Improved print quality and first-time-right results with Ultimaker Cura 4.12

With this latest release, you’ll enjoy improvements that increase your print quality – resulting in prints that look better than ever, increasing your first-time right results. Plus (as always), additional security improvements and smaller-scale features further enhance your 3D printing workflow. Want more? Watch the video or read on!

It’s all about quality

Whether you’re creating a visual prototype, a part meant for a hardworking industrial environment or architecture design, print quality is essential. For visual models, this means that your model looks fantastic. For functional parts, it means your print has the required properties for the job.

For all prints, however, one thing is key: getting the quality you expect and need in one go. No failed prints, no iterations, but getting it directly spot-on: getting it first-time-right.

If your prints are closer to your desired result from the start – you can accelerate your 3D printing processes, as you will save time iterating for optimizations and other tweaks.

That’s why print quality for Ultimaker 3D printers is at the core of Ultimaker Cura 4.12. For its release, we’ve taken another comprehensive look at print processes, making changes, tweaks, and adjustments that work together to provide you with high-quality that are closer to your desired result straight out of your Ultimaker 3D printer.

Here’s how we’ve done it:

Improved top surface quality. With Ultimaker Cura 4.12, top surfaces look better than ever! We’ve made adjustments throughout print profiles and tweaked how we use the monotonic ordering setting – making your top surfaces smoother and removing occasional scarring. All of this is in default profiles – getting you closer to your intended result from the start.

Note: These changes exclude TPU-95A profiles and draft-intent profiles

Improved horizontal print quality. Not only has top surface quality greatly improved with Ultimaker Cura 4.12, we’ve also worked on the quality of side surfaces. Previously, there were sometimes artefacts (an effect called ‘ringing’ or ‘ghosting’) on finished prints. We’ve greatly reduced this by processing several improvements through optimizations in print profiles – and by implementing a bug fix. This results a reduction of ringing, improving resolution and overall print quality.

New slicing feature

Lightning infill. We released a new infill type! It is especially useful for use cases for which you need a part quickly – and you don’t require part strength. The new lightning infill setting enables you to print high-quality top layers but is optimized to use less material and increase your production speed. It’s perfect for visual models, as reduced material usage will result in some loss of strength.

Note: Special thanks to GitHub users rburema and BagelOrb ! You can find out more about lightning infill here.

Additional improvement

The following improvements have also been implemented in Ultimaker Cura 4.12:

• App switcher. A new app navigation module in Ultimaker Cura provides a simpler way to navigate and use other Ultimaker applications, including (but not limited to) Ultimaker Digital Factory, Ultimaker Marketplace, Ultimaker 3D Printing Academy, and Ultimaker support

• Faster start-up. We’ve shaved 10 seconds from Ultimaker Cura’s start-up time by optimizing profile data caching

• Multiple security fixes. We’ve improved Ultimaker Cura’s overall security in several ways by, for example, updating our code libraries

Start printing now

Download Ultimaker Cura 4.12 today to begin printing in even higher quality! Have an idea or a comment? Be sure to let us know on our community of 3D printing experts, where you can offer questions, feedback, or suggestions directly to our development team.