Cura 4.6.1 - Best Tips and Tricks

Hey folks, TechNibbers here. Today we're going to be going over some of my favorite tips and tricks for using in Kira Slicer starting right now. The TechNibbers channel is brought to you by these fine Patreon supporters. Alright, you're here for some tips and tricks. So we're going to start with a couple of tips, some of my best advice that I can give you when beginning to work with Kira. And tip number one is pretty simple. This is Kira. You can see I've dragged in a model and I have the more advanced settings open here, the custom settings. Tip number one is to get familiar with the settings. So a lot of people come in, they throw their model in and they set the layer height and the infill and decide whether they want support and adhesion and they are good to go. And that works in most cases. But if you really want to get to know your software and get really good at Kira, you're going to have to go into the custom settings. So tip number one is opening extra settings. So if you go in here, you'll see I have all these categories available with subcategories and sub settings underneath all of them. See, the thing is it gets a little daunting every time and we'll get to this more in tip number two, but to double check all of these settings. So a lot of people get scared away by the fact that there's so many of these. I find it's a lot less intimidating if you have them all closed and then you open them one at a time. But our tip is basically this little cogwheel here. So once you get into the custom settings, there are some things that you will see and that you will not see. So there are things in here that you have to turn on and off. And in order to find one of those things, or if you're looking for a setting that you can't particularly see over here, you can type in an item up here and it will show you all of the settings that have to do with it. So you can see here that I have experimental selected and it's showing me the tree support options for the experimental settings. That also lets me know that these tree support settings I was looking for are under the experimental setting. Now, if you don't have a checkbox here, it's not going to show up there. It won't be an option. So you need to make sure that you turn it on. And there are some other ones as well. Say you want to do something with the jerk or the acceleration control and those settings aren't available, you can bring them up by typing in pretty much anything you're looking for. So we're not going to mess with those. We're going to go ahead and close that. The main thing is the ability to add and subtract settings. Let's say I go into mesh fixes. Now, I don't use this too often. There are some good settings in here. If I click the settings wheel in there, it brings me right to the mesh fixes settings and I don't have maximum travel resolution turned on. To be honest, I could probably turn all of these off because I don't really use any of them. I don't change the settings. I am going to leave them on just because I'm used to what I have here. But if there's anything in your way that you don't think you're using, go ahead and disable it. Test it out. Play with the settings and get used to it. That's going to bring us to tip number two. Tip number two is pretty simple. The thing is every time you print, you're going to want to go and check the main settings at least. The main settings are going to be your material. You want to ensure, especially if you're switching in between materials, that you have the proper material temperature and that you're not leaving it at a setting from a previous material. This also applies to the build plates and there are some other settings you might want to check as well. One of the ones that catches me up quite a bit is when switching between ABS, PETG, or PLA. With PLA, I have my fan turned on and with PETG and ABS, I do not. Sometimes I forget to turn it back on and then I start to print in PLA and get really blobby prints. It's something that I've gained a lot more control over lately because I've done it so many times that I've realized that's why this is my number two tip. Make sure you're checking these settings. If you always use a raft and you never change it, go ahead. Don't worry about checking your adhesion settings all the time. The temperature is something that you change quite a bit. I would recommend the cooling, the material, possibly the infill. Sometimes you're going to want to check the quality and shell too to make sure that you didn't change those in a previous setting for a previous filament you were working with. Maybe not every print, but every time you switch filaments, you're going to want to remember to adjust all of the settings properly. Either turn your fan on or off. Make sure that you have the temperature set properly for that filament. The final item that I have for tips, and this is tip number three, and then we'll go into a couple of tricks I have for you, is to learn about this guy right here. If you don't have tree support turned on, turn it on and give it a shot on a couple of different models. Let me slice this guy. I'll show you the preview. You get some pretty interesting support, but I find it also has a slightly better interface with the model itself. No matter how I change the interface settings for my support, I can't quite get it as clean as the tree support settings. It is simple, a little bit easier to remove. Depending on the model, it can use more or less plastic. That's not absolute, but you can see that it is printing. The nice thing about tree supports is that it'll put my support on the base of the build plate instead of building straight lines up from here and causing issues for removal on both sides. It's very, very clean. It pretty much attaches right to the surface that needs the overhanging support and works really well, comes off pretty well. Then if you need to finish the surface and clean it up a little bit, it comes clean really nicely. All right, now moving on to the tricks. Now, this one is pretty straightforward, and a lot of common care users will already know this, so bear with me. Don't yell at me that you knew this already. There are some people out there that don't know this. There is a way to orient your model exactly how you want to orient it. Now, orienting your model is very important because it can reduce overhangs, reduce filament, and reduce print time, and also lead to cleaner finishes. But you see this red area here? That means that it's going to need support. It's overhanging past the acceptable overhang angle for this printer's settings, and it's going to need some sort of support. There's a quick way to do this without adding support. I can just go to rotate model, and the thing I'm talking about, this is trick number one, is this button right here. You don't have to rotate using these wheels. You can simply click select face to align to build plate, and click on the face you want to put flat to the build plate. Now, when I do this, you'll notice that those red areas here, here, and on the top of the circles have all disappeared. This model should print fine without support, thereby reducing the wasted plastic that I might be using. So let's jump over to number two. Now, trick number two is a little bit different. We're going to go in here. We're going to go to preferences, and configure Kira, and click theme, and you'll notice that I have quite a few of these. You can download or even make extra themes. I definitely suggest changing it up because this white kind of hurts my eyes. I had been using this one that I made for quite a while, but I'm going to switch over to this, guys, because I just recently added this. This is by a guy named Mamadu BA, and you do have to close Kira and reopen it for it to take effect, and there you have it. This is a lovely green theme. He also has a couple different colors as well as, if you do a search around my YouTube channel, you can find some themes that I have made as well. Just type in Kira theme, but this is pretty interesting. It's nice to look at. I like the dark modes a little bit better. I could have just switched to the Ultimaker dark, but when I was practicing making my themes, I kind of butchered that one, so I would have to re-download it, but yeah, themes are pretty cool. Neat little trick. Everything is a different color, but I think this one was done really well, so everything's pretty subtle and well done. And finally, that brings us to our final trick of the day, and I love this one. So these are a couple of parts that I'm printing for a model that I'm currently making. I haven't put all of it in here because I don't want to fully give it away, but you can kind of see some hints here and probably have an idea of what it is. However, the reason I've brought them all in here like this is because I wanted to show you a cool trick. Now, this model was made in Fusion 360. I then dissected it into several parts to make it easier for printing and adjusting certain things on the model, but what I'm going to show you is, let's first, let's take everything and we'll select all the models at once. You do that by holding shift. There's a little bonus tip for you, and we're going to go into scale. Let's take it down to 50% and there we have it. Now, I still have all the models selected, and what I'm going to do is go ahead and right click and click merge models, and because this was made in Fusion 360, it's got a little bit more data than you think when you bring in the STL, and it puts the file back pretty much completely together. So, if you have something that you dissect into smaller pieces, and you want to print a miniature version of it whole, say a prototype or just a demo model to show somebody, maybe half scale or smaller or something like that, this is a good way to just drag all the parts in and have the model built in a bunch of pieces. Now, this is, I think, a pretty handy trick. I could just throw some support in here and print this as is. Of course, it's not going to print this floating ring here and things like that just because there are some pieces missing. There's a top of a case, a little dome that goes here, and some things like that, but I think that that's a pretty neat trick, and I wanted to show it to you guys and share all the other tips and tricks that I have. I'm pretty sure I'll have another episode of these Kira Tips and Tricks videos coming up pretty soon, but give it a couple weeks. I'll find some more little tidbits to share with you guys. Thanks for watching. I appreciate it. Don't forget to leave a like if this video was in any way helpful. Subscribe to the channel, and yeah, leave me a comment. Let me know if there's a particular setting or something that you'd like to learn more about in Kira because I love making videos about Kira, and they tend to go over really well on the channel, and it's a really fun software to play around with. That's basically it, guys. TechNiverse 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. It won't be available on a channel store until I reach 10,000 subscribers, and so far I am just about to hit 5,000. It'll be a little while, a couple more months before you see this on the actual channel, but they are available now. I have a couple other designs. 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