Cura Slicer 2022 How To! Tutorial For new 3d printers - In Depth Guide

Hey folks, TechNiverse here, and it's been a few versions since I did one of these, so I figured it was time for an updated and in-depth tutorial on Kira Slicer. If you're new to Kira and 3D printing, you're in the right place. I'm going to show you everything from how to navigate the slicing software, to how to get that print to come out just right, and what settings you need to keep an eye on. Before we start though, I wanted to let you know I have a ton of Kira content here on my channel, including full playlists on individual settings, and a playlist where I specifically answer user questions left in my video comments. So stick around to the end, and I'll put up a link, and if you have any questions about Kira, leave them in the comments of this video, and I will probably make a video just for you. Be sure to leave a like and hit subscribe while you're here. So let's start with the basics. You're new to Kira, you know you need a slicer because you've just purchased a 3D printer, and odds are pretty good that Kira is the one that was included on the disc that came with your machine. That's not necessarily always the case, and if it's not, there are ways to add your own printer to Kira. So the first thing we're going to do to get you set up is make sure that you have a proper printing profile. I am going to be adding another Ender 3. You can see I've done this a couple times before. The reason I'm doing that is because it is a very common printer, and it is the one that I get asked about the most. So let's go here. You probably won't have these selections here. The first thing we're going to do is simply click on add printer. Now when you fire up Kira for the first time, you're going to be presented with a menu like this. So you might not even get the option to click this, but what we're going to do is click add non-networked printer. If you want to add one that's plugged into your machine, you'll click the other button. You just have to make sure that it's set up and you have the drivers installed. So this is a little bit easier though, since most of these end up having the same settings. You just simply scroll down, find your manufacturer. In our case it's Creality, and we are going to add... let's do an Ender 3 Pro. So let's go add, and we are going to get a couple of options popping up for things like start and end g-code, which you'll see down here. These are pretty good right off the bat for the profiles that are listed. If you don't find your machine in there, you can add a custom printer, and in that case you'll want to do some research and find good start and end g-code for your machine, and you'll have to plug that in yourself. But for most market printers, it is readily available, and you can go ahead and just hit next in this box, and we're going to do that now. And as you can see, we now have our build plate. We also have a couple of options up here, so let's take a look around the software interface now that we're actually able and available to interact. What we're going to see is our selected printer, and then our selected material. This isn't necessarily important. You never have to change this if you don't want to. It's just one of those things where you can set presets if you're using the same thing, and you'd rather change your temperature by selecting a different plastic and not mess with all your settings. So we're going to skip over that for just right now, and we're going to go to this, because this is the meat of our slicer. This is going to determine everything. Yours should look like this, actually. It's going to determine everything that our slicer does in order to turn the model, which we're going to import in just a minute, into G-code. Now, a little bit about G-code. It is simply machine code that is broken down into commands, basically telling the machine where to start, where to end, how much to extrude, things like that. What we're going to do is we're going to take a three dimensional model. This machine is going, or this software, excuse me, is going to slice that model into layers. That layer is going to depend on that, how many layers is going to depend on our layer height. So I don't want to overwhelm you. We'll get into that in just a minute, and it'll be a little bit easier to describe. But basically, I just wanted to tell you that, because that's why they call it a slicer. Let's go grab some 3D objects, and what do we have in here? I think I opened a new cue. That's all right. We'll drag this one into the window, because it's going to take forever for that to open up. So here we have a coin I made, and you can simply drag and drop your STLs or 3MF files in here, or you can click this button here. This will allow you to load something as well. I have a bunch of different items in there, but we're not going to do it that way. I'm also getting a warning, and you might get this too. Sometimes it's something you need to pay attention to, sometimes not really. Another freaking cue. All right, there we go. All right, sorry about that. Anyway, it's telling me that the coin is not watertight. That just means that the model isn't manifold, and that it might produce some errors. However, if we put the I'm not seeing any artifacts internally in the model, so I think it should be okay. We're going to go to prepare again. This is where most of your stuff is going to be selected. So this is your layer height. So the smaller the layer height, the finer the details, and the less cleanup work you're going to have, but also the longer it's going to take. So you figure the whole height of the model is divided whatever this layer height is, and that's how many layers you're going to have. So the smaller the layer height, the more layers, and it has to do each layer individually. So this is going to be your second setting. This is your infill. Somewhere between 15 and 20 is what they consider standard, although there are a lot of different settings for infill, including different patterns and things like that. When we talk about support, support is going to be what builds up under big flat areas of your model to keep it from drooping over and ensure that it retains its shape. And if you look at this model here, you can see that all of this red area here is not quite on the build plate, which means it's going to need something underneath it in order to print that flat. So when I slice this with support, it is going to generate a certain structure down here. The structure for support is also variable depending on what you select. In most cases, I tend to go with tree support, but I'm not sure what's selected in here right now. The next thing in the simple menu here is adhesion. So adhesion is basically how much you want your model to stick to the bed. And on a round object like this, generally, I wouldn't need much adhesion. So I can go with something like a skirt or a brim, but on large flat models with corners, corners can tend to lift sometimes. So I use rafts as well. And we'll get into a little bit more about what each of those adhesion types are, but let me go ahead and slice this with our basic settings here. You see I have 0.2 selected. That is pretty high layer height. 0.16 is probably my average, but this should give us a much faster print. So if you're just prototyping and you need a rough copy, increase that layer height to get your time down. And as you can see, it's saying five hours and seven minutes. So a little bit more about actual slicing. Let's take a look at preview mode, which we can do now that we've sliced our object. And if I zoom in real closely here, you can see these layer lines. So if you're staring at your computer getting frustrated because you can't seem to manipulate it in the right way, let's go over the navigation real quick because I kind of skipped past that. So in order to grab the screen and pan, I am right clicking and holding my mouse. You can zoom in and out with the wheel, and you can also rotate around your object using the keyboard, the arrow keys. That's handy as well. If I shift click with the right mouse button, I can drag and pan instead of rotate. So that's the basic navigation. So I'm panning around and I'm going to zoom in and you can see these layers here. This bar on the side here, I can scroll down layer by layer. It's telling me at the layer height that I've selected, I have 60 layers comprising my model. So we're going to go all the way down to the bottom. Now, this blue on the outside here, that is our adhesion. That's not part of the model that'll have to be cut off. And this is what's known as a brim. And a brim is attached to the outside of your model in order to ensure that none of the parts lift up. It's a little bit excessive on a circle because like I said, lifting normally happens on corners and with PLA, it shouldn't be a problem if you have your bed level anyway. Anyway, I digress. The inside is the beginning of our support structure. And you can see these lines, this grid pattern, those are going to build all the way up until just underneath the model. And then the model is going to be built on top of it. That way it's not trying to print a large, flat surface over thin air. And you'd be surprised actually, that's called bridging, and you'd be surprised how good printers are at just printing with nothing underneath them sometimes. Some of them do a really amazing job. So as we scroll up and we begin to see these interior lines, these are our infill lines, and it's set to a triangular pattern right now. You can change that. Since it ends up on the inside of the model, it doesn't really matter to me what it looks like. So you can select whatever one you want. And there are a ton of different settings that you can use such as gradual infill to save yourself plastic and time and things like that. So now that we have the model completely sliced, let's go down to the bottom layer here. And we're going to rewind it back through the actual g-code. So when I click on this, you'll see the nozzle head appear there. And if I rewind it all the way back to the beginning, this will show you exactly how it's going to tell your first layer. It's simulating your printer printing out the first layers. This is exactly the pattern it should go in. And it'll go just like this around and around and around until it starts building up the inside. And then it'll do the walls and the bottom surface. So the yellow, green, and red here, that is your actual model. So a quick note though, I'm noticing that I have one line of red and one line of green. That infill pattern that we talked about can sometimes show through to the outside of your model. So what I'm going to do is increase the walls. And you should see more red here when I'm done. In order to do that, I need to get to the more in-depth settings. And you do that simply by clicking custom right here. Now don't get overwhelmed. There are a lot of settings in here. And right now is a good time to point out that, like I said, I have a Kira settings in five minutes or less set video playlist. And each of those videos goes over each of these settings and what they do in five minutes or less explaining them. So I'll put a card for that in the corner up here. You should see it popping up and you'll be able to click on that and jump right over and explore any of these other settings you wanted to explore. For right now, we found the setting I was talking about. And that's a wall line count. Two is really low. So generally I'm going to want three, preferably four or five. Four is probably my average. Now that we've changed a setting in here, it's going to have to recalculate our model because it's going to change the g-code to adapt to account for our settings. So let's go ahead and hit slice again. And when we go back down into the model after it's completely done slicing, you should see more red lines comprising circles around the exterior of the model in order to illustrate that there are more walls. So it's processing and there we go. Okay. Yeah. So my mistake, the red is just the outer wall. These green ones are the additional walls. So we went from one green and one red to three green lines and one red line. And that means that our wall is thicker and there's pretty much no way that this infill is now going to show through the model on the outside. What I mean by that is sometimes you get this pattern, that's like a crazy square hex hexagonal pattern, depending on what infill you use. Not necessarily a good thing. So this is the in-depth custom settings menu. As I said, there's a ton of stuff in here and we can actually break this down for you just quickly and you won't have to go over that settings video. But let's take a look at all of these major settings and I'll tell you what they mean for your print. So basically quality is going to contain things like your line height and nozzle widths. This is going to be your initial layer height, your layer height, things like that. That is going to determine how high these lines are, how high, how thick each layer is. And like I said, the thinner, the better because you have less finishing work. They won't be as noticeable. You won't need to sand them as much. And the bigger they are, the higher that number, the bigger those lines are. It's going to print really, really fast, but it's not going to be as neat and clean as if you had used a smaller layer height. So that's why they refer to that as quality. Walls is a setting you should be somewhat familiar with because I just explained it to you pretty well. And as you can see, there are a ton of settings in here and they're all worth a look. I highly recommend checking out horizontal expansion and whole horizontal expansion. If you're making parts that fit together and then you have top and bottom, that's going to be your flat surfaces on the top and bottom of the model. How many layers do you want that to be? Again, if you're seeing infill show through on the top or bottom of your model, that's not going to be the walls. That's going to be this setting right here. So you can increase that in the same way. Here you have infill. We're not going to go over all of these, but as you can see, there are a ton of different infill patterns. If I select one of those, it's going to make me slice again, and I don't want to do that. So we're going to go ahead and close that. Material is going to be where you set your temperature. Now, this is why I said you can pretty much disregard that material setting that shows up in here under prepare. And that's because you're going to set your temperature and print settings here. So most new users start with PLA. I hope that that's what you have, because I'm going to show you some quick settings to get a nice print off the Ender 3 with PLA. And we're going to go over it real quickly. So basically, PLA is going to print well from a range of around 205 to 230. In most cases, 205 is where I would start because it's easy to burn and you want to burn it because that'll cause clogs in the end of your hot end in the long run. So I've increased the printing temperature and the build plate temperature for PLA. You really don't need to worry about this. I'm going to leave it at 60 because the warmth does help a little bit with adhesion, but PLA pretty much sticks if you have the bed level no matter what. So I'm going to go ahead and skip all of these other settings right in here. Those are the only, the main two that I need to deal with in order to deal with the material. I do, however, want to go down and check out speed and make sure that we're not printing too fast. Now, 50 millimeters per second is pretty slow for the Ender 3 Pro. I've seen it go at 150, but the quality starts to go down after about 75 millimeters per second. So if you take that up, you should still get a decent model. If you're starting to get a little too many flaws, go ahead and reduce that down a little bit, but you should be fine anywhere in that range. And then we are going to go to travel. This is going to have a retraction distance. So the retraction distance on the Ender 3 Pro for me, a 4.5 works really, really well, and that should work for you as well. I do want to mention, I do have a profile for the Ender 3 that you can just download and plug in if you don't feel like doing all these settings, but I just kind of wanted to explain to you what these settings do and why we use them. So the next thing is going to be cooling. And with PLA, you want your cooling on and you want it on 100%. Different polymers and plastics are going to require different settings, and some such as ABS, you're not going to have the fan on at all. Some such as PETG, you're going to reduce that fan speed to about 20%. If you're looking for more on fan speed settings and what to use with your particular plastic, I do have some videos on my channel about that as well. So make sure you subscribe and kind of dig around and see if you can find anything that you find interesting over there as well. Support, we are using on this model and it is turned on. The structure is normal. As I mentioned earlier, there is something in here called tree support, and that is what I normally use because it tends to save a lot of plastic and it just kind of looks cool. So I definitely recommend checking that out. The only other thing in here that's really important to look at is your support overhang angle. Now this one is set to 45 degrees. 45 degrees is pretty conservative, to be honest. The Ender can print pretty much up to 60, well, 55 degrees without any drooping. So I could get another 10 degrees of tilt, which would require less support and also less calculation time for slicing the model. However, in order to find your proper support overhang angle, I highly suggest you print an overhang tower. Now these are pre-made models with selected angles modeled into them and you can print them. And if you examine them, you can see exactly where your model starts to droop without support. And then you can type in the proper value here. We're going to go ahead and leave it at 45% since anything supported on this model is already at a 90 degree angle. So raising that for this purpose isn't really going to give me a change. Oh, I didn't mean to turn it off. I meant to close the tab. There we go. And then you have your build plate adhesion. As I said, a brim is a little excessive. So since I showed you that already, let's show you the skirt. Now a skirt is going to be exactly like a brim except it's not actually going to attach to our model. And what it does is creates a purge line going around the outline of the object similar to the brim and allows us to ensure that the filament is flowing nicely through our nozzle and we're getting a nice squish on the first layer that everything's coming out nicely before it then skips a beat and moves on to the interior and starting to print the model. So we should get a nice circular outline in this case, maybe with a couple of flares because of the ridges on this coin. And this is probably my preferred method of doing adhesion because it just kind of makes sure, like I said, that everything's running smoothly, but then you don't have anything to cut off your model at the end. Of course, a raft is slightly superior in my opinion, but it does use a lot more plastic. So we are looking here at our skirt. We've set it to three lines and that's what we got. And then it's going to stop and go in and start printing our models. That's exactly what we want. We'll go ahead and close that. We're not going to touch on dual extrusion because the Ender 3 is not a dual extruding printer. However, if you have more than one nozzle, you will need to look into these settings. So I highly suggest checking out my Cura settings in five minutes or less playlist. Special modes we don't really need to look at either. Although I will tell you there are some cool things in here. So let's take a peek for instance, mold and spiralize. Now this is your base mode and this is for making an inverted object. So it'll make the opposite, the negative of your item, allowing you to make a mold that you can make replicas of basically. And then you have print sequence. This is all at once. This is how this is set. If you want to print things one at a time, you can change that. Not really a great idea on this machine because the height isn't really what it needs to be for doing that. There are some experimental modes. I highly recommend not playing around with these until you are familiar with the rest of them. And if you're seeing settings in your settings that you don't want, you can disable them. And if you're seeing settings in my settings that you don't have, the way to get them is to simply type in here and it will show all of the settings with line involved. So if you're not getting what you want from selecting that, we can go to manage settings visibility and you can turn all of these options on or off. So I have pretty much everything on. I don't use most of this, but it is nice to have access to it and see what you can and can't change. So if there's something that you're not seeing, you go ahead and type it in here and it'll give you all the settings with that topic for you to access. Once you click it and turn the checkbox on, it's going to show up in here as well. So now that we have our sliced model, all that you need to do if your printer is not hooked up is click save to disk. You're going to want to make sure that your USB stick with your micro SD card is inserted in the computer and that you are saving it to that disk. What will come out is what's known as an STL file, as I mentioned, or excuse me, we're bringing in STLs. What's going to come out as a G code file. That's going to be a series of numbers and commands that you, your printer is going to run off of basically. So once you insert that SD card into your printer, you can simply click print and select that file. And then the printer should start up. Now, this is the part where the slicer has nothing to do with it. Once your file is sliced, you're going to need to make sure that you know what you're doing printer wise. And in order to do that, I have a playlist that I'll be putting up here that is basically me setting up and doing all of the different things you need to do to calibrate a printer on an Ender three type printer. Just so you can kind of see how to get your bed level, how to make sure everything's inserted properly and that everything is right. So we'll put that card up here and that is going to be that. I'm going to cut this video short because now that you know how to import slice and export a model, you're pretty much ready to go. However, like I said, if you do have any questions, feel free to leave them down in the comments and make sure you tag Kira question in there. Basically just type, Hey Kira question, and then follow it up with your question. That's how I search things. And I most likely will make you a video answering whatever question that you have. If you'd like to see the playlist I already have of all the questions I've answered already, I'll put that up in the corner as well. Make sure you check that out. There are some really, really common questions in there. I get asked a lot. So if you're new to Kira, I definitely think it is a very good resource for you to peek at and kind of see what might be daunting to you in the future before you run into those problems. So that's going to be it for this video guys, as always leave a like, please, please, please leave a like, share this video out to your friends and social media, because I appreciate it. That's the best way to help other people find us on YouTube and use this as a resource and make sure that you hit that subscribe button. I will see you in the next one. Tag Never is out.