Your new friend in comlpex world of 3d printing software is here!
CuraEngine is the a powerful, fast and robust engine for processing 3D models into 3D printing instruction for Ultimaker and other GCode based 3D printers. It is part of the larger open source project called "Cura".http://blog.ultimaker.com/cura-user-manual/
Summary of main features:
Faster slicing
What took hours now takes seconds. Also, this enabled us to create the following two features.
On-the-fly model preparation
There is no slicing button anymore because it starts processing right-away.
Live tweaking of slicing parameters
Because you see toolpaths re-appear whenever you change a setting, you can quicky find the optimal settings for your print job.
Model fixing
The engine can fix major problem in a model.
Multiple materials
The engine was built from the start with multi-head printing in mind.
Cross-platform
The Engine is written in C++ and released for Linux, Windows & Mac. Compilation on these and other platform should be trivial.
Open source
The license is Affero GPLv3.
David Braam (THE developer) gives more insight:
Ultimaker-evening: David Braam. from Ultimaker on Vimeo.
https://github.com/Ultimaker/CuraEngine
Source:
http://blog.reprap.org/2013/08/new-open-source-slicer-curaengine.html
