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I noticed these extremely weird behaviors of Cura


Neukyhm

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Posted (edited) · I noticed these extremely weird behaviors of Cura

I noticed 2 very weird things Cura does, let's go with the first one.

 

First thing

This is a very simple box I'm making for a machine, see the picture, Cura makes the printer perform a travel through the box. The blue line is what it does, the red line is a shorter and faster path that avoids that travel. It's not that it wastes much time doing that travel, but multiply it for hundreds of layers. The thing is that when Cura finishes slicing an island of the layer, instead of going to the nearest island it goes to the other corner of the box.

Captura.thumb.PNG.078950130ac66ad4bb6d20cd9985cd8b.PNG

 

Second thing

With the same box, I have noticed that ALL layers start at the same corner of the box. This simple thing adds new travels when the printer could just start the new layer at the same point where the previous one was finished. And yes, I have tweaked Z Seam alignment  to shortest, random, etc, nothing changed. I really find this very weird, why traveling to a new position to start a layer when you can start it at the point the other layer was finished?

 

Thank you in advance guys, I really want to adjust everything to get the fastest print, because this box is really big and Cura is telling me already times of 25 hours of printing.

 

 

Edited by Neukyhm
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    Posted · I noticed these extremely weird behaviors of Cura

    Hello @Neukyhm, the second thing (layers start at same corner of box) is a constraint that came along when Cura's slicing engine moved from being single threaded to multi-threaded. Now it is multi-threaded, all layers start at the same location. Arguably, that is a regression but that's progress for you.

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    Posted · I noticed these extremely weird behaviors of Cura
    15 minutes ago, Smithy said:

    So that means, it is irrelevant what we set for Z-seam alignment?

    No, z-seam alignment settings will still have an influence as before but the difference is that now it will no longer start a new layer where the previous layer finished when z-seam is set to closest.

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    Posted · I noticed these extremely weird behaviors of Cura
    1 hour ago, smartavionics said:

    Hello @Neukyhm, the second thing (layers start at same corner of box) is a constraint that came along when Cura's slicing engine moved from being single threaded to multi-threaded. Now it is multi-threaded, all layers start at the same location. Arguably, that is a regression but that's progress for you.

    Multithreading is a very useful feature, it makes slicing faster, but sometimes (like in this case) I prefer a longer slicing time if I can save an hour or more in a 25h print.

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    Posted · I noticed these extremely weird behaviors of Cura
    1 hour ago, smartavionics said:

    I agree that it would be good if you could choose between faster slicing and better quality output.

    I agree too. I have tested an object using Cura 3.4.1 and Cura 2.3.1. The result is that Cura 2.3.1 does a faster printing:

     

    This is the test object:

    Captura3.thumb.PNG.9f136a06df82ff6bf81a88d59e492dbe.PNG

     

    This is the slicing in Cura 3.4.1, you can see that there are 2 travels for each layer (printing time 9h26m):

    Captura2.thumb.PNG.9e6061a75b7ed0c68e056a92a3722044.PNG

     

    And this is the slicing using Cura 2.3.1, only 1 travel per layer because it's starting every layer where the previous one was finished):

    Captura4.thumb.PNG.9d4920e16c701dc69bb037d9b00304af.PNG

     

    The result is that Cura 2.3.1 is faster at printing, the difference is not very high but this was only a test object. More complex objects could have a bigger print time difference.

     

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    Posted · I noticed these extremely weird behaviors of Cura

    Yes, but it is how it is. We have to live with the current behaviour. You can open an issue on github and complain about it but I doubt if it will get acted upon.

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    Posted (edited) · I noticed these extremely weird behaviors of Cura
    2 hours ago, smartavionics said:

    Yes, but it is how it is. We have to live with the current behaviour. You can open an issue on github and complain about it but I doubt if it will get acted upon.

    And what about the first thing I noticed, it is really strange that Cura will travel to a far island when it has others nearby. I have already posted the issue.

    Let's see what people on Github do.

    Edited by Neukyhm
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