Hey gang, Tim here at Core Electronics, and today there's a new jumper, so it's time for more exciting Cura features. It's been a while since I hit you up with the newest and most exciting Cura features, so in this are some of my new favourites.

We'll take a dive into make overhangs printable, new ways to fix meshes, and new print intention profiles. Cura is constantly being improved upon and half the fun is keeping on top of all the new changes and all the new offerings it has to give. For a completely free software, they are doing an amazing job.

Now there is an Ultimaker Cura overview guide on our website, which is a great reference point if this is your first time encountering Cura and you want to hit the ground running, link down below.

This is a new setting that literally alters your CAD model inside Cura, as the name implies, to make overhangs print better and without supports. Now this is such a swell option, particularly when the overhang that is being altered is not going to be viewed or does not need to be dimensionally correct. So I'll paint the picture of when I utilised this setting last to print this spooky guy over here.

Jumping into Cura now, we can see in Cura the STL file of this skull, which I wanted to be printing facing up out of the print build platform, but with minimal to no supports. So when you view it from across the platform, you can see that the anatomy is correct and the jaw section makes for a very big overhang. And to further this point, you can see highlighted in red all the overhang areas, which will struggle to 3D print correctly. These are the sections that are going to be altered by the make overhangs printable setting. This setting you can find in the experimental heading in the advanced print setting menu. If this setting is not showing up for you, press the three lines next to the search bar and press on the drop down toolbar, all, and then search for that setting.

To demonstrate exactly what this setting does, take a look at when it's been sliced with and without this setting. It has effectively added material to the underneath of the jaw, making the overhang less steep. Overall, a very swell setting to use when the occasion is ripe for it.

Cura has really upped its game in fixing meshes to make models easier to print. Now, to clarify, mesh modeling has become the most common type of modeling in all methods of capturing into a computer the irregular shapes of the real world. A polygon mesh is a collection of vertices, edges, and shapes that define the shape of a polyhedral object. Depending on how this computer data has been created, or if errors have occurred during reformatting of this data, there can be gaps or holes or have whole features missing from it. This happened to me during the process of 3D printing this scale version of a Swedish Visby Corvette class battleship. Remove all holes, extensive stitching, and keep disconnected faces. These settings, much like the one before, are actually altering the CAD, the computer aided design file inside Ultimaker Cura. This results in slice models that either print better, or in this case, actually make the file printable. All these settings can be found under Mesh Fixes.

So let's jump back into the computer, into Cura, and I'll throw the STL file I have of this battleship into Cura. Once I've scaled it and put it to fit onto the build platform, you're going to notice an error, model error message that has popped up, which states, your model is not manifold. The highlighted areas indicate either missing or extraneous surfaces. And this is the problem that we're going to be addressing with these new mesh fixing options. First things first, I'll show you what happens when none of these mesh settings have been altered. By default, they are.All normally turned off and the model is sliced. As you can see, a whole chunk of the lower hole has been neglected by the slicing program. This small little problem with the mesh has compounded into a much bigger issue. This boat is definitely liable to sink if printed at this moment.

Now, often one or a combination of these mesh repair settings can fix computer files with issues like this. A little bit of trial and error in Cura can often save you heaps of time instead of software hopping to try and fix these problems. So let's click on the checkbox of kick disconnect faces and then slice the model again. As you can see, it has repaired this gap really well, even repairing the back of the boat correctly. This single checkbox has fixed all my problems in this particular model and has let me get right back to 3D printing.

Now, altering these settings are not always guaranteed to work. Another good method of repairing models is opening the file in another software, altering it in there, and then exporting it out as another file format, which can still be readily read by Cura. I'm going to link below a guide which dives into mesh repairing and using other softwares. This will teach you how to turn raw point cloud data into a usable 3D printable file.

Finally, new within Cura is the intent profiles available for the S-Series Ultimaker 3D printers. These are the engineering, draft, and visual print profiles. They rule as they do a lot of the hard work for you automatically and they are exactly what they say they are. I brought to the table showing you exactly what Ultimaker materials have which profiles currently. And as you can see, the Ultimaker material PLA, Tough PLA, ABS, both have visual and draft options, and Ultimaker PLA, Tough PLA, ABS, Nylon, CPE, CPE Plus, PC, all have engineering profiles. All colour variations of these filament materials are applicable to these profiles. In Cura, you can see the location of these print profiles are right here.

So I've had some amazing results with the visual profile using ABS and Tough PLA. Here's a whale I 3D printed with the Ultimaker PLA. Here's a whale I 3D printed with the Ultimaker Blue ABS on the Ultimaker S5. Using the visual setting at 0.1, using PVA support and brim adhesion. I didn't even use a purge tower, don't tell anyone. No other settings were altered and truly the surface finish is almost soft. Hopefully the camera catches how nice it is. All I did was scale and arrange it in Cura. Another print that I've just got off the printer is this lion, which currently has that PVA material attached to it.

What these print profiles really mean is that if you use any of these profiles with the right machine, you're going to get excellent results. This is all about ease of use, selecting viewer options to get the exact result you desire out of the 3D printer and ending up with exactly what you want.

Here are some test pieces I used to figure out which diameter works best with M2.5 screws when screwing them directly into 3D printed components, which I printed with an engineering intent profile and they came out exactly how they should. If you're interested in exactly what these print profiles are doing, you can sift through the expert settings and see what is being changed. This could definitely give you pointers to alter and improve your own favourite print profiles. To give you an idea of the depth that these changes do, on our online write-up is the current changes from the default intent profile to the engineering intent profile.

And with these three new, exciting Cura features, I will sign off. If you dig our content, come like and subscribe and until next time, stay cozy.