Cura 4.7.1 A newbies guide to slicing for 3d printing - tutorial-

Hey there friends and fellow technivores and welcome to the channel. If this is your first time here and you'd like to become a technivore, hit that subscribe button and turn on notifications so we can keep you in the loop and up to date on the latest and greatest 3d printing developments. That said, let's jump right into Kira 4.7.1, the latest release version of Ultimaker's slicer for 3d printing. In this video I will walk you through the process of importing, slicing, and exporting a file for 3d printing step by step, and on the way we'll go over some of the most commonly used settings that will affect the outcome quality of your print. So if you're familiar with all this, feel free to skip around a bit, but if you're new to slicing and printing, be sure to pay attention. After the main portion of this video, we will go over some tips and tricks that should be useful to everyone, so be sure not to miss those. The technivores channel is brought to you by these patreon supporters. Check us out on patreon at patreon.com slash technivores. So you now have a 3d printer and you've printed a test model that came with it, and now you'd like to know how to slice and print your own file. Well, it's actually pretty simple. Today we will be setting up a print for my Creality Ender 3 v2, since it's a pretty popular printer and most of the information will transfer well to other brands and builds. This is my Ender 3 v2, and this is the micro sd card. We're going to put the file on this from our computer, then insert it into the printer when we are done. To do this, you will need the usb adapter that is usually included with your printer, insert the card into the slot on the usb stick, then insert the usb into your pc. Most printers will include a slicer on this disk, and it may be kira or it may not. Please note that the slicer included with the Ender 3 v2 is called creality slicer, and it's actually just a port of kira that runs on the kira engine. This means that it's essentially the same thing. I don't mind creality slicer, but kira receives new functionality and updates quite regularly, so odds are the version on your usb may already be outdated. To download a clean install of the latest version of kira, feel free to check out this site, where you can find the latest stable release version of the software, download and install it for your platform, and then open it up. When you open kira for the first time, you will need to set up your printer. Now I'm going to set up mine for the Ender 3 v2, but the steps for any printer are virtually the same. So just follow along, and the most important thing to know at this time will be the dimensions of your print area, or the amount of actual space you can print an object in. If you're not sure of your specs, a quick google search will return what you're looking for. Once you have them at hand, go ahead and click add a non-networked printer, then select your brand from the drop-down list, followed by the model. In this case we're using a creality, so we'll select that, and then the Ender 3 pro. Since there is no Ender 3 v2 yet, I'll build my profile from this. If you can't find your brand or model, click custom, and then select custom fff printer. Once you're at this screen here, since I selected a printer that already has a pre-built profile, it is going to fill in most of this for me. Now what you're going to want to put is these three settings right here, your width, your depth, and your height. And if you're doing a custom fff printer, you're also going to want to take a look at these settings here. Now what these settings denote is the height and width of your actual gantry itself, so that way it can take into account the top of the printer and it will reduce your build area accordingly so it doesn't try to print outside where it needs to. These numbers aren't necessarily vital if you're not going to be printing really high up on the gantry, so you do want to take away the width of the carriage, which is going to reduce your left and right travel to keep it from smashing into the end and trying to continue going. These perimeters right here, as I said, are your main perimeters. You're going to want your width, your depth, and your height in here to ensure that it doesn't try to print something outside the build area, which will cause it to ram into one end or the other. Start and end g-code are going to be pretty simple. They are exactly what they sound like. This is basically what it's going to run. We can expand that and make it a little bit bigger. So this code right here is what it's going to run before it prints a print, and in my case it is priming the nozzle and printing two lines in order to make sure that everything is purged. This is NG code that it's going to do after it prints, such as turning off the fan, the hot end of the bed, and disabling all the stepper motors. Now your code might not exactly be the same for either of these, and I have separate videos on what works best for these for particular printers, so we can come back to that at another time. You don't really need to worry about what's in there off of the bat. Now the extruder tab here is unnecessary to mess with unless you have more than one nozzle. So since this is a single nozzle machine, we're going to go ahead and hit next, and we now have a profile here. As you can see, I've done this before. I have several profiles on here, but I can come back at any time to this menu by hitting settings, printer, manage printers. Then if I want to make adjustments to the hardware settings, I can click machine settings, and I can change my start and NG code or the dimensions. One important thing to note about these printers is you see this section that says origin at center? I don't have it clicked, and that is on purpose. If you click that, it will move the origin to down here. I know it sounds backwards, but the origin being in the corner here will cause a lot of problems, and you won't get any finished models. So you really want to make sure that's unchecked, and if it is, it will print where you expect it to in the actual middle of the bed. I know it's counterintuitive, just trust me, that's the way it works. Once everything is all set up, you will be presented with this screen here. Now you'll note these four main settings over here. These are the main settings you're going to need to know to print with, and for the most part of this video, we're going to stick with just these four settings, and they are set to the default for the printer that I built, which is a 0.2 millimeter layer height with 20% infill, no support, and no adhesion. We'll go over each of those settings in just a second, but first let me show you how to bring a model in here. We are using STLs with Kira. There are some other file types that it takes, but this works the best at the moment. So we're going to drag and drop a model right to the build plate. You'll see right off the bat that this model is extending up over the top of my machine and therefore too large for me to print on this printer. So there are some simple ways to manipulate this object, move it around, rotate it, and even scale it down by selecting the object and going over here. And I'm going to go to scale here and I have it set to uniform, which means if I change a dimension in one direction, it will change all three dimensions to be equal to it. So I say let's print this at half size, 50%, and hit enter. And then once I drag it into the area, it'll snap to the bottom of the build plate because of my settings, and you can see the whole model turns yellow. You'll notice these red lines throughout here. Those are areas that are going to require support. So what that means is the printer can only print at a certain overhang angle, and after that it'll start to droop and string and you'll lose your form. So we want to print something underneath there to kind of prop it up, and in 3D printing this is known as support. So we're going to go ahead and click support, and that's going to help quite a bit. Another thing with this model is the fact that it's super tall and kind of thin. When the head of the printer starts moving around up here and moving at any decent sort of speed, it is quite possible that it could push downward and over on any direction here basically and cause the build plate to, or excuse me, the model to release from the build plate. We don't want to knock the model over, so what we're going to do is add adhesion. And there are a couple different settings for adhesion which we'll go into a little bit more later, but for right now, basically it's just going to add material around the base of the object in order to give it a bigger surface area to grip to our build plate, which is going to be quite helpful and prevent it from warping or knocking over. The other two settings over here are going to determine basically the speed of your print and the weight of your print. So infill percentage is exactly what it sounds like. It is how much of the model is printed as a solid object. Now it does this using an infill pattern, which you can see denoted here, in this case a grid pattern. So it doesn't have to print every single part of this object. It'll print the shell or the outer perimeter, and then it'll put infill everywhere that you're not going to see on the inside of the model to keep it structurally sound, but save on some plastic. And 20% is a pretty standard number for infill, so we can go ahead and just leave it there. Now the other setting is going to be your layer height, and that is how high each individual layer of this one slice is going to be printed. So the smaller your layer height, the finer your details are going to be, and the less you're going to see those lines, but the longer it's going to take to print. For default, it has me set at 0.2 millimeters, and that is actually pretty decent. With that height, you will see some slight layer lining, but not much. If you reduce it further than that, you're going to exponentially add to your time, but you are going to have less finishing work when the model is complete, such as sanding or smoothing, before you can paint the model if that's what you intend to do with it. Now, basically, these four settings are all you need to know. I can go ahead and hit slice down here, and once it's done slicing, I'll be able to look at the preview, and I can export the file. All right, and that is exactly what I'm going to recommend that you do. So we're going to go ahead, now that it's sliced, you can see it says preview or save the file. You can click the preview button here, or you can switch to preview mode in the top up here, and you will see exactly what a slicer does. So if there was any confusion before as to what your slicer software was doing to the file, I'm going to explain it to you right now. So once it's done processing all the layers, it will stop. There we go. You can see, if we grab this bar over here and scroll down, okay, right there we are looking at layer 681, and let's get a closer look. So here you can see the infill, which is going to print that pattern we were talking about. You can change that pattern with particular settings we'll get into in a few minutes here, and then you can see all this light blue stuff is the support. That's stuff that's going to have to be removed from the model in order to see the final product, and basically what g-code is, is a series of commands for the printhead to follow. So it's going to tell it to make a circle, and then make a smaller circle, and basically we'll go down to the bottom layer here, and I'll show you this a little bit better. This is your very bottom layer, and if I scroll this back, you can actually see the printhead, and we can watch. This is what it's telling to print. So right now it's doing that adhesion part we talked about, and it's going to widen the base a little bit. You can jump ahead a little bit here, I think. But once that part's printed, it'll start printing the actual details of the model, and it does that line by line by going from point to point in order to build upward and create the model. Now this layer here is 0.2 millimeters thick, and with that layer height to build this whole model, it's going to need to make 1042 layers. So that's the best explanation I can give you of what exactly a slicer does. It slices it into layers, and then it makes those layers into a path for the tool in order to print properly. Now all we need to do is insert our USB stick, and this option here will change to save to disk. You can go ahead and click that, and change your file name. This is Leaning Tower of Pisa, so we'll leave it at that, and we are saving as G-code. We don't need to change that. So we'll hit save. Make sure you're saving it onto your mini disk, and then you can place that disk in your printer and hit print. Once you find the file and select it, you'll be able to print out the model that you just sliced. We're going to jump back over to prepare for a minute because it slows me down a little bit less, and we are going to look at some other options. Now as you see here, there is this little button that says custom. If you click that, you are presented with a whole plethora of other options that you can tweak and adjust to be specific to your needs. Now if you'd like to know what each of these individual settings is, check out my playlist, Kira Settings in 5 Minutes or Less, where I have a video for pretty much each individual one explaining what it does in about 5 minutes each. So that's a good place to start. If you want to really dial in your profile, you're going to need to go through these. Unfortunately, if I did that now, the video would be hours long. So you get the gist of what you're going for, and definitely check out that playlist and you'll have a much better idea of what you should change and when. That being said, that is basically it for our Kira tutorial. We have everything we need right here, and you are ready to print your file. Before you go, let's check out some tips and tricks that I have in mind. One of the most important things when using Kira, or in fact any slicer for 3D printing, is to keep in mind your orientation. Now as I said, you can select a model and use these tools over here to manipulate the model. And if I were to go and grab this and tilt it like this, let's go a little further yet. Well, not only does it not fit, which we can adjust. Let's make it a little smaller to illustrate this point here. So, significantly more of the model is now red. You can see that this overhang is too much for it to print. I think if we go even a little bit further, you can see my point. All of this is now going to require support buildup, as well as all of the other little columns that are overextended over the height that it can, or excuse me, the range it has for printing an overhang. It's too steep of an angle, so it will all need support, and that will add to your print time. So, orientation is key. If you need to orient a model so that a flat part is up against the base, this is tip number two. Go ahead and click the rotate command with the item selected, and click this handy button right here. Then when you click on a face of the model, it will lay it flat to the build plate. And you can see now that this whole part is an overhang, and it'll have to print that. So, that's not ideal either, coming back to our point of orientation. Let's go ahead and check out the copy features. So, if I want more than one of these, let's turn it back the right way, please. There we go. I can right click on it and hit multiply. Now, it says number of copies, if I click that, it will make one additional copy. If I hit four, I won't end up with four copies total, it will make four additional copies. So, let's hit okay, and it will automatically place them where it thinks they should go in the build plate. Note that depending on your gantry dimensions, you should be able to move these objects closer in order to fit more onto the build plate, but it just kind of does a good job of arranging them all if they can all fit. The other tip is this error here shows up quite a bit, and what it's saying is that your model is not manifold. Now, sometimes that doesn't necessarily matter, but in most cases, a non-manifold model will cause issues while printing because it will try to print an outside layer on the inside and vice versa. So, if you can, you'll want to take your objects through some sort of fixing process, and you can do that in pretty much any 3D modeling software, and some slicers actually have functionality to correct that as well. We're going to go ahead and hit do not show this message again. I normally don't mess with non-manifold models unless I print them and have an issue printing them. Then, I will go and repair the model and try re-slicing, but normally, it's not too much of a problem. Cura's pretty smart. So, that's going to wrap up this video, guys. I hope it was helpful to you. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button, and leave me a comment if there's any particular settings in Cura that you don't understand. Thanks, guys. Tech Nibbers out. Well, that's it, guys. That's going to wrap up this video. If you've noticed the shirt, the merch is available. Go ahead and check out the Teespring merch link down below. 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