The ultimate beginners guide to cura -2020- version 4.4.1

Hey guys, TechNibbers here. Today we're going to be doing our in-depth Ultimate Beginner's Guide to slicing with Cura 3D Slicer and let's jump right into it. So the first thing you're going to need to do is pop over to the Ultimaker website and download a version of Cura. The current version is 4.4.1. All you have to do is click this handy download button. It'll give you the option of getting Cura for Windows, Mac, or Linux. I'm running on Windows here so obviously that's version I chose and I have already installed it. Once you get it installed, it's pretty simple, just a package installer. You are going to open it up and it will take a couple minutes to load. The first load, subsequent loadings after that will be quicker and you're going to be presented with a screen somewhat like this except yours is going to have an option for adding in your printer and I can show you what that menu looks like. It's going to look something like this. Now if you're plugged in and you have the driver installed for your printer, it might show up here under add a networked printer. In our case, we are not plugged in so we're going to add a non-networked printer. Ultimaker lists their printers first. It is their software so they try to highlight their stuff there and the list of printers and printer manufacturers has grown quite long so odds are your printer will be in here somewhere. We're going to set this up for the Creality Ender 3 because it's a pretty popular printer and we'll just hit add. It's going to offer us a couple of settings and these are built in based on the printer that we selected such as the width, depth, and height. The width and depth of the Ender 3 build plate are 220 millimeters. That is the x and the y. The height is 250 so it'll print up to 250 millimeters tall. All this stuff over here in the print head settings, this is set by Ultimaker in their end of the software so don't touch that. If you have more than one extruder, you can go in and change the number of extruders and you might be kind of distracted or thrown off by this origin at center. You want to leave that unclicked. If you click that, it will print the model at the corner of your bed and not at the center so it seems kind of backwards but just go ahead and leave that unclicked. We're going to hit next and now our printer is all set up. Before we bring in some models, let's take a look at a couple of things real quick. All right so this is Kira 4.4.1. I can click on the right side here and bring down my print settings. It offers me options for the layer height, the infill, support, and adhesion. Now these are the most necessary, the ones you're going to be using most often to adjust your print settings. We're going to leave that how it is for now. Now in Kira, you have three basic tabs. You're going to have your prepare tab. This is where you're going to import models, arrange them, adjust them, and things of that nature. Once you have them how you want them, you will slice them and then you will be able to go into preview mode which is showing nothing right now because we have nothing selected. Normally in preview mode if you have a model and it is sliced it will show you the g-code toolpath and basically you can scroll through the layers. I'll show you that in just a minute. The last mode here is monitor mode. We'll be using this in the next video when we hook up to our printer and go into the in-depth slicing settings but for now we're going to jump back to prepare and we're going to grab a model real quick. Just something simple and we'll go over the model manipulation tools. Now the first one you have here is move. This is your translate tool. You can simply grab it and move it or you can grab the item and move it around in three-dimensional space. You can also scale the object. You can scale it dragging these things or you can set it to a particular scale. Uniform scaling is set to be default so if I change it to 200% on the X it'll adjust the Y and Z to be proportional. You can turn that off if you just want to make one side longer. Not a big deal. The rotate now lay flat will lay it flat on the closest flat surface. The most common one is to use this select face to align to build plate because then I can click on a face and it will align it. Now it's grayed out because part of it is sticking off of the bed so if I hit center select model it will put it back in the middle of the build plate. This option here is for if I need to reverse the direction of it and flip sides. That is the mirror and then there's per model settings so if I pull in two different models I can change the supports individually for each of them. The other way to import a model is to go to file, open files and go ahead and we'll just grab one here. This is a pretty simple little model. You can arrange a couple of them on here if you'd like. You can also right click, click multiply selected model. Say I needed to print eight of these so it's asking me how many copies. I need seven copies which gives me eight total. It will place them all on the build plate so that's pretty handy as well. As far as settings let's talk about layer height. Now 0.2 is pretty standard. It will give you a decently fast model and a good looking model as well although there will be some obvious layer lines in there. If I take it down to 0.12 those layer lines are going to be a lot less obvious but it is going to add quite a bit to my print time. This printer is capable of printing all the way up to 0.4 and that would leave huge layer lines very visible but it's good for a rough mock-up print as it will print really fast. As far as infill goes 15 to 20 percent is your standard amount of infill so leaving where where it's at will not hurt at all. Now as you can see these models are pretty low and flat to the build plate and there are no overhanging edges so I'm going to go ahead and grab this again. Just drag it in here. Normally I would orient this by going to rotate and putting this part flat. That gives me less overhang. I only have to worry about this spot and this spot. In the other orientation all of this was going to be overhanging at a 90 degree angle as well as all of this so there would have been support built up through all of that. Instead we can get a better model translate this over here by rotating it this way because we'll get less support less support interface. So we're going to click support. I will show that to you once it slices it'll add some bars in down here but before we do that let's discuss this last setting real quick which is adhesion. Let me turn on support here. It doesn't seem to want to turn on. There it goes. So adhesion there's basically three different types. You can do a skirt which will put a three to five layer perimeter or line perimeter around your model. This is for purging whatever's in the hot end and ensuring that it's flowing properly and applying properly to the bed. The next mode of adhesion is what's known as a brim and it's basically a skirt. It does the same thing except the edge of it prints all the way in to meet the edge of the model so you will need to trim it away from the model when you're done but the adhesion for the brim is amazing as it helps keep your corners from lifting on square models like this one. The last method of adhesion is a raft and it'll print a three to five layer basically a card underneath it a flat surface to print on top of and then you will separate the raft in the model from the bed and you will separate the model from the raft and what you're left with is a fairly flat surface although not nearly as smooth as if you were to print directly on a glass or PEI bed. Now let's go ahead and slice this. We're not actually going to print these to just give you an idea of how the slicer works and the preview mode we're going to take a look at here. It didn't take long at all. It's telling us it's going to take three hours and nine minutes to print all of these pieces. It's going to use 21 grams of filament or seven meters so basically now we can go into our preview mode and all of these blue lines you see here these are support so I can scroll up and down through the layers to see what my infill is going to look like and see what the path is like for each individual layer then I can scroll backward through that particular layer as you can see now it's putting down the support there and this gives you a good idea of what your printer is going to be doing at each layer so that is very good so far so well as you can see like I said these overhangs here have support there is no other support anywhere else this is our skirt line and it is counting that as support and down here you can see it says save to removable drive that's because I have an sd card and if you don't have an sd card in it'll just give you the option to save the file you can also save to your computer by clicking this arrow and hitting save to file now there are other options that become available here say you have your printer hooked up connected to monitor mode you can print directly from kira that option will be here as well sometimes when you're hooked up directly and you want to save to the drive but it assumes you want to print and it'll put print right here you can simply click the drop down arrow and select one of the other options to save the file once you have that file saved to an sd card you can go ahead and put it in your printer and hit print from sd card on the printer and go ahead and start printing that's basically the it we are going to come back i'll show you real quick if you click custom there are a ton of settings in the custom settings and if there's one that you're looking for that you can't find you can simply click the cog wheel there and type it in here this is the spiralized contour mode this is basically base mode for cura i have mine turned on already but if you didn't you would simply check the box and this is the tab it'll show up under so if i go in here and find special modes there you have it spiralized outer contour obviously it's not turned on because i'm not printing a base but that's how you find extra options we'll go into this and go in depth over a lot more of the settings in our next video but this video should have you pretty well primed and ready to print that is going to be it for this video guys i hope it was helpful to you if there's any particular topics you would like to learn about feel free to leave them in a comment down below if this video was helpful please leave a like and don't forget to subscribe to the channel because we do tons of 3d printing videos and we post pretty much every day 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 technivarus all right guys that's going to be the end of this video as always thank you i'll put a video up right here that you can check out for more of our stuff and if you're still here and you haven't already why don't you click right here and subscribe to the channel