Ultimaker Cura 4.5 now available

[Guest maht]

Hi everyone,

 

Once again a stable release has come around. 4.5 contains a range of useful community contributions to give you better performance and extended features. Some notable ones:

 

Brim distance. This new setting contributed by smartavionics allows you to define a gap between the brim and the model for easier brim removal and reduced chance of leaving a mark on the finished piece.

 

'Skin Edge Support' settings. It’s now possible to add an extra line inside your infill that supports the edge of the skin better. Two new settings contributed by smartavionics control this feature: ‘Skin Edge Support Thickness’ and ‘Skin Edge Support Layers’. Find these under ‘Infill settings’.

 

Speed up plugin loading. fieldOfview has contributed a code optimization to load plugins faster on start. Mileage may vary, but Cura’s startup speed should see a marked improvement.

 

Support for alpha channels in ImageReader. Added support for images with transparency, such as PNGs. When using an image with transparency, the contours of the transparent layer will be followed. Contributed by BagelOrb.

 

Jobnames less sensitive to being touched. A contribution from fieldOfview has fixed an issue where the jobname in the bottom-left of the scene is no longer made static by clicking on it. If you load a model and change to another printer, the prefix is now correctly updated.

 

Shared heater. A new ‘Shared heater’ checkbox has been added to the machine settings page to support printers that have one nozzle and one heater, but multiple feeders. When enabled, heating and pre-heating procedures act differently so that the nozzle doesn’t cool down for the stand-by temperature or the initial/final printing temperatures. Contributed by smartavionics.

 

Material mixing. A new post-processing script can be used to mix materials if you have a mixing nozzle. Mix materials of different colors in order to print in a different color than either of your currently loaded materials. Contributed by Hrybmo.

 

In addition to this, another ten third-party printer definitions have been added.

Want to add a definition for a third-party printer? Find out how here.

 

Internally, we've been focused on adding integration with our new web Marketplace, so you can easily add packages to Cura from outside the software. When you start Cura, packages will now sync if changes are detected in your installation. On a version upgrade, your packages will now follow along, and follow also actions you take using Ultimaker Cloud.

 

As well as this, we’ve also switched over to a new crash reporting system (Sentry) which allows us to catch more crashes and dive into more details.

 

Thanks to the public beta we ran, we were able to catch a major bug in MacOS which caused crashing after a few slices, which is fixed in the stable release.

 

Besides public betas, we have 2 dedicated QA people in the team, and automated tests to catch all the bugs. If any odd behavior still occurs, please let us know in this thread or by opening an issue on GitHub. We’ll do what we can, and we make an effort to look at everything you send us. For plugin issues, please contact the plugin developer.

 

Got a feature that you’d like to implement? Why not make a pull request or develop a plugin?

 

See the marketing blog, or download the latest stable release today.  Full release notes can be found here.

  

We hope you enjoy this release.

[P3D 46]

While the improvements are nice, what I would be *really* interested in are more intent profiles - for example for CPE, for Nylon...

 

Some weeks ago, @territerriterri wrote that more such profiles would be coming soon, what's the status on this?

[Guest maht]

2 hours ago, P3D said:

While the improvements are nice, what I would be *really* interested in are more intent profiles - for example for CPE, for Nylon...

 

Some weeks ago, @territerriterri wrote that more such profiles would be coming soon, what's the status on this?

Thanks for your interest - our materials and processing team has some Intent profiles ready for more materials, but they need a lot of testing before they go out into the wild. If you want more info about this, I'd suggest opening a separate thread to pool people's wants and needs for this.

[P3D 46]

22 minutes ago, maht said:

Thanks for your interest - our materials and processing team has some Intent profiles ready for more materials, but they need a lot of testing before they go out into the wild. If you want more info about this, I'd suggest opening a separate thread to pool people's wants and needs for this.

 

Thanks for the feedback, I just did that: 

 

[MarcusWolschon 7]

Nice upgrade but with only my print profiles but no material profiles after the upgrade it's not usable.

(Yes, I reinstalled my Eastman Materials plugin. Still not a single material. Can't uninstall the Ultimaker Default material plugin to reinstall that too.)

 

[DavidEDW 0]

Does anyone know what happened to the NX plugin? 

[MaverickNH 1]

New to Cura - when I clicked the notification to upgrade my 4.4.1 installation, it put a second 4.5 install on my HD. Is there a way to simply upgrade? Or migrate my 4.4.1 settings over?

[nallath 1,124]

11 hours ago, MaverickNH said:

New to Cura - when I clicked the notification to upgrade my 4.4.1 installation, it put a second 4.5 install on my HD. Is there a way to simply upgrade? Or migrate my 4.4.1 settings over?

It should automatically migrate your 4.4.1 settings.

[Guest maht]

15 hours ago, DavidEDW said:

Does anyone know what happened to the NX plugin? 

 

It needs to be updated to the latest SDK before it will work with 4.5. It's an external contribution so we need to clear this with them.

[MaverickNH 1]

Thanks nallath - then I can uninstall V4.4.1?

Edited February 28, 2020 by MaverickNH

[Dekyras 0]

Hi, installed this on my Mac, but can't run the application as I get the error

 

"Ultimaker Cura" can't be opened because apple cannot check it for malicious software.

 

Is there a workaround for this?

 

Thanks

 

H

[Smithy 1,146]

On Mac you have to right click the application, then select Open. A window appears to confirm that you really want wo open it. You have to do this step only for the first time, then a simple double click is enough to open Cura. 

[Enigma_M4 123]

On 2/28/2020 at 2:08 PM, MaverickNH said:

Thanks nallath - then I can uninstall V4.4.1?

Yes, you can uninstall 4.4.1 (check first, if 4.5 works), but DON'T remove configutation files / settings (I made this mistake once and hopefully never do it again ;-) ).

[Spandex_Spatula 1]

Not sure why this was released, still has bed area bugs from the Beta. 

 

Ex: On the Ender 3 profile, it cuts off the top and bottom of the bed in the Y axis. 

The legacy profile still allows for use of the entire bed; however you guys have made it ridiculously annoying to install those profiles. 

 

[Smithy 1,146]

Keep in mind that most 3rd party printer profiles are provided by the community and not by Ultimaker.

[ChaosBlades 0]

Same issue as Spandex_Spatula. This is the build area on the Ender 3 with skirt turned off and a fresh default Cura 4.5. Machine settings are the correct 235,235,250.

[nallath 1,124]

That's how the profile was provided to us. We can't (and won't) test all the third party machine profiles.

[hussainsail2002 3]

@nallath , If we find a small bug with a 3rd party installed profile, can we correct it or only the author has the rights ? 

[Guest maht]

23 minutes ago, hussainsail2002 said:

@nallath , If we find a small bug with a 3rd party installed profile, can we correct it or only the author has the rights ? 

 

You can make a pull request with optimizations for third party profiles. If they pass our checks, we can then merge them.

[Spandex_Spatula 1]

2 hours ago, nallath said:

That's how the profile was provided to us. We can't (and won't) test all the third party machine profiles.

 

The legacy profile did not have this issue, and the issue has been reported during the beta. 

The question is, why did you change a working profile to one that is inferior, and then make it a hassle to import the legacy  profile? It'd be better to continue using what works, rather than to have some rando give you a profile which you distribute without testing. 

Sloppy work. 

[Guest maht]

4 hours ago, Spandex_Spatula said:

 

The legacy profile did not have this issue, and the issue has been reported during the beta. 

 

@Spandex_Spatula Just following up on this - can you show me where was it reported?

 

Quote

Sloppy work. 

 

We accept contributions for third-party printer definitions, but we do not test or maintain them, as nallath states above. There are 200 third-party definitions in Cura, we don't have each printer to test. We take definitions contributed by the community, and take it on good faith that they're tested adequately.

 

If you haven't already, please make an issue report on GitHub and we'll try to get this straightened out. If you have made one already, please refer me to it.

[Mad_Al 0]

The new version of Cura seems to take forever to slice larger models now. The older version would take no time at all. 

 

[hussainsail2002 3]

On 3/2/2020 at 5:01 PM, Spandex_Spatula said:

Sloppy work. 

one of the only few slicers that host the definitions of  so many printers,

 

Its also pretty powerful , on par with paid ones like simplify3D. 

[Guest maht]

20 minutes ago, Mad_Al said:

The new version of Cura seems to take forever to slice larger models now. The older version would take no time at all. 

 

 

You can verify this by slicing a model in each version, and then examining the log. Each version will log how long a slice takes, e.g. 

2020-03-04 09:45:16,489 - DEBUG - [MainThread] CuraEngineBackend.CuraEngineBackend._onSlicingFinishedMessage [663]: Slicing took 3.141117572784424 seconds

 

[Guest maht]

41 minutes ago, Mad_Al said:

The new version of Cura seems to take forever to slice larger models now. The older version would take no time at all. 

 

19 minutes ago, maht said:

 

You can verify this by slicing a model in each version, and then examining the log. Each version will log how long a slice takes, e.g. 

2020-03-04 09:45:16,489 - DEBUG - [MainThread] CuraEngineBackend.CuraEngineBackend._onSlicingFinishedMessage [663]: Slicing took 3.141117572784424 seconds

 

 

@Mad_Al Just tried it with the attached model (which ships on the USB stick of the UMS3).

 

4.4.1

2020-03-04 14:06:44,025 - DEBUG - [MainThread] CuraEngineBackend.CuraEngineBackend._onSlicingFinishedMessage [663]: Slicing took 8.200138330459595 seconds

 

4.5

2020-03-04 14:03:06,005 - DEBUG - [MainThread] CuraEngineBackend.CuraEngineBackend._onSlicingFinishedMessage [663]: Slicing took 7.160868167877197 seconds

 

1.039270162582398‬ seconds faster!

 

UMS3_HEADphonestand.3mf