Suggestion: Profiles

[BelvederePixel 1]

Hello there,

 

Ive been using Cura for quite a bit ( not long in time, just extremely intensively lol ) and i came up to some frustration : When you try to chase a problem and you have to test so many different settings to get to a good final results, sometimes you dont think of writing down your changes. Sometimes you make it worse, sometimes you make it better. When you make it worse, but you changed the profile a couple times : it gets confusing to try to write down everything when youre running 9 printers, and troubleshooting different designs and prints at all times.

 

So hear me out : what about a checkpoint system ? What about saving the changes of a profile and being able to access them. Maybe 5 of them ? maybe 10 ?

 

So lets say your profile is called "0.6mm nozzle" and you make changes (1) and you save the profile. Then you make changes (2) and save the profile. Then you test them, it works on one, but not the other. So you do more changes (3) and save them.

 

Now you realize the initial profile was the right one but youre too far gone. This is where my idea comes in :

 

You have your profile "0.6 nozzle" but beside it, under it, right click, whatever the option : you can open and select the previous states and have them listed as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc etc.

 

Maybe im crazy, but with the amount of testing im doing for different things, different finish, different material, different shapes and colours, it would be very handy.

 

Thank you for listening to my crazy idea and have a good night ! lol

[Slashee_the_Cow 267]

Not a completely crazy idea. Doable manually, albeit annoying. There's an official feature request form on the Cura GitHub page, that's the best place to direct ideas, crazy or otherwise.

[BelvederePixel 1]

oh okay perfect, First post, first time. i didnt know. I copy paste my idea there lol i have another idea too : change infill % at a layer height instead of the gradient. I can never make it work for my purpose. I would want the bottom 2mm to be 30% for the first 5-6 layers. Then 10% for the rest til layer 200, then i would go back to maybe 20% just to support the roof. again... crazy idea lol

[Slashee_the_Cow 267]

2 minutes ago, BelvederePixel said:

oh okay perfect, First post, first time. i didnt know. I copy paste my idea there lol i have another idea too : change infill % at a layer height instead of the gradient. I can never make it work for my purpose. I would want the bottom 2mm to be 30% for the first 5-6 layers. Then 10% for the rest til layer 200, then i would go back to maybe 20% just to support the roof. again... crazy idea lol

Also doable manually: select your model, use the support blocker tool to create a support blocker, use the move and scale tools to get it to cover the part of the model you want, then click the "per model settings" button (above the support blocker button), change it to a modifier mesh (third button at the top), click "Select settings" at the bottom of that, scroll down to "Infill density" and check that, and it'll appear in the settings. You should leave all the wall and top/bottom settings there (and at 0) or it'll put extra skin/walls in where you don't need it. Then just duplicate your modifier for all the tiers you need and change the infill density for each one.

[BelvederePixel 1]

damn i mean yes i can go that route, but my suggestion is just to have it more user friendly because you know that 90% of people are not like us lol Ill be looking into your idea tomorrow probably ! but just for conversation sake, i think having it simplified for newbies would be great ( and also faster for advanced users ).

[Slashee_the_Cow 267]

I wasn't trying to say it was a bad idea, just thought you'd like to know to do it already, without waiting potentially forever for them to add it 😐.

 

Unfortunately if you're waiting for your ideas to come out in a new version of Cura, you might be waiting a looooooooong time - it's just how software development works. There's always a pile of bugs you need to deal with before you can think about new features, and there's already a ton of features they'd like to add but don't have the time for.

 

Both of the things you've suggested would be really useful but unfortunately they're also the sort of things which are only going to be useful to only a relatively small percentage of Cura users and they focus on things which will benefit as many people as possible first.

 

I'm not sure about the first but I'm pretty sure the second one could be done as a plugin - unfortunately I don't know how to make plugins or I'd have probably have made it already for me.

[BelvederePixel 1]

haha yes im not hoping for it to come out tomorrow but could you imagine ? lol haha plug in would be a good idea. i cant make one either. HEY PEOPLE MAKING PLUG INS .... NDA PENDING, but letsgo ! lol hahaha

 

wanna know another crazy idea ? the possibility to change line width, layer height, flow compensator, retraction etc on the spot without a script... it would make a big gcode but meh.... most machine now can handle it. Worse case put a full computer as a motherboard haha but seriously.... sometimes so many of my problems could have been solved by testing on the fly instead of reslicing and restarting everything.

 

but thats fantasy until an actual printer on kickstarter make it that way.

[Slashee_the_Cow 267]

7 hours ago, BelvederePixel said:

but thats fantasy until an actual printer on kickstarter make it that way.

If I know Kickstarter, someone's already run a campaign for that and the printers are at least one year late.

 

7 hours ago, BelvederePixel said:

wanna know another crazy idea ? the possibility to change line width, layer height, flow compensator, retraction etc on the spot without a script... it would make a big gcode but meh

You can already change line width and retraction speed (but not distance?) and flow rates (but not compensation ratio) using modifier meshes. Wouldn't make for a bigger gcode file at all, just modifies the commands in it (well, a little bigger if you make the lines thinner since it's printing more lines).

[BelvederePixel 1]

change line width ? infill ? layer height ? everything on the spot like a list you just go : POOPPP push this button and the line width went from 0.4 to 0.2 or 0.15 to 0.6 ? never seen that on any printer yet lol

[Slashee_the_Cow 267]

It has nothing to do with the printer, it's all in the slicer - the same modifier mesh you use to adjust the infill density can change the infill type (I usually switch this to a stronger type on weaker parts of my models), or the line width, or the number of walls or top/bottom layers, or the print speed for that section, or... a whole bunch of things! When you open the Select Settings box for your modifier mesh you can enable Show All and there's a cornucopia of things you can change for even a segment, not even a whole layer!

 

(But you can't change layer height. Sorry.)

 

But yeah, the printer has nothing to do with it - it's just a dumb machine that follows the instructions it's given in a gcode file. And the slicer can give it instructions to do different things in different parts, and it does them!

 

If I wanted to make a cow you could punch in the side and it'd just cave in (not that I want to, but it makes for an interesting looking example) I can make a section which has one really thin wall and no infill:

[BelvederePixel 1]

someone on github got a script for adding every settings at the bottom of the gcode. That way you can tell what your settings were for that specific file. So thats a big help !