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I seem to have got Cura into a state where changing the material has no effect on the settings. I am a beginner with Cura, and I would like to understand what I've done wrong, and how I can undo it.

More details:

My part is meant to be printed in PETG, but I first did some test prints in PLA to get all the non-material related settings right (e.g. infill, top/bottom pattern, etc.). When I changed the material from "PLA" to "PETG", it gave me a popup saying that I had changed these settings and asking me if I wanted to keep or discard the changes - I selected keep. I'm pretty sure that temperature, fan speed etc. weren't on that list of changes, otherwise I would have pressed discard.

However, the temperature, fan speed etc. also didn't change, they all stayed at their appropriate values for PLA. This effect seems to be permanent - they stay at their PLA values even if I select 'Settings -> Profile -> Discard current changes' from the menu, or if I select the 'Draft' or 'High' profiles, which I haven't yet used.

I noticed also that if I go to 'Manage Profiles', I find that all three profiles include settings for the material, including a 200 degree printing temperature and a 60 degree bed temperature. I guess that these are overriding the settings associated with the material. I guess that these settings are not supposed to be in the profiles, so I want to understand how they got there and whether/how I should remove them.

It's possible that I did manually change those temperature settings for some previous print - but I wouldn't have expected that to have such a permanent effect.

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  • $\begingroup$ You're on the right track: you need to set up your PETG profile under Manage Profiles and save it as a new profile. $\endgroup$
    – Carl Witthoft
    Oct 23, 2019 at 15:30
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    $\begingroup$ @CarlWitthoft if that's correct it strikes me as rather strange. If I'm supposed to manually enter the temperature etc. and save it as a separate profile, then why is there an option to change the material at all? Surely the whole point of having material and profile be different things is that you can change one without changing the other... $\endgroup$
    – N. Virgo
    Oct 23, 2019 at 15:53
  • $\begingroup$ You probably have to clear/reset temp overrides in the profile so it honors the defaults from the material. $\endgroup$
    – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE
    Oct 23, 2019 at 17:23
  • $\begingroup$ (I don't generally use the Cura gui, just the slicing engine, so I'm not sure.) $\endgroup$
    – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE
    Oct 23, 2019 at 17:24
  • $\begingroup$ @R.. I guess the issue is, it's not clear how to do that in the GUI. (But on another note: cool, I didn't know you could use the engine separately. Can I ask you, since you're here, whether the command line tool allows you to run the slicing step separately from g-code generation? If so, it might make a good answer to this question, which would be super super cool.) $\endgroup$
    – N. Virgo
    Oct 24, 2019 at 8:41

1 Answer 1

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You're right in that the profile overrides the material. Cura's overriding precedence is as follows, where higher numbers override the lower numbers:

  1. Cura's base defaults.
  2. Printer specific settings.
  3. Adjustments to the printer made in the Machine Settings dialogue.
  4. Nozzle profiles.
  5. Material profiles.
  6. Quality levels (aka built-in profiles).
  7. Custom profiles.
  8. Settings not yet saved to a profile.

In the Cura GUI, once a setting has been saved to a profile, there is no way to really get it out again. You can only create a new profile and copy over all of your overrides.

However for the temperature you can still click on the little fx button next to the setting. This will restore the link from the setting to inherit again from different settings. In the case of printing temperature, the material profile actually adjusts the "Default Printing Temperature" setting. Clicking the fx button makes it go back to "use the Default Printing Temperature" so that your material's temperature is used again.

The same does not go for fan speed, sadly.

The Cura developers are planning to remove the fx button and replace it with a button to remove a setting override from a custom profile. That would fix your problem. It's not implemented yet though.

Source: Am Cura developer.

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