RepRap: Blog

"Cura is the name of a divine figure whose name means "Care" or "Concern""

Source: Wikipedia

Ever heard of Cura? Besides a divine figure, it's a 3D printing solution that is meant to be useful and usable to both beginning and advanced 3D printer users. David Braam is full-time developer of Cura, at Ultimaker. We recently released version 13.06, which was a major update. Compared to the previous version it looked... well ...exactly the same. But on the back-end, the engine that generates the toolpath from the mesh-surface model (e.g. the STL or AMF) was replaced by a new engine, written entirely from scratch.

The short summary is for this initial release:

• Faster slicing
  What took hours now takes seconds. Also, this enabled us to create the following two features.
• On-the-fly model preparation
  There is no slicing button anymore because it starts processing right-away.
• Live tweaking of slicing parameters
  Because you see toolpaths re-appear whenever you change a setting, you can quicky find the optimal settings for your print job.
• Model fixing
  The engine can fix major problem in a model.
• Multiple materials
  The engine was built from the start with multi-head printing in mind.
• Cross-platform
  The Engine is written in C++ and released for Linux, Windows & Mac. Compilation on these and other platform should be trivial.
• Open source
  The license is Affero GPLv3.

The main goals for this new engine were to be able to implement innovative features that improve the quality of 3D printed objects, and to create a code structure that encourages further development. An intermediate goal was to release it with the baseline feature set that is common in slicing engines, including the ability to robustly handle many kinds of (problematic) models and generate support structures.

A nice side effect of the new slicer is that it turns out to be fast, really fast. We decided to do something unconventional: removing the "Prepare for printing" button from Cura's interface entirely. It will just start slice the model in the background (with a low-priority). If you change the layer height or any other setting, it will just restart. If you don't change settings, it may already have finished before you're thinking to save the resulting G-Code to an SD card or print directly through USB. An extra, pretty useful, side-effect is that you can inspect the generated toolpath, change the settings and see the new toolpath preview appear automatically and quickly, without pushing a button.

Because Cura is developed to work with the Ultimaker and most other RepRap-based designs, we'd like to ask you what you think of the new engine. Also, because, like Cura (source), the Engine is released under the Affero GPL version 3, we'd love to see anyone benefit from this new solution and possibly help us improve it further.

Below is a 45-minute presentation on the Cura release, focusing mostly on the new Cura Engine.


Below is the interview with David by Andrew of 3DHacker.com:

Labels: announcements, G Codes, g-code file, host, host software, improvements, Mac, mesh, multiple materials, simulation window, stl

The Meshlab utility I recommended to Forrest was something that I'd hunted down while trying to find a PLY to STL file converter that was Open Source. I was trying to import free animal models in to the RepRap GUI to see how the RepRap did at sculpture, and to show off at the New Zealand Open Source Awards. In the end I found this cat, but it had eye-holes and the base was open. Fortunately Meshlab has a very intelligent filter for closing holes that creates Euler-valid solids (unlike the "close boundary" option on ArtOfIllusion).

As you can see, the RepRap (a standard Darwin extruding PLA) did a fair job of the cat, and that's at a resolution of 2,000 facets. Note also that it did a very nice job of the cat's chin, even though that was overhanging by considerably more than 45 degrees!

Vik :v)

Labels: cat, mesh, meshlab, reprap, sculpture