reporting 'bugs' with Cura

[alaris2 1]

so I finally found a file that failed to slice and print properly under Cura. it displays fine, but prints 'inside out' in that hollow parts are solid and vice-versa.

what's the correct way to report files like this - would you prefer them mailed to you Daid or just reported as bugs on the Cura wiki page (assuming I can edit or leave messages there..)

or perhaps, more useful (to me) - what's the quickest way to 'fix' broken files - are there any packages available that 'clean up' bad stl files for printing? it's probably something inside out or non-manifold or whatever, but I'm not in a position to edit the file myself..

thanks, nik

[Daid 306]

Emailing me is the worst option (IMHO) unless you want to keep the files private. You can file issues on Github, which would be the best way to report bugs.

However, if a model is printed hollow, you most likely have intersecting faces. I don't know if cloud.netfab can solve this. But it's often used to fix up broken models.

[alaris2 1]

Thanks Daid - I found a workaround, altho I admit I don't understand why the model should slice like this..

imagine a fish shape - a circle with a triangle (tail) that intersects it. make a smaller hole in the center of the fish (another circle). If you extrude this shape, the cylinder and triangle are two separate things and instead of the hole printing as a hole, it prints solid whereas the outer solid prints hollow.. except the perimeter!

netfabb claims there are openings and helpfully closes them all, thus rendering everything solid. which was not at all what i wanted.

solution was to boolean the circle with the triangle, thus cutting away the part of the triangle that intersected the circle.

trouble is, it's still 2 things. and Cura lays down the entire circle first, then goes back afterwards to lay down the triangle (for each layer)

this results in a retraction and layer adhesion problems and is clearly suboptimal - I would have thought it would lay down the entire outline since it's a continuous shape.

anyway, it printed, just the tail won't be very strong i suspect.

[Daid 306]

You need to "union" the tail with the body. This will create 1 solid shape instead of 2. It's a pretty common problem, and the reason why this happens lays at the core of Skeinforge. Slic3r does this differently, but has other issues in some cases then.

[laurent1133 0]

[ahoeben 1,955]

You are responding to a 10 year old thread with a single image and no explanation or information. What do you think will happen now?

[GregValiant 1,287]

You type faster than I do.