Cura 13.06.04 slicing limit?

[jochen 0]

Hello,

I am new to the whole 3d Printing scene. I have recently bought an Ultimaker and still learning but I have come across the following problem in Cura (latest version). I am trying to slice a Rocket for my son and in the layer view it always stops at 3000 is that a hard limit? I have tried to objects and both do the same on two different pcs (Xp & Win7). So it cuts of the top. I have tried printing them and they stop also half way through.

Did not think at of it much first but then I looked at the Gcode file size and both objects one was a 12H print and the other was a 4H print had nearly the same file size of around 20MB.

Is there a problem with the slicing agent or am I doing something wrong. The objects are OK as when I scale them the same happens at different heights but again at 3000.

Any help would be appreached.

Have not tried an older version to see the difference. Slices OK in netfabb (demo).

 

[illuminarti 18]

It sounds like there might be some hard limit of 3000 layers... but Daid can speak better to that. Regarding the estimated print time, there is a bug that causes the print time to be miscalculated when the minimum layer time is set. Daid just fixed that in the Cura source in the last day or two, so it's not in the released versions yet.

More generally though, I have to wonder why you need so many layers? To print to maximum height with more than 3000 layers suggests a layer height of 0.06mm or less. That really is going to take an age to print. For something this big, that doesn't sound like it's for a fine art project, and I'm guessing probably has a fairly simple geometry without lots of overhangs, have you considered printing with thicker layers - somewhere in the 0.1 to 0.2mm layer range? You can get perfectly good results at that layer height, and it will take a lot less time to print :-)

 

[gr5 2,172]

There does seem to be a bug. I tried a 3mm tall cylinder and at .001 layers it worked out to 3000 layers and was fine. When I tried just 10% more (.0009mm layers) it just did 3 slices.

But 3000 layers is ridiculously high. How thin is this rocket? If it takes a minute per layer it could take you a few days to print this. Or a few weeks. I suggest you do .2mm layers. This will keep you under 1000 layers. It's kind of silly to print with less than .2mm layers as you only improve the resolution in one axis. The other axes are restricted by the nozzle size (.4mm).

Of course now lots of people will tell me how much better the quality is with .1 or .06 or whatever layers. It may be true that it's harder to see the layers but you won't improve the resolution in the plane of a layer much beyond .4mm resolution.

Until you have printed many dozens of prints and know all the tricks - it's crazy to print something that takes more than 3 hours as there is a high probability something will go wrong.