UltiMaker Cura 4.6-beta

Ultimaker Cura 4.6 beta

April 3, 2020

THANK YOU to all Ultimaker Cura users helping in the fight against COVID-19 – with 3D printing, volunteering, or just by staying home. Want to get involved? Find out more on our website ↗.

New features

New Intent profiles. In version 4.4 we introduced Intent profiles ↗ for the Ultimaker S3 ↗ and Ultimaker S5 ↗ which allow you to start prints at the click of a button without a lot of configuration steps.

Due to popular demand, version 4.6 expands the range of Engineering Intent profiles to include more of the Ultimaker material portfolio: PC ↗, Nylon ↗, CPE ↗, and CPE+ ↗. These work with 0.4 print cores.

Show active post processing scripts. fieldOfview ↗ has contributed an ease of use improvement to the post processing plugin. The number of enabled post processing scripts will now display as a badge notification over the post processing scripts icon. A tooltip gives extra information about which scripts are enabled for quick and easy inspection, so there's no need to open the post processing dialog. [Source ↗] [Pull request ↗]

Hole Horizontal Expansion. smartavionics ↗ has contributed a new setting that applies an offset to all holes on each layer, allowing you to manually enlarge or contract holes to compensate for horizontal expansion. [Source ↗] [Pull request - Frontend ↗] [Pull request - Engine ↗]

Per-model settings. The "Infill only" checkbox has been changed to a dropdown selection: “Infill mesh only” or “Cutting mesh”. [Source ↗]

Transparent support rendering. In preview mode with ‘Line type’ selected, support material will render with transparency so you can easily see what’s being supported. [Pull request ↗]

No stair stepping for PVA profiles. Stair stepping is intended to reduce the adhesion between support and the model, where the support rests on the model, and to reduce scarring. As PVA doesn't suffer from scarring or adhesion issues due to its water-solubility, this value has been set to 0 for PVA profiles. A known issue with the stair stepping algorithm causes support to disappear sometimes, so doing this reduces the chance of that happening when PVA is used.

Separators in extensions menu. fieldOfview ↗ has contributed a method for plugin authors to add separators between menu items in the “Extensions” submenu. The method is backwards-compatible so changes don’t have to be made in Cura and Uranium together. [Pull request ↗]

Ultimaker account sign in prompt. Added clearer text to the sign in popup and first use flow to highlight the benefits of using an Ultimaker account with Cura.

Updated installer. Small fixes have been made to the installer. To keep up with the times, we’ve also updated the images to display an Ultimaker S3 ↗ instead of an Ultimaker 3.

Bug fixes

Infill mesh ordering. When you have three objects overlapping each other and you set two of them to "Modify settings for infill of other models", then the setting "Infill Mesh Order" determines which of the two infill meshes gets priority where they overlap. This was broken for cutting meshes, so BagelOrb ↗ contributed a fix. [Pull request ↗]

Backups storage size. We’ve put a hard limit on backup file size in this release to prevent other files being stored there.

3MF gcode comments removed. Fixed a bug where comments were removed from Start/End G-codes when opening from a 3MF. [Source ↗]

Print monitor preheat fields. Values in the print monitor preheat fields were broken in previous versions, they have now been fixed by fieldOfview ↗. [Source ↗] [Pull request ↗]

Stepper motor disarming during pause at height. Some printers automatically disable their steppers after a pause (after a certain time). This script makes it possible to set that in the pause script (instead of relying on default behavior of the firmware). [Pull request ↗]

Third-party printers

Flying Bear printers. oducceu ↗ has contributed a machine definition for the Flying Bear Ghost 4S Printer. [Pull request ↗]

Magicfirm printers. jeffkyjin ↗ has contributed machine definitions for MBot Grid II+, MBot Grid II+ (dual), MBot Grid IV+ and MBot Grid IV+ (dual). [Pull request ↗]