Have a look at the stitching details on this tiny cricket
ball valve cap. Which one of these is printed with a resin printer?
Well actually - neither of them. You didn't see that coming did you. I'm sure I had you fooled.
But let's dive into the new cura 5 and what it has to do with these two prints.
I've had my eye on what's now called cura 5 for a while actually,
as I've been using the arachne beta version 2 for a good while now, in fact if you were keen
eyed you may have spotted it in one of the past ten or so videos. Nobody said a word,
so that really shows how the changes are very much under the hood rather than visual.
There is a new UI though, this is brand new for this version and it has changed slightly.
It's very very new though, so there's some quirks still, no doubt they will be ironed out.
But the real changes are in the backend. Cura is a software of two parts. The frontend is the bit
most users interact with, but when you slice, that's done by the part called cura engine,
and this is the part that was codenamed arachne until now, where it forms cura 5.
So given that most of cura looks the same to the casual eye, what's really new?
Actually - something quite big.
Firstly my impression is that the arachne engine was rewritten from the ground up,
something that becomes quite evident once you start slicing and comparing previews side by side.
Take this very simple box I've thrown together in freecad as an example.
When you design something with thin walls like a box you would normally
consider the thickness of the walls as a multiple of line widths for best printing,
so that you get a whole number of printed lines as the walls. In this example I create
walls 1.6mm thick, to allow 4 print lines total to make up the walls of the box with no gap.
With cura 5, this just doesn't really have to be a consideration any more. Look what
happens if I change the wall sizes and slice. While cura 4 did seem to have limited ability
to vary width of the infill, this is totally new, the line width is completely variable.
There's more to this though. If I draw your eye to a new setting called "minimum line width", this is
what I'm also really excited about. I don't have all the information yet to explain fully what
these settings do, and the help cuts off too, inherently also what cura? Inherently
also what? But from my initial tests, it seems like minimum line width allows you to
set the smallest line width you want cura to make when using variable line widths.
Which leads us to this. These details on this cricket ball
valve cap are...just not possible in cura 4.
And we can do the same comparison with a benchy just as ultimaker did in their presentation.
Cura 4 gives up after a certain size reduction, but in fact you can carry on printing below that.
Bear in mind all of these examples I've shown you were printed on .4 nozzle size too.
It would appear on the face of it, that this version of cura is going
to be a huge game changer when it comes to details. If you print small things on FDM,
or large things with small details, you should be getting excited about this.
Now, while I have found the new engine to be fairly stable, I think I should probably warn
you about a couple of things before you dive in and start using it. Firstly, I gather there's
going to be a wait for plugins to be available. If you use any in cura 4, for example I use the
octoprint plugin, and I also use the thumbnail one for the MKS robin nano, these aren't available
yet. Secondly as I mentioned the UI seems to still be quite buggy. None of these are stopping
me from using it from now on, and it's worth mentioning that you absolutely can run multiple
versions of cura side by side so there's really no reason not to try it right now.
Well that is all I wanted to cover right now because I'm kinda busy doing the next....five
videos right now. Right now. Right now. Righ...yeah you get it. I'll give you
some eye candy though before I finish, how cool is this?
So...did you download cura 5 yet? What do you think? Any good? Let me know in the
comments. And I will see you hopefully in a couple days with the next vid.