3d Printing Cura 4.X Custom and Advanced Support Tutorial

hi the server of dr. VAX Channel and today we're going to cover a topic that many of my viewers have been interested in for a long time they want to learn more about supports I've done some basic videos about supports today we're going to go into detailed features we're going to look at both automatically generated supports and what in the cure world we call custom supports so stay tuned and let's learn something together just as a bit of background supports are used when you have a model such as this model here which is not supposed to be flexible that's because the top layer did not print properly and you want to be able to print it so you need to add additional structures underneath and your slicer answers automatically those are called supports there are many options for these types of supports and depending on how you add them the supports are easy to take out as in this case you can see that was really very easy and a little cleanup with an exacto knife and this print is a much better print than this print or those supports might be very hard to take off and that will depend on these settings in addition you have a range of settings for more complicated objects we're going to look at all of that today in this video now to get started I want to give you two hints and this is really the secret to using cura effectively not only for supports but for any type of parameter setting there are I don't know hundreds of options in Keira maybe not but close and so how do you know what they all do even if you learn what they all do how do you remember what they all do well let's at the screen and we'll learn about this together now here on the screen what I see is the current version of Keira if I go to Keira and the about option well see this this is version 4.6.1 I recommend you use the current version of Keira I know people are concerned that if their printer is working well they don't want to mess with it I get that and sometimes there are bugs so it's good to keep the old version around but the Keira software slicer has been evolving dramatically faster over the last 18 months than it did before that and there are new features every couple months that significantly improve your printing now I know that's a problem for people that had a version of Keira very often three-point-three is shipped with printers and because now I know that's a problem for people that have a version of cure the shift of their printer that's prior to version 4 because profiles you save in version 3 addicts will not import properly into Keira version for docs it's you worth your while to bring them up on the screen but side-by-side and manually copy the values over because I really find version 4 and later of Keira are quite remarkable they're really it's a very very good slicer now the next thing I want to point out is that built into Keira is the ability to add extensions extensions come in two types and I'll do a separate video on this one are called scripts and the other type is called plugins today we're going to look at two plugins that are going to help you with supports to find plugins you either search for them on the web and manually copy them into the correct directories or for the plugins that Keira that specifically Ultimaker sort of blessed as being relatively good quality at least usable cuz not all of them are perfect you can find those in the marketplace so I'm going to start by installing this plug-in called settings I click on it I click install I agree to the terms and conditions the terms and conditions basically say this is open-source software use it your own risk and then I have to quit Kirra and restart it for that plug-in to become active now plugins are Python scripts while the core of Kirra is written in the C programming language for speed the user interface and all of the plugins and in fact many things we think of as basic Corcyra are written in Python Python is a very approachable programming language that we're actually going to learn about on this channel later in the year so now that I've installed that plug-in I can do something very interesting let's go to layer height and when I mouse over layer height you'll see that Kirra provides basic information about it but if I right click on layer height now and click on settings guide I'll get it basically a full tutorial on that feature this is unbelievably powerful just by reading through this tutorial and trying things out you can learn a lot about how to use a slicer now as importantly let's load a model in right now and the model I'm gonna load in is this model that actually made on Tinkercad this model I made on Tinkercad this one I made on free CAD these are two models that I use for testing various types of support structures we'll look at this in some detail today so let's um load that model in and we'll put this in alphabetical order and then we'll go down here to support whoops here we go let's load this one and now I'm going to hit shift and the left mouse button to move this into the center I use my scroll wheel to make this a little bigger and I'll move it back so that we can see that a little easier and I can use the right mouse button to rotate this around now the first thing that we will notice about this model is if I rotate it up there are some surfaces that are red on the bottom what does that indicate this is one of the nicest features of Kirra it indicates an area of the model that Kira believes need supports how does it do that well 3d printers have no trouble printing things that are vertical these walls printed fine on this model it was the horizontal surface that was a problem and it's not all horizontal surfaces you'll see that these even this structure has a support structure under it whereas these two do not well as the structure moves from vertical to closer to horizontal gravity pulls on it and when it gets far enough over it will start to bend if we don't support it it won't print properly in a case like this the bend is so severe that these top layers had nothing to even stick to so this is showing you those layers that Kira believes are too steep and how does cure determine that what determines it with this parameter support angle support overhead angle the minimum angle of overhangs for which support is added and a value of 0 all overhangs are supported so I turned it to 0 switched it to 0 and now you can see even these top ones are going to need support if I make this 40% you'll see that this one no longer needs a support but all the rest still do so a structure that is vertical is 90% a structure that is horizontal is 0% as you go from 90 down to zero you need more support generally I start with 60% because most printers can print successfully something that's at 60% so you'll see in this model this and this surface and even this surface are all printable but the horizontal ones are not if I drop this down to 50% you'll see that now this surface is going to get supported by supports so that's the first thing you need to learn about supports is you can look at cura and you can see where on your model it thinks you're going to need supports if we go and we right-click on this and go to the settings guide you'll see a tutorial about what this parameter means so right click settings guide which is a plug-in is your friend let's actually go through some more of these supports now touching build plate if there were multiple lines here so as an example there aren't in this case well there is one right here so right now we're saying only use supports if they're touching the build plate I'm going to say everywhere and now let's slice this and let's see where it puts supports on this model we'll click on preview aha so it's only in this case putting supports under these surfaces that are above the print plate however that's not because of this parameter it's because of this next one because of the support overhang angle so let's say we set it at 40% Andry slice now you'll see there's a support between here and here and then here and the bottom so we can see that better from this dimension support for between here and here and here in the bottom if I change this back to touching build plate and slice this support has disappeared now the next thing you need to know about supports is if you look at these supports and we're using the default pattern called lines these over here look like they're nice individual lines so those will be very easy to get off this is a solid line why because cura only prints supports in a single direction so if I didn't want any solid support across this model what can I do well I'm gonna go back to prepare I'm going to go to rotate and let me rotate that around a little bit like that and now we'll generate our supports and now we'll see that we have lined single lines supporting everything so if we move it around we'll see you'll see there single line supporting everything because nowhere is the model directly on the y-axis and so the orientation of your model will have a significant impact on what the supports look like this support is a solid support across here these are individual supports now if we look at these supports it looks like they're connected together but they're actually not what's causing that feature here you can see the same thing here what's causing that feature is that retraction is off when the slicer is configuring supports for the printer so that means when it goes to print somewhere where it would nor retract filament to eliminate stringing it says why bother we're going to be tearing that out anyways this gets thrown away so there's no reason to turn retraction off so these are actually not part of the supports that are actually stringing caused by the lack of retraction okay let's continue through this they're a wide range of patterns that you can use for supports and you can experiment with those many models it won't matter if the models were very heavy some of the denser patterns would be interesting so here is a three-dimensional pattern and you can see here it's much denser however it's going to take a little bit longer to print when we print slice this without supports we'll see it'll print in 54 minutes if we slice this with support and let's go back to let's say a standard grid pattern now we see it'll take an hour and 13 minutes but depending on the model it will take even longer so this model takes almost twice as long to print with standard 2 foot supports than it does with no supports but with no supports it doesn't work so it doesn't really matter let's look at some more of these parameters one of the reason that this is printing relatively quickly with supports is support density is set to 5% that's not the default the default is 15% that says how much of the open space is filled with supports so let's slice it at 15% and we'll see here it will take an hour in 17 minutes and if we look at it will see that these supports when it's a grid are basically completely solid now that will lead to very clean prints but it will take longer to print you can in addition to setting density you can manually configure how close together the supports are on your model enable of support brim well let's say we go back to lines and we go back to 5% now I'm going to enable a support brim and let's slice this and take a look and you'll see here the little the pads that are underneath the support well if you're printing very thin supports because you just want a little bit of support sometimes they'll detach from your print surface so if you turn on brims it will actually print a surface around them these are support friends it's a good idea to do and because they're really very thin they don't take a long time to print support Z distance this is a very important parameter this says how close to the actual model do the supports print so if you look here it's actually not touching if I make it too far it really won't keep that surface from drooping if I make it too close they'll sort of bond together and they'll be very hard to cut off so let me take and make this five millimeters just to show you what it looks like and you can see here there's now a large gap between the supports and this overhang that's supports going to do no good but I'll put it back to a tenth of a millimeter and it's pretty darn close now at a tenth of a millimeter if that starts to droop just a little bit it'll hit the support and stop it from falling if the surface is actually not drooping at all the support will sort of be there without having any impact on the model okay let's look at some of the other key parameters support interface what is a support interface well if you look at this model there is a flat surface you can see it's sort of hard to see here I'm going to actually take this out this supports these supports are actually stuck pretty good to this model here so let's see if I can get these off and you'll see this is one of the problems with interfaces it makes it much harder to get the supports off but you'll see here that there's actually a surface on top of the supports that's going to make for a very smooth print here where you don't end up with problems but if you end up with it for some reason this binding together this fusing together and it makes it very hard to get the supports off and I'm going to have to do look quite a bit of work to clean this up and you can see if you try too hard you'll break your model so support interfaces can lead to nice smooth surfaces but sometimes they're quite hard to get off and that's probably a good overview of some of the key parameters now let's look at how to minimize the number of supports by using support blockers I'm going to switch to a different model here I'm going to delete this model here and let's take and load in the other support model that I hear of here so you can see that Kira believes that only this surface these surfaces here requires support it'll always show the for support on the surfaces that are on the build plate the build plates the support you don't need anything else and let's sort of go through here and make sure everything set at the defaults for akhira okay everything is now set at the default and let's go ahead and slice let's look at preview and you can see that this is going to put a fairly complex support under this item let it's going to take over an hour to print let's turn supports off slice again and without supports this print would print in 34 minutes so supports are doubling the time but one of the reasons is that the default supports and we can see it here on this screen are basically a solid support under the model well if we know that this printer can bridge I don't know 10 centimeters 20 centimeters without problem then we could end up we'd be better off with support something like this where we only have a couple supports in there so how can we achieve that well as we showed you we can achieve that a couple different ways one way was to reduce the support density so these are in essence zig zags now let's look at this from this angle here so you can see that better there but this still is going to take 48 minutes to print well one of the things I can do is go to the prepare screen and click on the model and then click on support blockers and I'm going to add a support blocker here and I'm going to add one here and let's say I add one here and then I'm going to go to move and I'm gonna make sure that whoops let's just click on a support blocker and I'm gonna move those blockers so when you click on support blockers you're adding an object to the build and then you can move it and scale it using the standard features so I'm gonna move that one then I'm gonna move this one because I want to make sure it's covering high that one is not move it a little more you know what let's make it a little easier let's scale it up to a hundred and twenty percent and let's scale this one up to a hundred and twenty percent and scale this one up to a hundred and twenty percent then we'll go back to this one and we'll go to move and let's let's go to move and we're gonna move it back so it covers it completely now let's take and slice this and see what it does look at preview and you can see that I've reduced the amount of support the areas where there's a support blocker no longer has any support under it so if I added another one here I could end up with a couple towers so that's one way to do this now another way to do this is I can go and eliminate delete this one let's say delete selected model delete this one delete selected model and now I'm going to look at support X Y distance I'm gonna make that 20 millimeters that's the distance from any XY surfaces so in this direction that supports are going to be created so let's slice again look at the preview and we'll see here with a single support blocker the support blocker right here I was able to just support these two areas which would probably work very well well what if instead of using support blockers and various other options such as density what if I want to just manually place a sport wherever I want well there's no built-in capability for that but there is a plug-in and it's actually quite a good plugin that has been around for a long time so let me delete this object here we'll go back to prepare we'll go back to our marketplace we'll click on plugins and now I'm going to scroll down and look for a plug-in that's called custom supports been around for a long time I'm gonna click on agree and when you install a new plugin you have to quit Kirra okay let's take and load our model back in let's zoom in a little bit and recenter our model and now when I click on my model here there's a new option here called custom supports I'm going to click on that and wherever I click on this model it's going to place a support so we'll click there we'll click there we'll click there now one thing you have to be careful of is when those blocks go over the top of your model it will actually add a support over the top that won't do any harm because these are very easy to take off when I go and generate now support so let's go and slice this look at the preview will see that it has supports basically in the same places as before so what happened here well what happened here is I still have generate supports on you'd have to turn that off but there is a little idiosyncrasy here when that is on you have access to all of these parameters which include support density and it even includes the type of supports so let's say we'll go back to zig zag here but then you after you've set those items you turn generate supports off before you actually slice so you turn supports on you select the variables then you turn them off so now we have two towers here and you can see that they I didn't quite get this right they weren't quite touching the right place here because this item here wasn't far enough down so let's go and refine that a little bit let's go back to here and the way I'm gonna do that is I'm actually gonna make these bigger make it a little easier to work with and then I'm going to do a move I'm gonna move this down make sure it's covering I'm going to go here and I'm gonna scale it bigger make it 120 and I'm a skill these bigger okay I think I have better coverage now let's slice and see what happens we'll go to preview and now we have two very nice towers supporting our model and so if I know how far I can bridge a surface where it was still will print clean then I can put supports just at the end of those bridges now overall I haven't found that this feature is quite as useful as I thought it would be I've generally found that by using support blockers by changing density changing spacing from the XY access for my supports I can get exactly what I'm looking for but some people would prefer this approach so overall I think that here now between the support blockers the wide range of the plug-in for custom support is really a very capable slicer for use when you need supports and you can pretty much achieve what you could achieve in other slicers historically simplified 3d was stronger with supports Prusa has a nice model for supports now but I think cura is right there and I find the addition of new features Sakura is extremely rapid so to sum up you really need to add in the settings guide plug-in you should add in the custom supports plug-in you'll need to restart Keira after you add in those plugins and then and we can take and remove the supports from this model and you can see how easily these came off because I have a reasonable Z offset and this one right here has a little bit of a droop in it and why is that because I had when I printed this I only added support to the build plate so there was no support under here so it did droop a little bit but you'll be able to print very successful prints thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video and you learned something give me a thumbs up suggest this video to other people share the URL with other people and to discuss this and other topics you can always leave comments right here on YouTube but you also can go to forum that dr. VAX comm where there's an interactive discussion group where you can actually post images of models you're struggling with and other people in the dr. vex community will help you out thanks again have a great day let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 40,353

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printer, cura slicer, cura support settings, ultimaker cura, cura tutorial, cura 4.5, cura 4.6, cura supports hard to remove, cura supports not touching model, cura supports failing, cura software, cura settings for ender 3, cura slicer settings, 3d printing supports hard to remove, 3d printing supports cura, 3d printing supports not sticking, cura support settings for easy removal, cura 4.0, 3d printing for beginners, support settings in cura

Id: WbVyIjF06bw

Length: 30min 16sec (1816 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 26 2020