GregValiant

I think I can address a piece of this. The above comments are from a year ago and there were no "shrinkage factor" settings in Cura at that point. I've designed a few molds and the customer would inform me of the shrink factor since it was based on the material being molded. I'll use 8% shrinkage as it was an oft-used number. When the part was released from the mold, everything was 8% smaller. To compensate in the design of the mold, I would design the part and then scale it up 8% (to create the "hob") before subtracting it from (what would become) the mold cavity. FDM is different. The parts created are "non-homogenous" and so shrinkage is different not just "XY vs Z" but also from one Z height to another dependent on the density of the infill and other factors. It's possible that the X shrinkage could be different than the Y shrinkage dependent on both the designed internal geometry and/or the printed internal geometry. I did an experiment a couple of years ago and printed a hole chart. I found that Hole Horizontal Expansion is not linear. Small holes suffer severely as the nozzle drags the molten material in towards the centerline (the "Snot Factor"). On large holes (above about 30mm with PLA) there was no significant change of the diameter. Where a 3mm hole would print to 2.7mm, a 30mm hole would print at 30mm. Square holes and Hex holes don't suffer from the problem. A mix of small round holes and holes with straight sides is really tough to compensate for. Every model is different and will require trial and error (sometimes lots of errors) to get a "perfect" print. Then I take that perfect print out of the air-conditioned room and put it in the bright Florida sun whereupon it will expand differently dependent on the factors noted above plus which side is facing the sun. Everything affects everything.

Now that is a serious workaround.

Load a benchy or calibration cube. Use one of your setting profiles. Use the "File / Save Project" command and open the 3mf file in the new version. Your printer and settings will be there. Some settings in the new version didn't exist in the old version. Just be aware of that. You can export your profiles from Creality Cura and import them to the new UM version.

It was developed by a contributor and was not updated for Cura 5.x versions. I tried to contact him but he never responded.

Think "Fun Scale" rather than "To Scale". Things like window mullions aren't going to print so you will need to make decisions and tradeoffs.

I like the SmartAvionics fork for Spiralize. His builds are based on the 4.x version of Cura.

I'll have to start asking posters if they are using Klipper. As it gets more popular these sorts of problems start coming up. It's good that you figured it out (in spite of my sideways advice).

When Cura paints polka-dots on a model it's because there are errors in the model. Your model is on the left and the repaired model is on the right. Here they are sliced. If you are using Windows you can get MS 3D Builder from the Microsoft store. It's not very intuitive, but it's pretty good at repair and at altering STL and other model files.

I agree with Torgeir, that's pretty darn good even with the warpage/deformation. I didn't get close to that quality and I tried a couple of times. I was going to switch to the 0.2 nozzle and do a test but my printer isn't good with the .2 and all those retractions tipped the scale and scared me away. I'm guessing you have more than a few minutes into that thing now.🥇

This isn't a great photo, but notice the hook below the filament spool and how the rubber band supports the hot end wiring harness. The hook on the filament guide has a triple-length rubber band and holds up the extruder motor harness. I fish and so I had some fishing rod guides laying around as spares. After the filament wore through the guide ring of my first PLA filament guide I took the ceramic ring out of a fishing rod guide, cut a sector out, and glued it into the ring of the filament guide. It won't be wearing out anytime soon. When you bling a printer you can accomplish two things. First, you learn how to print stuff. Second, you can occasionally print something useful. In the background of the photo above you can see just see the air baffle for the power supply fan. This is one of those things I designed that isn't so useful. I like it.

I read the gcode file into AutoCad. You can see in the attached image that the walls are straight. There aren't any wiggles near the "L" (that is on the front). This doesn't have anything to do with the infill pattern, density, temperature, none of that. It's the printer. You need to go over the printer with a fine tooth comb. Calibrating the frame of my Ender 3 Pro caused me to come up with this saying "Just because parts of it came assembled doesn't mean they were assembled correctly." So go over it. Use a straight edge ruler and a carpenter's square and make sure things are parallel and square. Go over the trolley wheels and the "V" slots again. I do a full R&R on mine once a month. It works hard and needs the maintenance.

I have to go back to my point - I printed the gcode file from your project and it was fine. IdeaMaker might be doing something different with the bridge flow or speed that better matches the capability of your printer, but I don't see anything wrong within the Cura gcode nor with the way it prints. Good luck with it. I do use IdeaMaker from time to time.

A project file would be good. You can pick the Support Extruder, and you can pick the Support Interface Extruder. You can't mix part of the interface with the support extruder. Try setting your Support Density to 20% then "Gradual Support Infill Steps" to 3, and "Gradual Support Infill Step Height" to 2mm. The Support Infill will start out sparse but hit 20% at the top. That would give the Support Interface more to grab on to. I have found that the Step Height has to be sufficient because the first layer or two after a density change is like bridging. It needs a few more layers before it develops any strength at all.

I did this also. The Pull Request is HERE. It includes Park and Purge options so it is a bit more involved.

You could write something up and put in a feature request on GitHub. Using the other slicers as examples is fine. One of the recurring problems I see in feature requests is that the poster doesn't really explain themselves clearly. It's good to avoid that so a developer has a clear idea of the concept of the request.

@h3Lk I don't get that behavior at all on my Ender. I looks like the extruder is pushing plastic, but the end of the extrusion isn't bonding to the buttress and is simply curling up behind the nozzle. It should be stretching across, not curling up. It looks like the gcode is fine (and it printed fine for me) but your printer isn't executing it correctly. @Dadkitess there is a long tradition of stealing threads here. At least yours is on-topic. If the lines were to go the short way, then they wouldn't be anchored to the buttresses. The short way would pull on what are already delicate lines (inner and outer wall) and distort them - possibly severely. The "Top Bottom Line Directions" setting doesn't have any effect on the bridge skins. One thing I noticed is that the when a bridge extrusion touches a previous bridge extrusion, it softens it and causes it to stretch. This causes a loop to hang down and the loop doesn't get welded to the next layer of bridge skin. I've written a plugin to change the hot end temperature for bridges. It works fine but the walls are generally a single line of gcode so pausing to wait for a temperature change for a single extrusion isn't the best thing. If you want to try it, unzip the folder and put the BridgeTemperatureAdjustment.py file into the "C:\Users\...username...\AppData\Roaming\cura\5.4\scripts" folder and restart Cura. BridgeTemperatureAdjustment.zip

Good Morning. I looked at the project and the model. The model has some minor errors and need to be repaired. I made the repairs but the project absolutely will not slice for me in 5.4beta1. This isn't the first time that has happened on a good model. The error "Backend exited abnormally with return code 3221225477!" keeps coming up. My understanding is that is a memory error. Using 5.3.1 I didn't have any trouble. Tracking the "Y" movements at around Layer:270 there is no "hiccup" in the gcode. The inner-wall toolpath is a straight shot from Y189 to Y30.6. There is no "stop in the middle and go around something". It's possible that your gcode was generated different than mine. If you still have it, post that gcode file here. I can read it into Auto-Cad and take Cura completely out of the loop. More likely - it's possible you have a string or something stuck in the grooves of the "Y" Beam below the build surface. Try cleaning the grooves and the wheels with a bit of IPA on a rag or paper towel. If a trolley wheel hits something as it moves back and forth then you will get defects like that. Because the defect appears to be in the front vertical wall as well as in the rear vertical wall is an indicator that this is the case. If the booger was on the wheel itself then the defect would be repeating and although the wheel bearings are not sealed and "stuff" can get into them, I don't think that's the case here. Adjusting the wheel tension (using the eccentric nuts) can't hurt. You should just be able to turn any trolley wheel with your fingers. Post the gcode file if you can, but this has the look of a mechanical problem. It's too regular and there is nothing in the model geometry to make Cura do that. Here is a look down the wall at Layer 272. It's straight and the gcode bears this out.

The printer sits at eye level right in front of me so I watched the entire thing. It was fine and acted exactly as I would expect. I have written a couple of macros for Excel and so I performed a flow analysis. All of those first skins of layer 26 are at a line width of .24 so from the actual line width of .40 that indicates 60% flow rate. Each of the "TYPE:SKIN:" extrusions uses 0.61624mm of filament. They are all identical so each extrusion must be exactly the same length. A video would be helpful. Since both gcode files printed fine on my Ender 3 Pro, I am starting to suspect something might be going on with your printer. I noticed that the project file has a retraction distance of 0.65. That's pretty short even for a direct drive. This is a snippet from the gcode of your project file starting at line 4066: G0 X125.44 Y106.4 ;TYPE:SKIN ;BRIDGE M106 S255 G1 F600 X94.56 Y106.4 E0.61624 G0 F9000 X94.56 Y106.8 G1 F600 X125.44 Y106.8 E0.61624 G0 F9000 X125.44 Y107.2 G1 F600 X94.56 Y107.2 E0.61624 G0 F9000 X94.56 Y107.6 G1 F600 X125.44 Y107.6 E0.61624 G0 F9000 X125.44 Y108 Looks good to me. The "Y" keeps indexing by .4mm but the "X" values are consistent and each extrusion goes from X94.56 to X125.44 and indexes over, and extrudes back to X94.56. That is true through that entire section.

The bottom part is sliced direct from your project file with no changes. The top part is with my profile. Other than the infill (yours with gyroid and mine with grid)- I don't really see any difference.

Here is the Cura sliced preview: Here is the preview of the gcode. It isn't even close to being right. Here is the preview but instead of that "Overture PETG" profile I switched to "Standard" and enabled the bridging and made the temperature changes. This is the gcode preview with my changes. It looks to me like something is really wonky in that "Overture - PETG" profile. I looked at the settings and I don't see anything odd, but something isn't right. I think you should delete that Overture - PETG profile and start from scratch on a new profile. My question is why isn't the gcode being generated like the sliced preview shows? I've never seen that before. The GcodeWriter is supposed to take the slice data and write it to file. I certainly isn't supposed to make things up along the way.

I don't get that at all in the gcode. Every line in the bridge shows as an extrusion. This is the first layer of a bridge ;TYPE:SKIN ;BRIDGE G1 F2250 X163.459 Y110 E2760.05975 G0 F9000 X163.459 Y110.4 G1 F2250 X130.806 Y110.4 E2760.71138 G0 F9000 X130.806 Y110.8 G1 F2250 X163.459 Y110.8 E2761.363 G0 F9000 X163.459 Y111.2 G1 F2250 X130.806 Y111.2 E2762.01463 etc, etc, ;TYPE:WALL-OUTER ;BRIDGE G1 F1500 X164.8 Y133.07 E2730.17987 G1 X164.8 Y108.47 E2730.58897 G1 X131.467 Y108.47 E2731.1433 You can check your gcode or load the model and set Cura up then use the "File | Save Project" command and post the 3mf file here.

Yessir, you are correct. It was late and something like this had happened.

In Cura 5.4beta I see the "skirt" can be up to 10 layers high. For a brim you will need the plugin

I call them post-post processors. Cura creates a gcode file. You open the gcode, read it into your C# app, alter/manipulate the gcode as required, and then "Create" a new text file, do a "SaveAs" new gcode file, and write the altered gcode into it. I've written an app that is a wrapper for about 15 post-processors but what you want isn't one of them. Normally, there isn't anything in a gcode file to differentiate the "handle" from the "mug". If you were to put a support blocker configured as Modify Settings for Overlaps and with say Wall Count the same as the Wall Count of the main model, then whenever the nozzle entered the Mesh Modifier you would get ";MESH:Eraser" in the Gcode. That would allow you to separate that part of the code on any particular layer. Cut them out of 5 consecutive layers, paste them into a new layer, use G92 liberally to adjust the XYZE for all the areas with missing code sections and with the pasted code sections. After that all you have to do is everything else. It would seem to be easier to buy another printer (or 6).

Cura is going to plan an optimized path. The fastest most efficient path for that part is to travel spoke-to-spoke. Consequently, that's what you are going to get. Maybe...if each of the spokes was a separate part...you could adjust the print order to give you a pattern that travels back and forth across the center. Try setting the "Z seam Alignment" to User Specified, the "Z seam X" = 0, "Z seam Y" = 0, and "Z seam relative" checked. At least all the starts and stops will be on the inside. Maybe...trying a print with the Z-hop height at 1.0 or even 2.0 would work?? That would force an "up-travel-down" move on every retraction. A problem with that model is that the spokes are so thin that the pressure from the nozzle pushes the spoke down and you are getting very little "squish" and there is no room to "wipe". In the end, that is not a good model for FDM. There is no continuity where the flow through the nozzle can really get going and that occurs on 75 to 100 consecutive layers. 80 retracts and primes per layer isn't good either. The nozzle pressure is bouncing up and down at a ridiculous rate. Even sliced with a 0.20 nozzle and .16 minimum line width I have my doubts about this model. It looks good, reality is likely different. Printing this at 5X size and putting it in the clothes dryer with your socks hoping it will shrink is unlikely to work. Just sayin'.