours. When I tried to print it this way, the S3 also tried to print the Tough PLA with the PVA Generic temperature. The settings here are 1 to 1 reversed. Although 5 outer walls are set, only 2 are printed, because the PVA Generic has only 2 outer walls set. UMS3_Bodenplatte_Bug.3mf

I just noticed that apparently the settings for print core 1 and 2 are reversed on an Ultimaker S3. For example, to edit the speed, fill or skirt settings in print core 1 on an Ultimaker S3, Ultimaker Tough PLA, I need to change the settings for print core 2 (PVA, which is disabled). Changing the settings for print core 1 has no effect on objects printed with print core 1. Can anyone confirm this?

We have had the same experience with other high-speed printers. It is now well known that the faster you print, the less time the layers have to fuse together properly. Nevertheless, the higher printing speeds are welcome for many projects. I think the engineering profiles still have significantly slower speeds. I would also expect this with the according description. That if I need parts for mechanical loads, these are printed accordingly with the best possible accuracy and strength.

@PaulKuiper Thank you for the reply and the test of the retraction settings. The print images shown were printed with an aa0.4 nozzle and the engineering settings, ergo 0.15mm layer height. We print 90% of everything with the engineering profiles. Since visual quality on parts for customers is also very important to us, we may try the profiles for visual quality more often. The CPE roll was dried in a PrintDryPro3 before printing and then stored in the Material Station. Here, I think we are absolutely following Ultimaker's recommended steps. Regarding the comparison with BambuLab: The printing sequence of the walls is not the same even with the "From inside to outside" setting. Enclosed is a print image of a component with 2 outer walls. Here all inner walls are grouped and finally the outer ones. If the distance between the two outer walls is too large (i.e. if the component were larger), there is a retraction between the two red outer walls and there is either a blob or an under-extrusion in the outer wall. The same part in the Bambu Slicer will be printed differently from the wall order. Here, the walls from the Inner Outer Wall are grouped first, then the walls from the Outer Outer Wall. There is no extrusion break between the outer walls, so printing defects due to extrusion irregularities are not visible.

that cura should slice the walls in the same way?

This was all printed Ultimaker-only. Ultimaker with the Cura 5.5 Beta on an Ultimaker S5 Pro Bundle with Ultimaker CPE Yellow. The nozzles are only cleaned occasionally. I could ramp up our maintenance routine and clean the nozzles more frequently and regularly. I will try this and see if the results improve. Thanks for the advice! However, these problems would not occur so dramatically immediately if the order of the walls were the same as with any other manufacturer in the slicer. I had described the exact printing method of BambuLab in the Cura 5.4 post, where the last two outer walls are always printed together without any interruption, which always creates a full material flow in the nozzle. Under-extrusion due to tough material or retraction will not be visible in the outer wall. In my opinion, for the Ultimaker printers by Bowden extruder the best solution...

@MariMakes I have tried it again with custom parts for a customer, the material here is CPE Yellow from Ultimaker. The error pattern is the same since cura 5.0. The material flow is not 100% at the nozzle here and shows up at the Z-seam with under-extrusion. I can therefore not take any of the standard profiles from Ultimaker without adjusting the settings for simple customer parts, despite Ultimaker printer and Ultimaker materials. I'm afraid I can neither understand nor confirm the opinion of the printing experts at Ultimaker that these would work.

The beta certainly makes a good impression. However, I am still a bit skeptical about the print speed. The mechanical construction of the Ultimaker printers is, in my opinion, not stable and stiff enough that the speeds can simply be increased without some loss of print quality. I will try it out, of course. Grouping the walls seems to look good in the first preview of print objects. But the print order here is still on "outside to inside". i had understood the answers from the github post on this topic that this should actually be changed again?

Setting the skirt height back to 1 for each new print is no longer necessary when switching to cura 5.3 or 4.13 for the time being 🙂 but it's standard settings like this, which i have to adjust with every new print, that make using cura unnecessarily inconvenient in the meantime.

All the better if both are fixed in the upcoming version. I had understood the answer in fact only on the order. On the Github page seems to be addressed in indeed also the togetherness of the walls. However, another alpha has not yet been released by Ultimaker. Releases · Ultimaker/Cura (github.com)

Thanks for the answer! However, I'm afraid that simply changing the basic setting won't help too much. Part of the problem is that all the inner walls are printed first, one after the other, and finally all the outer ones. On a simple sheet with multiple holes, this results in each hole being approached multiple times. Since here, too, a re-retraction is first carried out for each outer wall, the typical under-extrusion error pattern occurs, since here the complete material flow is not achieved directly after the retraction. To prevent this, the walls of a closed geomembrane must be printed one behind the other, as in the earlier cura 4 versions, so that a uniform material flow is finally present at the nozzle for the outer wall.

Hi MariMakes, I tried to write a detailed post above about our current problems with Cura 5.4. We have been experimenting with cura 5.4 for some time, with cura versions from 5.0 onwards in general and just feel like we have to trick around more and more "hurdles". In fact, I still have to mention the wall order thing as the biggest shortcoming at the moment. I have now spoken directly with several dealers and another manufacturer and all said the normal order is of course the "inside to outside". In fact, I've been using cura 4.13 more and more again lately for our orders on the Ultimakers. Do you know if there is any change/optimization planned for the next Cura version?

I'll take the liberty of stating that there are more than one or two changes that currently prevent us from using cura 5.4 for our printer farm and service.

I still think Ultimaker's decision to reverse the default order of walls is counterproductive. Here I have comparison images of an Ultimaker S5 and a Bambulab X1. Same objects, same filament PET-CF. Tested here on the Ultimaker with the new material profiles for PET-CF. The problem with the Ultimakers is clearly the order of the walls. The PET-CF settings in particular amplify the disadvantage of Bowden extruders: After a retraction, the 100% flow rate of material is not immediately present at the nozzle. Combined with the Arachne Engine, in which smaller details such as lettering are printed with individual small mini-extrusions, this inevitably leads to poor results. Even switching the wall order to the original value seems to work only conditionally well at the moment, as Cura first prints all inner walls and then jumps from outer wall to outer wall one by one. This behavior was also better solved in Cura 4.13 last time. We now have a divided printer farm, consisting of Ultimakers and BambuLab printers. I can name the following differences in the slicer that significantly improve the print quality on the BambuLab printers, which could also be applied to the Ultimaker printers: - the Arachne Engine can be switched on and off with a simple click. The Arachne Engine is a super improvement in wall generation, but not for all objects. As with most settings, it depends on the geomitry whether they help or make things worse. It is definitely recommended for writing on smooth surfaces in Z direction. For writing on outer walls rather less. -The print order is from inside to outside by default. -Two contiguous walls are always printed. This is the second most important difference between the two slicers at present. For each outer wall, no matter how many holes the object has, the last inner wall and the outer wall are always printed together. In this way, two wall lines are always printed in one continuous extrusion. Important side feature here is that both wall lines have the same Z-seam, so there is no retraction within these two wall lines. In this way, the nozzle achieves full and uniform material flow for each outer wall, and thus no extrusion unevenness is generated. BambuLab does this because of the high printing speed possible. Due to the direct extruder, this would not necessarily be necessary at slower speeds. But especially the Ultimaker printers have this very necessary. All the previous settings (the combining for example) were used to create as little retraction as possible. Therefore, I don't understand why settings have now been made that have the exact opposite effect here. We print all sorts of different materials. Currently in the portfolio we have PLA, Tough-PLA, PETG, ABS, Nylon, PC, BVOH, PET-CF, PA6-CF and a few special others. It's really only PLA that can be reliably printed with the "new" wall order. With all other materials, the average print quality of our objects has become poorer. I'm sorry if it seems like I'm blowing off steam here. I can't deny a certain frustration with worse parts and constantly trying to adjust settings. The fact that my one request to Ultimaker support was ignored doesn't really help either... I still think our Ultimaker printers are really very reliable devices that can do a great job. Now if we could just get back to our 4.13 print quality with the features of Cura5.4...

i can only support this at the moment. we still have our ultimakers running, but have currently put the purchase of new ultimakers on hold. we started testing 4 of the bambu printers and even though they have their quirks, the print results are very good indeed. With the first larger test objects from petg, the bambu printers are faster and cleaner in the print image. only the fibre-reinforced materials are a little tricky to fine-tune at the moment. but even here we are already getting better results than the ultimakers with successful prints, mostly due to the direct extruder. since 2016, we have only ever used ultimakers. in retrospect, however, it has to be said that nothing has really changed with the ultimaker formula. Just two weeks ago, I asked if there was a way to get the Pro Subscription model for the digital factory without many of the Report features for all printers at an adjusted price because we only needed certain features. No answer later, we tested the bambu printers. Even though the cloud solution unfortunately does not offer what the ultimaker digital factory offers, I currently have to take a workaround with ultimaker anyway because I only have limited resources here. in addition, since version 5.0 of ultimaker and cura, i don't have the feeling that i can print simple objects with the standard settings. i always have to make certain changes in the settings. even with a small button from pla. there is no "load, slice, print" workflow here. but i have this with prusa and bambu using almost the same slicer with very reliable results. there are just a lot of little things that you notice when you start having other printers next to ultimaker again. the ultimaker s7 in the pro bundle (we still have s5) is definitely still a really well-rounded overall package. the material station can also have its quirks, but overall it's better than other solutions (although it's also much more expensive). nevertheless, i can't print all materials equally well due to the bowden extruder, and cura causes minor cramps in the otherwise smooth workflow due to always small but necessary adjustments to the prefabricated profiles. innovation is exactly the point. and it doesn't even have to be fundamentally new things. but a lot of things from other manufacturers could simply be implemented as well. if we go back 5 years and hold the s5 and s7 next to each other, a new and old cura version side by side, we don't notice a particularly big difference. improvements in any case. yes. but you still get the feeling of being behind.

Another problem I face is that when printing with only one material, it is under enormous stress from the many retractions in the tree supports. The picture shows a component that has a 1.5mm high nose around a hole. this means that supports are printed next to this nose to support the lower flange. when using the tree supports, an extremely large number of very small dots are printed here, between which the filament is always pulled back one at a time. this may still work with PLA, but a test with PET-CF15 shows that more technical materials cannot do this. i cannot adjust the minimum length before a retraction because this affects other parts of the component. Unfortunately, this is another problem that severely restricts the use of tree supports at present.