Ideamaker 3.6 -Raise3d's Slicer for 3d printing

The TechNiverous channel is brought to you by these fine Patreon supporters. If you'd like to check us out on Patreon, pop over to www.patreon.com slash techniverous. That's T-E-C-H-N-I-V-O-R-O-U-S. Here, we do our best to stay up to date on the latest and greatest in 3D printing and tech, and keep you informed on the latest developments in these sectors. So, if you're interested in getting updates on 3D printing, or technology such as programming, robotics, artificial intelligence, and things of that nature, make sure you hit that subscribe button down below, leave a like on this video, and comment about what you'd like to see in the future, because we make these videos for you. Welcome back folks, TechNiverous here. Today, we are going to be taking a look at the new beta version of Raze 3D. This is 3.6. It was just released about a month ago, and they're going to be getting ready to go into full deployment here soon. I thought we would take a look. It's been a while since we checked out this slicer. I think the last version we looked at was 3.3, and I want to see what's new here. We did delete our old install, so we have to adjust and set some new settings. I'm going to set up my printer here, and I tend to set up the workhorse, the old Ender 3 first, because why not? 230, 230, mine goes to 500. I generally set it to 410. It does have a heated bed. It has fan speed control, distance from the border of the build plate. That's okay, rectangle. We are using Marlin. Not too worried about... Don't need to set the gantry height. It's really for sequential printing, and I'm not going to be doing that at the moment. Here you see configuration wizards getting ready to finish up. It's just double checking some of my settings. Here we have IdeaMaker itself. There are a lot of cool things here. Some easy little tutorial things here. The IdeaMaker library and the Raise cloud. Now, Raise 3D makes their own printers, and that's what this is meant to work with, but it does work with any printer, and this slicer is actually really, really elegantly designed. It has a lot in common with Kira as far as the looks of the interface, but you can do some things with this that Kira can't quite do. Let's go ahead and add a model. We will take a look around and see what is in store here. 3D printer models. I'm just going to grab something random because it doesn't matter. A little rotor blade there. One of the nice things about Raise 3D is it'll tell you down here, this little symbol tells you... Oh, the model is invalid. Okay, so it tells you that the model has non-manifold edges. The nice thing about Raise 3D is this handy repair button right here. Let's go ahead and click that, and it should take care of those faces for you. As you can see, now it does not... Whoa, I still have... Let's try it again. How many times do we got to do this? Apparently, it's not going to take it below 14 edges. Okay, well, that's just a crappy model. Let's grab something else. It does a really good job of checking for manifolds, so pretty much anything you bring in is probably going to show some sort of error, which is nice to see and have those tools to repair it on hand ready to go. There we go. This one has two non-manifold edges. Should be a little easier to repair. There we are, down to zero, and we have this green check mark here. That means we're going to get a more accurate print than we would with those non-manifold edges. Basically, non-manifold edges are outer surfaces that cross over each other, which you don't really notice in some cases, but in some instances, it's really, really a pain. Let's go ahead and check out some of these other options here. Support, create auto support. We're not needing support. It did put a thin line up in here on this gap just to ensure that that prints properly, and a little piece down here. Let me go ahead and clear the supports. Let's take a look at FreeCut. This is also another amazing tool. So, say I wanted to take this and, well, let's do that first. So, say I wanted to make a huge one of these. This fits your hand, so there's no reason to do this, but let's just say. So, not only can you scale, you can also hit this max fit button, which will make it as large as it'll possibly fit on your particular printer with its build size. So, once that's done, let's take a look at this FreeCut tool. So, you can slide this up and down. You can rotate this, and the cool thing about it, let's get a good section. There we go, is that all you have to do is hit this button, and immediately, depending on the model, sometimes not immediately, it does take a minute sometimes, you can split that right on a plane and have two models to print. That is amazing. One of the other things that I like is the duplicate. So, let's make one copy of this, and it does stack it in there pretty nicely. As far as print quality, IdeaMaker has really, really great print quality. It is pretty much on par with Kira and the other major slicers. So, nothing too drastically different. I wanted to check out the IdeaMaker library real quick, just to see what was in here, and then we're going to quickly go and look at the change log and see if there's any other new features that might warrant being shown. So, there are files for the Ender-3 here already, it looks like, and that should be ready to go, as well as a couple of others. Spool holder for one of the Raise 3D printers. Filament settings for a couple different filament, that's cool. Let's see the release notes. So, 3.6 added cloud support, including the following functions. You can log into IdeaMaker, G-code files in IdeaMaker can be one-click uploaded, and Raise Cloud and IdeaMaker work together. So, then they also added that IdeaMaker library that we were just looking at, where you can download the slice template for different printers and different stuff. So, since it's been a while since we looked, let's take a look at some of the other changes they've made in the last few editions. Added overhang shell angle option, optimized layer start point feature, lots of stuff, yeah. So, they're always making updates. Nice thing about these guys is they are a little bit more thorough with their testing before they release. I mean, even in this beta version, everything is very clean. I haven't really found any bugs. And they'll test their beta for quite a while before they actually release a full version. Normally, with Kira, they'll release a beta, and then you will have the full version of that software within about two weeks. These guys go between a month, a month and a half, two months. So, a little bit more time invested in the beta to ensure that their full release is a little bit better end product. I'm not knocking Kira when I say that, because they iterate constantly. And one of the things that Kira has over all the other slicers is the fact that the community is so big, people are always adding to Kira themselves. And then Ultimaker ultimately takes a lot of those ideas and pushes them into the main branch to extend their software. So, a lot of their stuff is community driven. This is actually made by Raise3D pretty much all in-house. Pretty impressive stuff. Pretty nice slicer. And I definitely recommend you give it a shot. So, if you're testing out different slicers or you like to try new things like I do, this is definitely one that should be on your list. It is interesting. It is simple. And as I said in the beginning, it has a very elegant design. So, the looks are probably the least important part of a slicer. But at the same time, it is also nice to have them not be just an afterthought. So, that's going to be it for this video, guys. Give Raise3D Idea Maker a shot. And if you try it, leave a comment down below and tell me what you think. I'm curious to get some feedback from some other people. As always, I do try pretty much every slicer I can find to get my hands on and pretty much every version of every upgrade because they each have individual features that some of the other ones don't have. And it's nice to have them available to go back and forth to manipulate files before actually slicing. 90% of my slicing actually does get done in Kira. But I can't tell you how many times I've dragged a model in here and split it in half and then exported it back to STL and printed those two models separately. So, very handy tool to have and very unique. I think you guys will like it. Don't forget to leave a comment on this video. Hit subscribe and leave a like. 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