That is AMAZING.. I have been using Cura solidly for 12 months and didn't know that...
I am going to have a play.. But based on my first tests, this looks perfect.
One thing jumps out immediatly is the 'base'.. My "background" is white.. Yet I get a bottom to the print which could have to be trimmed off... Is there a way to make Cura treat a white background as "nothing"?
Jon
Edit: I guess I could just use the "cut off the bottom" feature to sink it into the bed.
Edited by GuestThe base you see, I believe comes from the import settings... There is a field called "Base" and I think default is 1mm.
Try reimporting your image and setting it to 0..
Also, do look over the layer view of your slice... It may look good initially, but a pixelated edge will eg. come out as a jagged zigzag line in the slice, yielding horrible print results (and noise :s)
Edited by GuestThe base you see, I believe comes from the import settings... There is a field called "Base" and I think default is 1mm.
Try reimporting your image and setting it to 0..
Also, do look over the layer view of your slice... It may look good initially, but a pixelated edge will eg. come out as a jagged zigzag line in the slice, yielding horrible print results (and noise :s)
I tried messing with the base value, but even at 0.0 it leaves a "plate" at the bottom.. So I just used the "cut the bottom" feature to get rid of it and that works.
But your point about the zig-zags is absolutely right.. I have looked at the layers and its horrific.. If I try to print that, its going to shake my printer appart.. So I think I need to look for another solution.
I will have a look at PS, but I am a novice and know almost nothing about it.. So I fear I may have to hunt for another solution..
Cheers
Jon
I am a complete novice in PS too, but at least the extrude to 3d feature was very straight forward, so Im sure you'll figure it out.
For the fixing of hole and wall sizes that I talked about, I used the magic wand tool to select areas of the image... then there is some option to expand that selection by x amount of pixels (dont remember exactly where, but its fairly easy to find), that, along with the ability to invert selection (right click -> invert selection) will get you a long way... You can then just use a paint brush or the eraser tool in the selected area, depending on what you need.I am a complete novie too, but at least the extrude to 3d feature was very straight forward, so Im sure you'll figure it out.
For the fixing of hole and wall sizes that I talked about, I used the magic wand tool to select areas of the image... then there is some option to expand that selection by x amount of pixels (dont remember exactly where, but its fairly easy to find), that, along with the ability to reverse selection (right click -> inverse selection) will get you a long way... You can then just use a paint brush or the eraser tool in the selected area, depending on what you need.
Edited by Guest
You could also post your image here and give specific dimensions. I can do it for you. I usually do these sort of things on my lunch breaks anyway.
On 9/30/2015 at 11:23 AM, jweaver said:I tried messing with the base value, but even at 0.0 it leaves a "plate" at the bottom..
I also saw in Cura what appeared to be a bottom layer that would be printed even with Base set to 0. Once I actually printed it though, that layer was not created. Only an outline of that layer. You can see my Cura screen, and a print example in a separate thread I started before finding yours.
1
I finally figured out how to turn a 2D drawing into 3D print without the extra rim, frame, plate, base that Cura creates when you Slice the image into *.gcode. It is not setting the base to 0, that did not work. It is not dragging the image into and below the printing plate. It is not setting Z to a negative number.
The answer is Adhesion setting under Standard Quality - 0.2mm in the top right of the Ultimaker Cura screen. It is checked by default. The extra rim plate is called Brim or Raft. Turning off Adhesion turns of brim or raft. Slice your image and you'll see a thin outline separated from your model image instead of that annoying solid rim plate Slicing automatically created. To thin that outside line even further under Custom Print Settings, Quality, Initial Layer Line Width set it down to 10% or so, Slice again and see that line get thin.
However, without any Adhesion the gcode instructions begin on the object by going around its outer edges and may not stick, i.e. adhesion actually helps. It can turn out a tangled mess of plastic blobs or strands causing you to troubleshoot and level your build plate. It's in the gcode, it's not any problem with the printer. But, many people don't want that ridiculous brim either. So, I turned back on Adhesion but went into custom settings and searched brim. Under Quality and Build Plate Adhesion set the Brim width and line count to 1 or 0, made sure Initial Layer Line Width was 100% and Shell had a bottom thickness of 0.8mm and Bottom Layers was 4. You can check or uncheck Brim Only on Outside. Now, the Sliced gcode has a bottom layer to adhere the object's plastic to. The brim left at 1 is so thin and small it snaps off the edges and it became redundant, but the bottom layer, initial layer is important.
I'm not sure why you're making things so complicated with modifying the brim settings when you can just let the Skirt do the job for you. "Skirt" is an option under "Build plate adhesion type" and is what is getting enabled when you're turning off "Adhesion" in the simple "Recommended" view of the settings. That's the outline you mentioned in your previous post.
The skirt can be customized to set how many lines it should print, which distance it should be from the model and the minimum length of the skirt (when printing tiny objects a single line might not be enough). All this is doing is priming your nozzle to make sure it's full of plastic before the actual model starts getting printed. When the nozzle isn't fully primed the start of the first layer of the model will usually have issues.
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tommyph1208 55
So... The very simplest approach is to simply drag your image file into cura... (it will accept .bmp, .jpg, .png and possibly more)
Cura will generate a 3d model for you where a grescale version of the image is used as a heightmap... You have a few options, like deciding which tone, dark or light, should be low and high points, some options for how large the model will be, and if it will have a base or not.
the import also has two simple smoothing filters you can apply.
Now, depending on your source material, this may or may not be a sufficient approach... I tried it a bit, and found that with an image with a lot of detail (many different greyscale values cluttered about), you get a lot of "hills" and "valleys" in your print, which results in a lot of travel, retraction, stringing, etc. generally things you would want to avoid.
I found that you get the best results, if you pre process your image a bit, using a photo editing tool like eg. photoshop... In there you can do a lot of smart filtering, and if you can eg. reduce the image to 3-5 greyscale values (or even hard black/white), you'll get a much better result.
Another approach is, if you have one of the newer Photoshop editions, to use some of their 3d features... I did a series of prints of these Star Wars snowflakses: http://anthonyherreradesigns.com/index.php/8-ahd-blog/14-star-wars-snowflakes-2014
For those i converted the source image to hard black/white, then did some steps with expanding and contracting selections and painting over, to make sure there were no too small holes, or too thin walls... After that I simply extruded the image directly in photoshop (I believe it was CS5) and exported it to Cura.
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