Cura is an open source slicing application for 3D printers. It was created by David Braam who was later employed by Ultimaker, a 3D printer manufacturing company, to maintain the software. Cura is available under LGPLv3 license. Cura was initially released under the

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

Affero General Public License version 3, but on 28 September 2017 the license was changed to LGPLv3. This change allowed for more integration with third-party

CAD Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computers (or ) to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. This software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve c ...

applications. Development is hosted on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

. Ultimaker Cura is used by over one million users worldwide and handles 1.4 million print jobs per week. It is the preferred

3D printing 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, is the construction of a three-dimensional object from a CAD model or a digital 3D model. It can be done in a variety of processes in which material is deposited, joined or solidified under computer ...

software for Ultimaker

3D printers 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, is the construction of a three-dimensional object from a CAD model or a digital 3D model. It can be done in a variety of processes in which material is deposited, joined or solidified under computer ...

, but it can be used with other printers as well.

Technical specifications

Zamenhof Bust in CURA cropped screenshot

Ultimaker Cura works by slicing the user’s model file into layers and generating a printer-specific

g-code G-code (abbreviation for geometric code; also called RS-274, standardized today in ISO 6983-1) is the most widely used computer numerical control (CNC) and 3D printing programming language. It is used mainly in computer-aided manufacturing t ...

. Once finished, the g-code can be sent to the printer for the manufacture of the physical object. The open source software, compatible with most desktop 3D printers, can work with files in the most common 3D formats such as STL, OBJ, X3D,

3MF 3D Manufacturing Format or 3MF is an open source file format standard developed and published by the 3MF Consortium. 3MF is an XML-based data format designed specifically for additive manufacturing. It includes information about materials, colors ...

as well as image file formats such as BMP,

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

JPG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

, and PNG.

Major software versions

* 7 June 2016: Ultimaker announced the new Cura major release 2.1.2, superseding the previous 15.04.6 version (note the non-sequentiality in the major version numbers). * September 2016: Version 2.3 was a major release. It includes new printing profiles, slicing features, as well as increasing speed. It also supported the dual extrusion possible with the Ultimaker 3 model. * 17 October 2017: Version 3.0 updated the user interface and allowed for CAD integration. This was the first version with plugin support. * November 2017: Cura Connect was released to enable users to control, monitor, and configure a group of network-enabled 3D printers from a single interface. * October 2018: Beginning with version 3.5, all files are saved in the 3MF format for improved compatibility with other 3D software.

Hotkey In computing, a keyboard shortcut (also hotkey/hot key or key binding) is a software-based assignment of an action to one or more keys on a computer keyboard. Most operating systems and applications come with a default set of keyboard shortcu ...

s were introduced as well as a searchable profile guide. * November 2018: Version 3.6 introduced material profile support for materials made by major manufacturers such as

BASF BASF SE (), an initialism of its original name , is a European Multinational corporation, multinational company and the List of largest chemical producers, largest chemical producer in the world. Its headquarters are located in Ludwigshafen, Ge ...

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, and other members of the Materials Alliance Program consortium. * March 2019: Version 4.0 made significant changes to the user interface. In support of plugin capabilities, a star-based rating system was incorporated to allow users to rate plugins. Cloud-backup functionality was added as well as support for more third-party printers. * 21 April 2022: Release of Ultimaker Cura 5.0 beta, which introduced a rebuilt slicer engine that allowed for much finer details, stronger prints, faster print profiles, support for Apple M1 chips, and an improved UI. * 17 May 2022: Release of Ultimaker Cura 5.0

Plugins

Release 3.0 introduced plugin capability. Users can develop their own plugins or use plugins commercially available. Plugins simplify workflow for users by allowing them to quickly perform tasks like opening a file from a menu or exporting a file from an application. Starting with Release 4.0, users can rate plugins using a star system. Current plugins include:

SolidWorks SolidWorks (stylized as SOLIDWORKS) is a brand of software used for solid modeling computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE). It was one of the first 3D CAD applications designed to run on a desktop PC. The brand is owned ...

Siemens NX NX, formerly known as "Unigraphics", is CAD/CAM/ CAE software, which has been owned since 2007 by Siemens Digital Industries Software. In 2000, Unigraphics purchased SDRC I-DEAS and began an effort to integrate aspects of both software packages ...

, HP 3D Scanning, MakePrintable,

Autodesk Inventor Autodesk Inventor is a computer-aided design extension application for 3D mechanical design, simulation, visualization, and documentation developed by Autodesk. Features Inventor allows analyzing 2D and 3D CAD models by creating a virtual rep ...

Media coverage

On August 31, 2014, Cura was included in a review of 3D slicing software by Think3DPrint3D. In the summer of 2015, Ultimaker released Cura 2.0. On January 1, 2018, All3DP named Cura one of the best 3D slicer software tools. In 2019, Cura was named one of the top free 3D printing tools by the industry blog, G2. Cura was named Software Tool of the Year at the international 2019 3D Printing Industry Awards ceremony in London.

References

External links