When I was exporting a model the other night I noticed an option on the File menu labeled 3D Print. OK, you have my attention. I selected it and got a dialog with options for sending an object to a slicer program or save as an STL file. By selecting Send to 3D Print Utility, Custom and then providing the path to the Cura executable, you can send models directly to Cura. I haven’t tried this with other slicers but I expect if they support drag and drop this will work for them as well.
You can select 1 of 4 Refinement levels, High, Medium, Low, and Custom settings. I have only tried the default, Medium, so far and the quality is good. The refinement level changes the number of triangles used to define the model. The options for adjustment are under the appropriately named Refinement Options section if Custom is selected.
When Preview Mesh is checked, the mesh – all the little triangles making up your model, is displayed. It’s kind of cool to see and when you switch Refinement levels you can see the difference if that’s important for your print.
The thing about this is that you can only select 1 Body at a time. And if you select a second and send it, it will open a second copy of Cura. There may be a way around this and if you figure it out, please let me know.
It feels much faster than exporting an STL file though. At least for the models I’ve exported. An export can take several minutes for me, and this is done in seconds. I used this recently to create separate models of parts I wanted to give different print characteristics.
If you uncheck the Send to 3D Print Utility options, it prompts for a file name and saves the file in STL format. For single body models, it’s faster than the STL export and possibly even faster than the Export option, although a bit more back-end work to pull all the models into Cura. I think I’ll be using this a lot.