Cura 4.5 tutorial - for beginner 3d printing!

Hey guys, TechNibbers here. Today I'm gonna give you a quick introduction tutorial to Kira 4.5. Now if you're not new to Kira and you know all this stuff already, feel free to skip through this one. But if you're just getting into 3D printing and you're curious about exactly the process you need to go through in order to get a model into Kira and slice it for your printer and get the g-code transported over to your printer, this video is for you. So I'll give you a quick rundown of a few things and we're gonna jump right into it right now. Now when you first open Kira, you'll be presented with a screen asking you to add a printer basically. And I'm going to open that screen now by going to settings, printer, add printer, and you'll see a screen that looks like this. You might say there is no printer found over your network. If that's the case, that means either A, your printer is not connected to your computer, which is fine, you don't need it to be at the moment, or it is connected and you don't have the proper driver software for the board in your printer to connect. So if that's the case, you might have some other steps to go through before getting the printer to connect to the actual computer. But since we're going to be using an SD card to transfer the file and print remotely, we don't really need to hook directly to the printer anyway. So we're going to go ahead and click the add a non-networked printer button and you'll see it gives you a giant list of all these options. So everything from the Anet A2 to the A8 to the ET4, ET5. You also have CrealT in here, Anycubic, a bunch, a bunch, a bunch. They keep adding new printers. I normally do the setup for the CrealT or my Tevo Tarantula. CrealT is pretty popular so let's check on them. There it is, CrealT 3D and let's set this up for a CR10. So then basically all you have to do is hit okay. You should by all means be able to find your printer in here. If for some reason you can't find your printer in here, we're going to go ahead and hop back to my face. We're going to move this out of the way a little bit more just so we can kind of see the settings. So we're going to go to manage printers and click on the CR10. Yours shouldn't have went away. I clicked over, that's why it did, but you should see this screen right here. It's basically going to give you the width, depth, and height settings, build plate shape, and it's going to fill most of this in for you because you pre-selected a printer that's programmed in here. So that is pretty much all you need to do for that. If you ever need to change that you can go in here into the settings. I'll have to close it for settings printer and select the printer or manage printers and from here you can select the printer and hit machine settings and it will open that again so you can make adjustments. We're not going to play with that too much. We're going to take a quick look at these settings right here. Basically it gives us a couple of default profiles at different heights. These are my layer heights. These are the recommended layer heights for the printer that I entered. It's pretty much got all that data there so we don't need to mess with that too much and the infill percentage is at a standard 20. I'm going to go ahead and lower that down to about 10 and that'll be fine. I could select gradual infill which means it increases the amount of infill towards the top, but I'll show you what infill is in just a second. Let's go ahead and grab a model and I'm going to grab one of these. No, that's the wrong one. Let's grab this one. As you can see here the fan blades aren't touching the build plate and they won't print in thin air like that so you're going to need to add support and that is denoted by these red angles or these red faces. Anytime you see a red face it means the angle is too steep for the printer and they recommend adding support. It will generate it automatically if I go ahead and hit support here and you don't see it right away because we're in the prepare view mode. If I were to go ahead and jump over here into the preview mode it's still not going to show me anything. It's showing a silhouette and that's because it says right down here nothing is shown because you need to slice first. So in order to slice and see what our supports look like we're going to go ahead and click the slice button. The larger the model the longer it'll take. It should whip through this pretty quickly and there you see it. All those additional little blue structures are support lines and they will have to be removed from the model. Where they are touching the model, this darker blue area, that is called the support interface and that can sometimes leave marks on the model that will need to be cleaned up afterwards. If you're not getting a view like this it's because I'm under color scheme and line type and you can see that the helper lines are blue. That's this color right here and that's what these are basically. This other line right here is a skirt that it's printing around the model and that can be adjusted by changing the adhesion settings. If I were to click adhesion basically turned it on and again these are your basic settings. We'll get into the custom settings here in just a second but when you first start printing these are the only ones you want to play with until you get a decent print and then you can adjust them from there to get an excellent print by adjusting the custom settings. So it's given me 52 minutes. You can see it put in a brim which means that those lines are now touching the model which is going to give me a flatter surface. So basically these lines out here that are pulling it outward keep the lines that are vertical here from lifting up. As they cool some plastics will try to curl and this little brim here will keep it held to the build plate ensuring that it stays flat because if it starts to curl up your printer will print on top of it. It'll do all sorts of weird extrusion things there and you'll end up with a really malformed model. Let's go back to prepare mode real quick. I want to show you one other trick. Most of the time when you download a model and there are plenty of places to get models if you're not making your own you will get this one. Let's say this is a lightsaber I downloaded and as you can see there are a lot of overhangs or places where it says it's going to need support. So I could check support 90% of the time when you get a model it's going to be oriented the way that you want it to be oriented but if it's not I think I could optimize printing by setting it up on this bottom here. So let's go ahead and go to our rotate tool. All of the tools for manipulating an object once it's placed in here are over on the side here. So this is your movement tool for moving it back and forth and you can grab the arrow and move it. You can also grab the item and move it freely. This is your scale tool you can make it uniform and scale it by a percentage. If you have an assembly you can scale all of the parts by that percentage and it will then make ensure that they still all fit together. But we're going to be using the rotate tool and here I can grab and rotate and spin by degrees and I'm using snap rotation so it's going to snap by 5 degree or 15 degree increments depending on the way I've selected. But this time I'm going to hit select face and I'm basically going to click on the spot I want and in doing that I am basically making it print vertically and you can see I greatly reduced the amount of areas that need support. Now it's debatable depending on your printer whether or not this overhang here is going to actually need support and we can adjust the percentage that of overhang that your printer requires support at. We'll get to that in just a second but for right now I am going to slice it with support and leave that on there and we'll take a quick preview of this model because this is going to give us a good view of the infill here when we scroll down through the preview mode so we can kind of see what infill is and what it does. All right so our model is finally done slicing let's pop over to preview mode and I will show you what that infill looks like. Now right now it's processing the layers which means it's stacking them up one by one here and you can see it does have a good amount of support around those little flanges there but significantly less than if it had printed on its side. So this is in my opinion the ideal orientation for this model let's go ahead and look at the infill. Now as I use this selector that's scrolling up and down through the layers it's showing me the travel of each individual layer and showing me and I can actually scroll this up and then you can see I've only got one layer selected it'll scroll down it'll show me basically three layers at a time but this is what my infill is going to look like. Now this is determined by this say if I hit 40% we can re-slice you will see a lot more little squares in there because it's filling more of empty space with plastic and using that pattern to make it denser. So basically in just a second here we'll scroll back down through the model and you should see a lot smaller check boxes through there and then we will move on to the next step here. And here we go it's done slicing it's once again processing layers. Kira 4.5 is actually amazingly fast compared to some of the other versions that I've used. You can see the little Star of David pattern here forming and they are a lot tinier it will use more plastic the amount of plastic is denoted by this number right here this is using 47 grams for this little end of the lightsaber hilt and that equals to be 15.63 meters it's going to take four hours 39 minutes to print so the infill percentage can significantly affect print time and plastic usage but that should be pretty common sense you should just kind of understand that. The next thing we're going to talk about is the SD card that we're going to be using now there are two kinds of SD card a standard size and a micro it doesn't matter what you're using for both of them you will need a USB adapter the adapter looks pretty much like this and we can go ahead pop transition back over here so there are different kinds of these but this one I like because it takes the standard size and the micro both and basically you're going to put it in there you're going to insert it into your computer there and once you do that this save to file here that you see in the corner will transition into save to SD card and it'll automatically save to that for now we can just click save and it'll save our g-code file which is the file that the printer reads to run the actual print into whatever folder we put it in on our computer now there are a lot of other things to look at and we're just going to look at a couple of them real quick let's jump in and look at the infill pattern so right now it's set to cubic I can go ahead and change it to any one of these if you're interested in any of these particular settings I do have a series here settings in five minutes or less where I go over every settings in the custom menu one by one in five minutes or less and kind of explain what they do how they interact with each other and how to best utilize them for their full potential let's just do one quick example of the let's do grid we'll slice this I'm going to let it slice one more time and then I will show you what the grid infill looks like and then if you would like to go ahead and check out some of these other settings or you're curious about what they do basically I will put a card up right here on this side actually and you can click on that it will take you to that playlist there are a ton of videos in there and a bunch of information on each of these settings I'm adding to it all the time and I hope that that helps you quite a bit basically once you have the file saved to your SD card and once again we are ready to save you can see that it is using check boxes here and the custom settings also allow you to go into basically each of these settings a lot more in-depth so here we are in the infill setting that's here and we can change the infill density on the fly to anything we want here we're stuck with 10% increments so here I'm at 10% here I'm at 20% if I go into custom I can put it at 17% I can put it at 13% I can put it at 29% I can put whatever I want so I can change the pattern changing the pattern changing it does have effects on how much plastic you use and the time so keep that in mind the other quick thing I wanted to talk about was the adhesion you'd seen when you just click adhesion over here it is basically adding standard adhesion right now it's set to brim if I set it to raft in the custom menu and then I go back and it's using adhesion let's slice it should automatically put a raft underneath there because that's the adhesion selected in the custom settings now some of those things won't be changed I've gone through a lot of custom settings as I said making that playlist so there are things that are set in mind that won't be set in yours so it's automatically making these adjustments because it retains those in the profile especially if you save this as a particular profile or make all the alterations and do separate profiles so now it is basically there's my raft so it is automatically doing the which is kind of like a brim but it does it a couple layers deep because it's easier to with a brim you have to cut around the outside layer and remove the brim with a raft it basically just peels off it does use quite a bit more plastic but I use rafts quite a lot I like them a lot of people think they're overrated and I think they're underutilized so that's going to be it for this video guys don't forget to check out that playlist let's see that card up there again one more time uh and technivorous out as always this channel was brought to you by these fine patreon supporters if you'd like to support the channel on patreon head over to www.patreon.com slash technivorous that's gonna be it for this video as always I am technivorous and thanks for watching don't forget to check out our main channel page where we do a free giveaway for our subscribers every month so far we've given away things like a Capricorn PTFE tubing kit and spools of filament so the giveaway videos are always pinned to our main channel page so all you have to do is subscribe and leave a comment on the giveaway video for the current contest feel free to check out this video right here youtube picked it for my content just for you and if you haven't already you can hit the subscribe button right here so what are you waiting for become a technivore now thanks again technivorous out