3d Printing Two Top Slicers Compared

hi this is bro with the doctor of axe channel and today we're going to compare two critical pieces of software that we all use when creating 3d prints because you don't start with a model that's properly defined for printing on your printer you start with a 3d model from a 3d modeling program that is often saved as an stl file an stl file is in fact a series of triangles that are overlapped in order to form a shape whether it's a simple shape like this that's used for testing overhangs or a more sophisticated shape like this of a vase those 3d models those stl files are converted into g-code g-code is a series of instructions to your 3d printer to print a layer at a time and build up until you create a 3d print the software as many of you already know that use for creating gcode from stl is called a slicer there are many many slicers but i use two most of the time and they both have evolved enormously over the last couple of years that's the prusa slicer and the cure slicer today we're going to compare them but as exciting we're going to go through those two slicers and look at about i don't know 20 plus terms parameters that you set in those slicers and learn what they're called in each slicer so if you're attempting as an example to set the extrusion dimensions the flow rate on your slicer it's called one thing in kira and something else in prusa so stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] now our topic today is a very complex topic with a lot of material so make sure you watch to the very end because i'm going to show you how to get a copy of the slides i use in this video and make sure you subscribe you give me a thumbs up and you recommend this video to others because it'll really help support my efforts to produce content for the maker community using 3d printing electronics some woodworking and even in the future maybe some computer programming now let's look at the screen together and talk a little bit about methodology the goal of these tests are not to come up with a definitive scientific evaluation of these two slicers to determine which is best i'll tell you right up front neither is best and so what we want to learn is when you should consider using one slicer versus the other when you should consider that based on specific features and when it's just a matter of personal preference so in this methodology the first thing i did as you see on the screen here is i created a print on a prusa printer using a default profile from crucial slicer and from cura because both of them have profiles for the prusa i3 mk3 that's behind me then i did something a little more complex i took and i created a profile from scratch using default settings wherever possible for my quidi xmart now quiddy doesn't make the xmart anymore it's about a euro year year and a half old printer i think they now call it the maker and but it's a printer you don't see as often it's printer i really like there are a lot of things about quiddie printers that are really just fantastic but there is no off-the-shelf cura profile and there's no off-the-shelf prusa profile so i wanted to create a profile using the same parameters in both slicers then take all the other defaults and see which did a better job printing along the way we're going to learn a lot about these two slicers and we're going to look at a whole series of various calibration prints i used in order to evaluate these printers so let's get started with our evaluation we're going to start here with the prusa slicer this is version 2.2 i'm going to click on this icon to add a model we're going to add our support test model and you'll see that on the screen when i'm using these products i use an external three button mouse so if i use the scroll wheel i can zoom in and out if i use the left mouse button i can rotate and if i use the right mouse button i can move it around on the screen now what's very nice about the prusa slicer is they have some standard configuration parameters right up here and they do have a simple mode an advanced mode and an expert mode i generally leave it in expert mode for both of my slicers because that lets me see all of the parameters on the left hand side you have icons to move to scale to rotate you have a very nice icon for placing the print flat on the print bed this is a capability added to cure recently and you do have the ability to split a model horizontally a very nice feature so if i click on slice here we'll see the model slices quite quickly i'm looking at the preview now if i rotate this down a bit and then i can go through the layers and look at the various layers i can go back at any time to looking at the model one of the things that's nicest about the prusa slicer is that if i take this top sort of arrow here and slide it down i can go to a particular layer and then click on this plus key and what i've defined now is i've divided my model into multiple colors and at the point where i have that split the prusa slicer will insert an m600 command into my output a g-code command that will if your printer firmware supports it not all printers do it will automatically pause your printer and give you instructions on the front panel about how to change the filament now how do you set settings well in this particular slicer there are four sort of tabs across the top we were on the platter slide you can go to the print settings fill in settings and printer settings print settings are things unique to a single print filament settings are unique to a material and printer settings are unique to your device the cura slicer is arranged quite differently i actually find it easier but it's probably because i use it more so i think you'll find that whichever slicer you use more you'll be more comfortable with so we're going to load the same model into this slicer and we can use the scroll wheel once again to zoom in or out we can use the right mouse button in this case to rotate we can press on the scroll wheel and drag in order to position a model if you click on this bar on the right hand side you can see all of your settings and or retract a setting area what's most important though is just as there's a basic advanced expert mode in prusa you have the same thing in cura and this messes a lot of people up so if you go up to this hamburger menu here you'll see you can select all expert advanced or basic i always select all so that i can see all the settings so very often people go to cura and they'll say my version of cura doesn't have that setting it's just that they're in the wrong mode so they're laid out quite different and the terminology is quite different if we slice our model we'll see one of the things i like the most about cura that i think is really very uh very useful we're going to click on preview here to see our model i think they do a very good job on coloration on the model we can scroll through our model in much the same way there is no ability built in to scroll to a point and say i'm going to change the filament that is unique to prusa there is a way to do that with extensions post-processing g-code so you can add a filament change in at a particular layer however it's much less visual in cura than it is in prusa let's look at a couple prints and then let's look at how the parameters are the same or different between the slicers to begin with i printed these ghosting tests on the prusa printer using the prusa slicer and the cure slicer to be very honest they're really close so now let's look at the same experiment on the quidi printer in this experiment in fact they are once again very very close it is hard to tell the difference there's really no ghosting on either now let's look at a little more interesting example very good example of tuning i've printed these are calibration prints that look for clearances so these are labeled 0.5 i'm sorry 0.6.5.4 3.2 and you try to determine whether the pins will come out the one printed on cura all the prints came out but one on prusa only one came out the rest and the rest bonded to the print and if you look at the bottom the bottom is not as clean so extrusion flow rate basically is not as properly calibrated when using the prusa slicer defaults with the quitti printer as the cura default with the curie printer now i do know if i print this print on the prusa using the prusa printer all the pins come out and i do know printing this using the quiddity slicer which is a derivative of cura on the quiddie printer i get the same result as this so in both cases once again could i tune this for perfect prints absolutely now the final thing i looked at was this model that i used to test overhangs and because what i really wanted to see here was how hard is it to remove these supports so let's go ahead and see if we can remove the supports on this model i'm just using a needle nose pliers and that support came off very easily let's try this one here this one is on a little harder didn't come off completely cleanly there this is proof the cura model let's try this one uh not well if i worked at it a little bit if i grabbed it a little tighter it came off pretty well this one seems to be a problem on this one here let's try this one here this one came off uh reasonably well so not too terrible i'll have to do a little bit of work to clean this up this overhang here on this particular print is a little bit rough now let's look at the same thing on the print produced from the prusa printer and well this one's actually stuck on pretty good having trouble getting this support off let's try this one this is also on pretty good let's try this one [Music] also on pretty good now this is consistent with the results i've generally found and that is the supports produced by the prusa slicer seem to be a little tighter to the actual print and quite a bit harder to remove than the supports from the cura slicer once again could i tune that absolutely on the other hand these overhangs that did not have supports are actually a bit cleaner on the print produced on liquidity with the prusa slicer which means potentially flow rates and cooling might be better on this printer overall these are both pretty good prints so what do we learn pens on the print depends on the printer both produce pretty good prints on both printers interestingly enough there were variations so the cura slicer actually produced better fine type with default settings on the prusa than the prusa slicer but the prusa slicer better fine type on the quiddy than the kira slicer so it depends on your printer and your slicer the bottom line you need to tune your printer and your slicer and your filament to work together 3d printing is as much art as engineering now let's look at some of the terminology that's different between these two slicers and how to find where various settings are i'm going to put up a series of complex tables on the screen we're not going to go through every item but i will tell you towards the end how to get these actual tables your own copy on the main screen of prusa and cura they have different information on pruso they have information about infill brim and support and you can actually change that information in cura it's only displayable one of the most powerful features of cura is there's a search capability where you can type in the name of a parameter and it'll tell you how to find it in addition in both of these slicers if you mouse over a parameter you'll see a pop-up window with an explanation of that parameter the parameters related to walls or perimeters how thick these lines are are set in the print settings section of prusa they're set in the shell section on cura when you're printing and you come to the end of a layer you have to move up a little bit and start over again that's going to leave a defect that's called a z seam you define that in print settings on prusa and once again that's in the shell section of cura cura has a very nice feature called ironing which is promised for a future version of prusa not available yet and that says when you get to the very top layer go over it one more time but extruding little or no filament in essence use the hot nozzle to flatten out that surface that's called ironing both of these slicers have the ability to minimize element feet well if you see the very bottom the first layer of a print very often that first layer will spread a little bit that's called an elephant foot you define compensation for that under print settings in prusa shell settings and it's called horizontal expansion in cura in addition when you have holes in your print you can ask the slicer to extrude a bit less so those holes don't close up and that's under print settings in prusa once again and shell section whole horizontal expansion in cura now let's go to the next section and you'll notice these are basically grouped together by the section names in cura infill is under print settings in prusa it's a separate section in cura material section is where you find many of the material related temperatures and flow those are under filament settings in prusa however flow rate um a hundred percent 110 120 how much to extrude is called extruder multiplier in prusa not flow rate speed is a separate section in cura it's under print settings in prusa likewise acceleration in jerk or under speed in cura and print settings in prusa now the parameters called travel in cura are in the print and printer sections of prusa so zhop and retraction are in the printer sections under the extruder definition most printers you'll see extruder one if you have a single extruder whereas retraction is listed under travel and cura so very different places combing is a whole different topic combing is where you're moving your print head over an area of the printer that's already printed and you're not extruding filament well normally you'd retract before you do that but you don't really care if you get stringing in an area that's already printed because it's going to be covered by the next layer and last you're on the top of the model where you'll see that stringing if you're on the top layer so there are a series of parameters for combing and when to comb comb means don't retract because you're moving over a printed area and one not to comb the closest equivalent to that in prusa is the print setting to avoid crossing perimeters and whether to wipe while retracting now wipe while retracting says don't retract in place and then move start retracting as you move as you travel but that could cause stringing but it will eliminate blobs at the beginning area where you're doing the retracting so combing and the avoid crossing perimeters and wipe while retracting parameters are both designed to help with stringing cooling is under the filament section in prusa it's a separate section in cura and a very important parameter is minimum layer time that says if you're done with the layer and you haven't spent this amount of time pause why so the filament on that layer can harden sufficiently before you put the next layer on it however if you set that too long your prints are going to take a really long time and so sometimes in particular when printing in vase mode you can reduce that because these are very thin walls they're only one nozzle with wide and therefore you don't need that extra cooling time supports are under print settings in prusa they're a separate section in cura and skirt brim and raft are in two different places in prusa and they're under build plate adhesion under cura the next parameter i want to talk about is maximum resolution it's under print settings in prusa it's under mesh fixes in cura when you're printing in essence you've taken the triangles that are created in your stl file and define them into layers and so in essence a print is not a series of dots it's really a series of segments the smallest segment that you'll attempt to print is the resolution if you have that too small then you'll get more bumps and artifacts in your print you see that very often in printing of vases so if you're getting bumps when printing vases try to make the resolution the maximum resolution bigger so that you have less segments less places for those bumps to form and you can do that in both prusa and in cura vase mode very interesting it's under print settings in prusa it's under the special mode section in cura now in cura when you select spiralize outer contour it automatically is going to pop up a box saying it's going to change some other parameters for you prusa will ask you if you want to change those other parameters will give you the option or you can change them manually and coasting is under the experimental section in cura that's where when you get towards the end of a line that you're extruding stop pushing out more filament so you sort of eliminate blobbing that's an experimental feature in cura it's not currently available in prusa so folks a lot of material today how do you get a copy of this material you go to forum.drvax.com and there will be a special section for registered users a special section of the forum just for registered users i think it's the second item the second major topic you'll only see it if you're registered so you have to register for the forum the forum is completely free it's a place where hundreds of my users exchange comments and ideas and actually print images because you can upload images to form.drvax.com and talk about what you've learned from the doctor of x videos and just help each other out so if you go there and you registered under the registered users only topic you will see a link to this presentation thanks so much for watching if you liked it give me a thumbs up subscribe to the channel recommend it to your friends and let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

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Id: Pl0z2w6N7Ro

Length: 23min 34sec (1414 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020