Best Way to Get Rid of Stringing on 3D Prints Using Cura + Get Smooth Top Layer + Block Supports

hey everybody chris here from it's mead made and today we're talking about kira again you're in part three of everything i think you should know about kira and understand [Music] we have gone through all of the basics but now let's get into some of those trouble areas where we get some stringing and we can see some pillowing what's pillowing and then we can also kind of prevent kira from doing what kira wants to do sometimes even though cure is great but sometimes we know better now at the end of this video i am going to be going through one of the settings that i just i don't feel like it gets enough use i don't feel like people know about it enough and i am trying to spread the knowledge so guess what i'm making a video we're going to learn about it so let's go ahead and get started so the next thing i want to talk about is your top layer and that's in top and bottom so when it comes to your top layer you can actually determine how many layers you're going to have on the very top surface of your models and if you have a very flat surface i highly recommend increasing your top layers if you can still see your infills so your top layers is something you might want to look at i always have five layers because i find for my printers and my nozzles i get a very smooth clean top layer i actually printed out a few different examples to show you what your prints would look like with one top layer all the way up to five top layers because i've seen some people with their prints that turned out really nice but the very top portions there's like a flat top on it and you can still see some pillowing on there which you can get from not enough top layers or you can still see the infill so let's jump over to all of the prints that i did to show you the differences so here i have one top layer and you can see that it's pretty much you can see through it this is two top layers three top layers four top layers and 12 top layers no i'm kidding it's five so you can see here that it really depends on what you do when it comes to top layers and there's some people that have preferences of like yeah i always do like five or six or you know i only i quit at three because i don't care as you can see here that you can actually get some cool effects and sometimes you might want this but it's good to know what it does because there's not enough filament stretching across to be able to really get a good fill and if you look even two you can't see you can see that it's also not getting a really good fill because there's still these holes and pits and things like that but then you get into three and three is you know usually when i hear people having a top layer issue they're at three and that means that it's fun put three layers on it's covered up those holes but they're still like you can see the infill and then sometimes you get these raised bumps or pits and that is called pillowing so if you have some of these issues i recommend trying to go up another one now four is very nice there are certain areas that you can still feel some of the actual infill that's why i always go with five five is like super smooth i can't feel anything here and it's just a good clean print this was a beautiful top layer um i was actually really happy that my fifth layer version turned out this beautiful so this is one of those things if you have a flat surface and that on your model in any way you really need to focus on this because it's not that huge of a deal when you're you know it's got kind of a subtle gradation um and it can just really start to build up because of the wall and the shell but if it's a flat top and that's your last layer it really does matter this is one this is five and you can see a big difference be sure to adjust those settings and play with those settings because you might find out that four does an amazing job for you and you just leave it there and that's fine and then you're saving filament personally i'd rather have a clean polished top and not have to worry about all of the sanding or anything else that i might have to do so check your top layer settings and mess around with those so the next thing i think you really need to know is retraction retraction is one of those things that some people really struggle with just for this reason of their having temperature issues with retraction issues or it's the filament they're using but it's something that it can be remedied and if you're new to 3d printing you're probably wondering uh what's retraction and retraction is that magic little name that prevents stringing if you have like angel hairs or you know any kind of fuzz on your 3d prints from stringing then i'm fairly certain that retraction is one thing that you need to start paying attention to so if you look here and i have retraction enabled and retract at layer change these two are crucial that you want to have them checked and you want to actually get your distance set properly and what retraction means is it's retracting the filament when it moves to another area of your 3d print so if it didn't do that it would still be oozing filament from the nozzle just because of the heat and the pressure it's been put under and then it's traveling over there and it's basically causing a tiny little bridge but it's just a hair but when you get multiple layers built up you start to get this fuzzy line so if we go over here and then we see travels you see these blue lines that is the movement of the nozzle you can see here once it finishes the nozzle moves over to the other side of the pillar in this string test and if you don't have good retraction you're basically making a wall because you can see all of these travels back and forth and you would be creating this wall of filament so zero retraction is the same thing of not checking it and typically you won't ever go higher than 10 for attraction and if you go over 10 cura will let you know depending on what print profiles you have set in place so this is a test file to actually just test your stringing and i have the link to this down in the description but the best part is i actually 3d printed these at different retraction distances so you can get a good idea of what retraction is actually doing to your prints so let's jump over to that so here is our retraction test and this is the actual successful print of retraction it should look like this when you're done and you've got it honed in perfectly now you'll see here that there is no strings no nothing here like there is nothing in between here two sticks basically i printed this at a 10 millimeter retraction so it pulled the filament back 10 millimeters before it moved to the other pole now moving down this was my 6.5 and i usually print at 6.5 but i noticed i was getting a little bit of stringing i was actually surprised so you can see a lot of that stringing right there now this by no means is bad getting a little bit like this i can just hit it with a heat gun for two seconds and it will all be gone it'll wither away and you will be fine and you'll still have a very clean print but now this is just doing this task and making this video i have actually thought about bumping this up to about seven and a half because it's almost there i mean almost there to be perfect for my 3d printer now moving down here is a two millimeter retraction this is basically just angel hair like back and forth back and forth back and forth this is way too low and i would definitely recommend moving it up and also just to show you what retraction looks like when you turn it off you basically get a spider web now it's it actually pushes out a lot more filament than you think because it's actually still oozing because of the heat and the pressure of when it was printing the pole so you will see this if you do not have retraction turned on so this versus this is quite different so if you're having any stringing issues i highly recommend to use the retraction setting and play with it so i have this han solo chibi that is in carbonite that i'm actually printing out for a future tutorial the next thing is not a setting in kira but a tool in kira and this is something that i feel like everybody should know and i haven't seen a lot of people use this maybe just because people aren't aware of it but to me it is totally a gem i don't know if it's a hidden gem but if you know about it it's a gem if you don't know about it this is a hidden gem so what this is is you kind of click on your model and then you come over here to support blocker and what support blocker is you just click it and then you click on your model anywhere and it will create this block and this block is telling kira anything inside this cube do not print supports and why would you want that well let's just say i know for a fact because i've already you know pre-sliced this to look at it there's going to be supports on the fingers right here i don't want to do that i know my printer can handle that right there and also inside here there's going to be a base that this stands on i don't want to support inside here a hundred percent so this is what we're gonna do i'm gonna go ahead and click on that box and then i'm going to get my move tool and then bring it over here and you have all of the same transforms as you do any kind of 3d model so i can actually scale this up like that to cover the hand and then make it wide and there we go so now that hand is encased in that so i can actually bring it down to to ensure there we go now what i'm gonna do is i'm going to multiply the selected once and make that and bring it on over to this hand so now those hands are not going to be supported in any way and then i can see a lot of red underneath here so well maybe it'll put a support there so i'm going to go ahead and i can multiply that by 1 and then i'll just move this box over here bring it up and rotate it around so now i know i'm not going to get any supports there now one of the little things and tips that i do let me multiply this twice is i will actually take my models when i have these holes right here now i definitely want to have it supported like i'm not fighting that in any way but there's no reason why i have to have the whole thing supported so i'm going to click both of these boxes move them in and bring them down so those corners are now not going to have any supports in them and you're probably wondering why does that even matter i'll tell you this when you're removing supports if you can do some little things like this to kind of give you a little bit of a hold for your pliers so you can rip them out instead of it just being one flat wall it is extremely helpful so when you're doing holes and things like that grab a support blocker and just make a little bit of a a pry spot so you can even put a screwdriver in there to just pop this whole support out so after i've got this like that i will be able to print this no problem the other thing is you want to make sure you're not blocking things you want to have supported so like all of this right here i definitely want it to be supported so i'm not going to let it touch it okay so this is all sliced and luckily it's only going to take three days 20 hours and 45 minutes yay so we're gonna go to preview now and let's see what this looks like you can see that there are no supports on the hands whatsoever none in the hair and if we look here you see those wonderful little gaps where we're going to be able to pull out those supports no problem so be sure to play around with your support blocker because i guarantee there are some places on models that kira is adding supports that you do not want them because there's no reason to have supports in areas that you know your printer can handle those certain overhangs alright so i have one more tip and this is probably the most important thing in this entire series and that is to create the most perfect print profile that's a lot of peace perfect print profile try to say that a lot uh to create the most perfect print profile you definitely to create the most perfect print profile you need to only adjust one setting at a time then test it that's it's crucial in the very beginning i used to change all of these things i was like i'm going to change this and this and this and this and i was like uh still garbage and my wife with the scientific background she's like oh my god how can you even have proper variables if you don't like test one thing at a time and i'm like uh yeah so guess what i started printing and testing one thing at a time and then suddenly i started seeing like oh wow this thing really turned out great like but this this side over here sucks so i've got to fix it and after i started doing that i was able to hone my print profile and i mean now i'm pretty freaking good with my printers i have now so only test one thing at a time and listen to your wife because that's that was my valuable lesson i got out of that alright so that's part three of this series but this series doesn't have to end here is there other settings or anything else that you want to know in cura leave me some comments below and i'll go ahead and i can make another video and we will keep it going and if it does keep going i'll put the video right here if not i'll just put some really cool videos right here for you to watch all right well i hope you have a good one and we'll see in the next video now i can't stop thinking a perfect print profile perfect print profile

Channel: ItsMeaDMaDe

Views: 52,730

Keywords: 3d printing ironing, anycubic vyper, best 3d prints, best retraction settings for pla, block supports cura, cura 4.13, cura cleaner top layers, cura slicer tutorial, how to get rid of stringing 3d printing, how to get rid of stringing cura, how to stop stringing on ender 3, how to use cura for ender 3, ironing cura settings, pillowing 3d printing, retraction 3d printing, retraction settings cura, smooth 3d print pla, support blocker cura

Id: RI2JKoEJf3I

Length: 16min 49sec (1009 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 25 2022