Ultimaker Cura 4.4 (including Intent profiles)

[Guest maht]

Hi everyone,

 

We went live with a beta of Ultimaker Cura 4.4 today. This release includes Intent profiles, that accelerate the slicing process by slicing for the intent of your print.

 

Here's what we have:

 

Draft. Optimized for fast results. Print your digital model in the shortest time possible.

Visual. Optimized for part aesthetics. Print your digital model with superior visual and surface quality.

Engineering. Optimized for improved accuracy. Print your digital model with enhanced dimensional accuracy and closer tolerances.

 

Learn more about Intent profiles in the blog.

 

Discover these, plus several other changes and bug fixes in this beta. Tell us what you think in this thread so we can improve the stable release.

 

 

[Smithy 1,144]

It's a pity that the UM3 was not considered, because it has to struggle with the same problems as the S5. I would really like to be able to print accurately with the UM3. 

 

Otherwise it sounds like an improvement if it works as promised. I am curious 🙂

[tomulinek 0]

Looking forward to benchmark tests with S3/S5. For experienced users the overview which parameters are different between these new profiles should be helpful. (Better then let us search one by one. 😉) Thank you. 

[Ishy 8]

So why no intent profiles for CPE? seems strange you have an engineering profile for what is surely the least used engineering filament.

[Dim3nsioneer 557]

9 minutes ago, Ishy said:

you have an engineering profile for what is surely the least used engineering filament

 

Which one do you mean? PLA? That is not that rarely used by engineers...

[Ishy 8]

1 hour ago, Dim3nsioneer said:

 

Which one do you mean? PLA? That is not that rarely used by engineers...

Yes at least that's what I would say but I can only go from my own engineering business.

[ahoeben 1,948]

Something that is not mentioned in the opening post is that all plugins from the Marketplace need to be updated by developers and approved by Ultimaker staff again. It may take a bit of time before your favorite plugins are all available.

 

I am still working on compatible versions of the Sidebar GUI and the Material Settings plugins. My other plugins have already been approved and are available in the Marketplace.

Edited November 11, 2019 by ahoeben

[Guest maht]

1 minute ago, ahoeben said:

Something that is not mentioned in the opening post is that all plugins from the Marketplace need to be updated by developers and approved by Ultimaker staff again. It may take a bit of time before your favorite plugins are all available.

This is indeed correct. We did an SDK update mailout last week to contributors.

[Ishy 8]

Are there going to be intent profiles available for CPE and Nylon etc?

[JohnInOttawa 104]

Same concern regarding the omission of the UM3 from the intent profiles.  The engineering tolerances would solve a major issue here - one of the reasons I am looking at options like the markforged as an addition is to try and deal with the existing tolerance variation.

 

Can someone from the team explain why this is limited to the s3 and s5?

 

My hope would be, if you still buy a new version of the printer (and with the UM3 this is the case),  it should be supported....

 

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

John

[ahoeben 1,948]

20 minutes ago, JohnInOttawa said:

Can someone from the team explain why this is limited to the s3 and s5?

 

I am not "from the team", but I think it is the shear number of profiles that need to be made and tested to support more printer, printcore, material, quality and intent profiles.

[JohnInOttawa 104]

Thanks for your reply!  That does make sense and also offers an explanation as to why we have been seeing so many wrinkles in software over the past couple of years.  A lot of members in the family and the permutations grow geometrically.

 

In your opinion, would it be realistic to expect these features to be limited to a couple of models in the initial beta test, then expanded outward to include the rest of the production series?

 

John

[ahoeben 1,948]

I am fairly certain there won't be profiles in the production version that are not in the beta version. It could happen that intent profiles for the UM3 will be added in a future version of Cura (4.5 or later), but I would not hold my breath.

[JohnInOttawa 104]

That's good to know, of course disappointing to miss out on something with such significant potential.   

 

While I've been a programmer most of my professional life, I have steered clear of messing with anything below end user interfaces on the ultimaker line.   Maybe once this intent feature is proven, there could be discussion of implementing some of what it delivers via other means on older printers.  Is that possible?

 

-John

[ahoeben 1,948]

Sure, that could happen. The intent profiles are not magic. They are just a way to select a different combination of setting values that eg sacrifice printing speed for either accuracy. There are physical limitations that make it hard to eg print accurately AND fast. The profiles that ship for the UM3 are intended to be a compromise between the two. Between the UM2 and the UM3, the printhead became heavier (to allow for the printcores and dual extrusion). This made the physical limitations manifest more clearly. For the UM S5 and S3, the gantry became even heavier, which made "intent profiles" more necessary.

 

You can already make your own profile that prints slower to be more accurate. Unfortunately I don't have an UM3, so I would not know what changes to make.

[Link 34]

Interested to know what has changed in these profiles over the normally supplied profiles. For example what makes the 'visual' 0.15 layer height better than the previously default 0.15 layer height default profile. 

 

I have created all my own profiles for accuracy and visual quality (I don't care about speed), so I am interested to see if these new profiles can improve on mine and more what they have tweaked to get improved quality for example. 

[nallath 1,120]

18 hours ago, Link said:

Interested to know what has changed in these profiles over the normally supplied profiles. For example what makes the 'visual' 0.15 layer height better than the previously default 0.15 layer height default profile. 

 

I have created all my own profiles for accuracy and visual quality (I don't care about speed), so I am interested to see if these new profiles can improve on mine and more what they have tweaked to get improved quality for example. 

I can say something about that!  The visual intents change the following settings:

speed_infill = 50
wall_thickness = =wall_line_width * 3
top_bottom_thickness = =wall_thickness

It's not a whole lot, but they were added last. I expect the visual intents to get more changes in the next releases.  The engineering profiles do a whole lot more:

infill_line_width = =line_width
jerk_print = 30
jerk_infill = =jerk_print
jerk_topbottom = =jerk_print
jerk_wall = =jerk_print
jerk_wall_0 = =jerk_wall
jerk_wall_x = =jerk_wall
jerk_layer_0 = 5
line_width = =machine_nozzle_size
speed_print = 30
speed_infill = =speed_print
speed_layer_0 = 20
speed_topbottom = =speed_print
speed_wall = =speed_print
speed_wall_0 = =speed_wall
speed_wall_x = =speed_wall
top_bottom_thickness = =wall_thickness
wall_line_width_x = =line_width
wall_thickness = =line_width * 3
xy_offset = =- layer_height * 0.2

Note that these intent changes sit on top of the existing profiles (so they override settings if both of them define it)

[nallath 1,120]

23 hours ago, JohnInOttawa said:

Same concern regarding the omission of the UM3 from the intent profiles.  The engineering tolerances would solve a major issue here - one of the reasons I am looking at options like the markforged as an addition is to try and deal with the existing tolerance variation.

 

Can someone from the team explain why this is limited to the s3 and s5?

 

My hope would be, if you still buy a new version of the printer (and with the UM3 this is the case),  it should be supported....

 

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

John

Note that you could probably already try the changes that I just posted and set them by hand on your UM3. The intent profiles for the S3 and the S5 are exactly the same. The settings you would need for the um3 to get the maximum result are probably a bit different, but it should already get you much closer.

[JohnInOttawa 104]

Thanks!  I'll give that a try.

 

All the best

John

[Elfonerio 5]

I am using ABS in the engineering profile printing with dual extrusion and I am not getting an initial layer for my supports.  I do not know if this is normal.  The second layer does lay down a support, and thereafter.  Maybe this is intentional?

 

-Jared

[Elfonerio 5]

21 hours ago, Elfonerio said:

I am using ABS in the engineering profile printing with dual extrusion and I am not getting an initial layer for my supports.  I do not know if this is normal.  The second layer does lay down a support, and thereafter.  Maybe this is intentional?

 

-Jared

Well, it looks like this is an old problem when using a brim...

[ROSMES 0]

Hi all,

 

I want to print the cube with infill and empty sphere inside see attached file.

Cura does not recognize/see the inner empty sphere, but some other programs (Simplify 3D) do see the inner empty sphere.

Could help me solve the issue.

 

Question to developers: Could you please add a function of a layer by layer visualization option. Would be useful for big objects with more than 1000 layers. It is very simply to miss between layers since now it can be only operated by mouse and no specific layer could be inputted. Simplify has such option.

Kub.stl

[ahoeben 1,948]

Click in the layer number indicator. Press up/down keys

[IRobertI 520]

And if you mean that you just want to view a single layer at the time, grab both of the black dots of the slider and drag them towards each other to set how many layers you want to see at once.

[gr5 2,172]

They way Ultimaker creates profiles - well there are a LOT!  There could be easily 2000 profiles.  Each of which needs to be tested:

7 types (accurate, fine, rough, etc) (roughly 7 types)

4 nozzle types (e.g. .25, .4, .8, .6 ruby)

4 printers (or many more?) (UM2, UM3, S3, S5)

20 material types (roughly)

 

7*4*4*20 = 2240!

 

Can you imagine testing 2240 profiles?  That's how these profiles work.  One text file for each profile.  It's bad enough to have to create all these profiles but testing can get out of hand.  how many prints should UM test with each combination?  1?  Is 1 print enough?  I think not.

 

I think this is unfortunate.  They shouldn't have to test every combination and they shouldn't even have to create that many profiles.  There should be a programmatic way that creates some of these profiles instead of a separate file for each one.

 

But this gives you an idea why it's a big deal to add more profiles and why it took so long to come out with this wonderful new feature and why (for now) the new ones only work with the newer printers.