setExtraOverhang

[Cuq 162]

Hello,

 

I was trying to update an old plugins of Ultimaker to create Custom Supports ( it's not the plugin present in the market place but one based on the principe to use a brush to 'paint' needed support area to add or remove supports) :

 

https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura/tree/feature_custom_support/plugins/CustomSupport

 

But I must confess that this job is far beyond my skills. My first problem comes from a function that now seems obsolete: setExtraOverhang

Ie : QtApplication.getInstance().getController().getView("SolidView").setExtraOverhang(self._draw_buffer)

 

Does any one of you knows how to replace this code ?

 

Thanks a lot !

Edited July 18, 2020 by Cuq

[ahoeben 1,769]

Well, considering that an Ultimaker developer did not get this working in a satisfactory way, I would think that `setExtraOverhang is the least of your worries. You need to use/update the accompanying Uranium branch: https://github.com/Ultimaker/Uranium/tree/feature_custom_support

[Cuq 162]

Thank you for your answer @ahoeben,

If I understand you well, according to you wanting to update this plugin is a utopian project ? 

[ahoeben 1,769]

It is not a question of updating it. It is a question of finishing the work someone else started. Feel free to try, but there are bound to be dragons along the road which made @ghostkeeper abandon it. Or it could have just been a lack of time. I have not looked into the code, or problems therein.

 

If you would want to make this into a plugin, you would have to jump through some hoops to contain the changes to Cura and Uranium inside your plugin.

[nallath 1,104]

Well, if someone does make it into a plugin, i'd be more than happy to help out to get the changes needed into main Uranium / Cura.

As far as I know, this was started as a research project. We were scheduled to have another "round" of that, but then corona happened.

 

So feel free to continue to work on it. I can help out with advice, but not with actually implementing it.

[ghostkeeper 105]

The setExtraOverhang function creates a buffer on which to draw. Think like MS Paint. You're actually drawing just with a black pen on a white canvas. While you're drawing (the mouse is holding down) Cura's rendering system will draw everything that's black on that buffer in red if it's on the object. When you let go of the mouse, Cura will look up all of the black pixels from that buffer and spray tiny cubes on your object by drawing rays from the camera through the centres of those pixels. I don't think it should be replaced, really, although it would need to be moved to the correct plug-in somehow.

 

The bear on the road I was facing was to make the overhang erasable again. I think it would need to be implemented through some unique ID for each cube which gets translated to a colour on the render buffer, so that we can look up which cubes to delete from the scene by looking at which colours are within a certain circle in that render buffer. On top of that, you'd want to also erase the original overhang that Cura normally already renders red, although that may be considered optional.

 

Aside from that, I was also just changing the theme to make support meshes render red as if they are overhang on your model. That would also affect normal support meshes that the user places, which is not nice. This is probably not so difficult to fix in Cura but may be difficult from a plug-in.

The plug-in was created during a research sprint several years ago, where we got 2 weeks to develop something which we thought was progressive. I had this proof of concept, but due to lack of research time on Ultimaker's planning I was never able to finish it. Well, turns out I was indeed progressive; 2 years ahead of Slic3r PE, which just added a similar feature to their latest release (and did manage to finish it).

Edited July 21, 2020 by ghostkeeper