Cura: Make elephant foot compensation easier to find and enabled by default

[probonopd]

Application Version
3.6

Platform
Linux, probably any

Printer
Ender-3, probably any

Steps to Reproduce
Search for "Elephant"

Actual Results
Nothing shows up

Expected results
An entry field shows up to enter the desired amount of elephant foot compensation

Additional Information
https://ultimaker.com/en/blog/50847-introducing-cura-27 talks about "horizontal expansion on initial layer" but it would be good if searching for "elephant" would find this

[probonopd]

Note to self: This works for me (0.6 mm nozzle):

[Liger0]

It's just that you are using a world invented by yourself.
The correct term is "linear advance", and it's done by enabling it in the firmware and/or Cura marketplace.

[probonopd]

Elephant foot compensation is about the first layer being to large in the x-y direction. It is not to be confused with Linear Advance, which is about the corners.

[Liger0]

Elephant foot compensation is about the first layer being to large in the x-y direction. It is not to be confused with Linear Advance, which is about the corners.

I think you can play with the line width and line height for the first layer to adjust it.

[nallath]

This is why we added the settings guide plugin. That greatly increases the amount of information about certain settings.

[ckielstra]

Just my 2 cents:
I also always enable this feature since it makes my printed object more accurate. The used compensation value is however different for each material and nozzle combination, so this should be activated in the material print profiles.

The other request is about the setting being easier to find. How about adding a feature where the search function also searches the help texts?

[nallath]

As for it being always active, that's up to our materials & processing engineers to actually do.

Making the setting search field also look through the descriptions might be a good one, but it might need a bit more work (eg; If you're searching for elephants foot and you would suddenly see the horizontal expansion pop up, would you know / realise why it's suddenly there?)

[probonopd]

How about adding a feature where the search function also searches the help texts?

I think this is a _great_ idea. I would always type "elephant" because I have already forgotten what the Cura name for this feature is...

[intelinc]

Bump. Had no idea this was a thing in Cura before stumbling on this thread. Elephant foot is a prevalent issue when 3D printing, and it would nice to surface the valuable ability address it in a more intuitive manner. Burying this behind buried tooltips subverts the potential user value here. Maybe
Initial Layer Horiz. Expansion (Elephant Foot)

For comparison, here is how it is handled in PrusaSlicer:

[Ghostkeeper]

There are many ways to deal with elephant foot though, and initial layer horizontal expansion is not usually the best of them. My first approach would be to look at the strength of the walls above the first layers (since quite often the strongest effect is that the skin doesn't shrink but the walls around the infill do). And then I tend to look at the build plate temperature and cooling. And only after that will I look at compensation methods like initial layer horizontal expansion. I think labelling this as "this will fix elephant foot" is misleading.

In the next version of the SettingsGuide I'm including an article to fix this. I just made some nice pictures of elephant's foot to include.

[Ghostkeeper]

Maybe it's an idea to include the setting descriptions in the search filter?

[probonopd]

@Ghostkeeper yes, pretty much so. (I search for "Elephant" in Cura every time...)

[mahtDFR]

We discussed this morning and think it's a good suggestion. It's on the backlog to be implemented in a future release.

[probonopd]

Looking at this video, it seems like version 4.7 is my lucky version :-)

Especially I like how the video explains the feature with the __elephant foot__ example :+1:

Thank you very much Ultimaker Team!

[nallath]

It only took us 1.5 year to implement it ;)

[Ghostkeeper]

It's really effective when combined with the option in the Settings Guide to show the articles in the setting tooltips (which makes it replace the setting descriptions and thus changes what the search function searches through).