UltiMaker Cura 5.11-alpha

⚠️Warnings & Disclaimers⚠️

• Alpha's and 'nightlies' are experimental builds -- please use this release in an exploratory fashion only, please do not rely on it for important tasks like production.
• Features introduced in this build are (often) unfinished, may be drastically altered for Beta (and subsequent Final) release(s), or even outright removed.
• This build will also not receive any official support -- it is purely to (showcase and) facilitate discussion of new features within the Cura-community.
• This effort is our own and should not be seen as a formal partnership with any 3rd party. We are aware that there are clear differences between us and BambuLabs. However, we both share a fundamental commitment to empowering the 3D printing community. Our focus is on supporting creators and pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

A nightly build with Painting 🎨 and Bambu 🎋

Once again, two sizeable new features that we'd like to have your feedback on have (nearly) arrived to Cura!

• We've introduced a Painting Tool into Cura -- for now, this can be used to paint allowed or disallowed areas for seam, or to paint on materials.
• Bambu-printers work a little different than most things out there in the 3D printing ecosystem (at least from a slicer perspective) -- so we had to pull out some tricks to get them working together properly with Cura.

Also, we've introduced a feature just for builds like this; where you can select if you'd like to 'start clean' or use the current configuration folder -- this helps not contaminate your main config should the alpha still have some issues. -- Also the banner-colour on the top is different from our usual deep blue, to let you know this isn't a normal release (or beta).

Painting 🎨

Painting, or various tasks that practically require paint-on functionality, have been a much requested feature for a good while. For now with the first introduction of paint-on in Cura, two of those features are coming along:

• Seam painting forces or disallows seams to be present on certain areas of the model.

roboseampic roboseampic_result

• Material painting can be used to paint the use of different extruders onto, and into areas of the model -- we go a little deeper than our competition though -- the entire model is taken into account, not just the surface.

image (15) image (16)

We are exploring other painting applications, like Paint On Support, but those are more effort than expected and might not show up in the upcoming release.

Known issues 🦟

• Occasionally, simpler(?) models can still generate a wrong UV-map -- a workaround is to export such an object to the .OBJ file-format, and then reload it -- the UV-mapping needed for painting should be correct. Try the above if painting doesn't seem to work properly at all.
• Painting (especially with multiple materials) may take extra slicing-time -- and progress isn't communicated to the front-end yet -- this means it may seem 'stuck' for a while after pressing Slice.
• Painting isn't fully optimized yet, which is why we've limited the brush-size for now. (In general, there are some issues with brush-size.)
• For painting, undo/redo works with Ctrl-L and Shift-Ctrl-L respectively -- since we don't know if it's wanted that the undo-stacks for (other) model-operations should be the same as the painting ones.
• There's some initial slowdown when applying the first brush-stroke(s).
• Internal testing shows that there might be a slowdown in Preview mode.

Bambu 🎋

Part of the reason Bambu-printers are so fast is that they have to do very little on-board operations w.r.t. gcode-postprocessing -- nearly everything is done by the slicer. Now, that slicer can be Cura.

Of course, with their multi-material capabilities, this synergizes with material-painting. (Just as with our own dual-extrusion.)

Known issues 🦟

• Reloading saved Bambu gcode-3MF's won't work for Previews (doesn't show layers).
• The display of layer progress on the LCD of a Bambu might not work properly (or at all).

Other Changes 🎁

All of this is built on top of our (current) in-progress work for the upcoming release, so you might see some other features pop-up, such as:

• Introduce capability to retract/unretract during travel.
• Control build-volume fan-speed (instead of just on/off).
• A fix for compatibility with the practices of certain anti-virus vendors (Windows -- newer versions of DLL's officially supplied by Microsoft wouldn't be 100% compatible to the version that at least one big anti-virus vendor forced Cura to run by DLL injection).

As well as a whole host of bug fixes, new printers and other improvements.

Why do we need you? 😎

• We have tested many builds of Cura, on many systems, but we know everyone has a different execution environment. The idea of this Alpha release is to make sure that it still works on all the platforms where it used to work before.
• We don't exactly know how everyone uses Cura. There may be some actions that you do, which will reveal a bug we didn't see in our tests.
• There are tons of plugins. So we want to make sure that they keep working with the new version.

What do you need to do? 💪

Well, not much, just download this version, use it as you would usually do, and send a brief feedback on the discussion: describe your environment, and tell us if everything went fine, or if you encountered some crashes or strange behaviours!