Hello, 3D Printing Friends! Today on the
BV3D Channel, we'll learn the basics of Creality Slicer, from installation, to adding a
printer, to slicing and printing your first model! Stick around and we'll get into it right after
this! I'm Bryan, and YOU... are watching BV3D! Hi, welcome back! Hey, if you're new here, and
you're wanting to learn about 3D printing, 3D modeling, and other 3D printing-related stuff...
Start now! By subscribing, and clicking the bell, so you don't miss anything! Ok, so today we're
going to get into Creality Slicer. And this video is primarily for new 3D printer owners, who
maybe got a new Creality 3D printer for Christmas. But since Creality Slicer is basically Ultimaker
Cura slicer under the hood, everything I show here works just as well for any of the hundreds of
3D printer models that Cura has profiles for. It can be confusing when you're just
getting started with a new 3D printer. I know it was for me. I had lots of questions.
Like, "Where can I find things to print?" "How do I get from downloading a cool
3D model I found online, to actually printing it?" "What software do I need?" And
those are the questions I'm hoping to answer here. And I guess I need to cover a few basics.
So first, let's talk about model files. 3D models are composed of triangles. I guess
the simplest example would be a tetrahedron, which is a pyramid shape with a triangular base.
It has four faces, and all four are triangles. And you might be thinking, "Okay, wise guy, if
3D models are all just triangles, then let me see explain a cube." Well, okay then. Let's get a
look at a cube. It has six faces. Each face is a pair of right triangles. So the cube can be
described by 12 triangles, two on each face. And now you might be thinking, "Huh, okay, that
makes sense. Well, what about a sphere?" Well, you got me there, because a sphere in a 3D model
won't be perfectly spherical. It'll be made out of lots and lots of triangles. The more triangles
it's made of, the smoother it will appear. So, like I said, 3D models are composed of
triangles. Sometimes just a few, sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands, sometimes hundreds
of thousands, and sometimes millions! Now, by far the most common file type you'll encounter is a
Stereolithography file. Now since that's a big, unwieldy word, it's generally referred to as an
STL file. Okay it's mostly referred to as an STL file because that's the file name extension. Like,
"My Cool Model.stl." STL files contain all the data about all those triangles and how they're all
connected to each other. And because of that, I have also heard people say that STL means Standard
Triangle Language. And I kind of like that one better than stereolithography. If you're wondering
where you can find and download STL files, well, there are several online repositories where people
upload and share 3D models that they've designed. The vast majority of models are available for
free, but some are paid models, costing as little as a few dollars. And there are also some
3D model search engines, which return results from several different repositories. And some sites are
hybrids, combining the function of a repository and a search engine that returns results from
other sites. In the "repository" category, you can check out PrusaPrinters, MyMiniFactory, Cults3D,
and Thingiverse. In the "search engine" category, you can check out Yeggi, and in the "hybrid"
category, you can check out Thangs. Links for all these sites are in the description. The next
thing to talk about is software. Specifically, what do we need in order to convert a 3D model
into instructions for a 3D printer? Well, filament-based 3D printers generally do what they
do one layer at a time, so we need software to convert these three-dimensional models into
many many stacks of two-dimensional layers. Yes, technically, I know these layers are
not two-dimensional. They do have thickness. Or thin-ness. They're very very thin. Anyway,
that class of software is known as a "slicer," because it slices the 3D model into layers for
the printer. And each slice gives the printer the movement instructions it needs in order to
print that layer. The movement instructions come in the form of g-code. Technically, g-code is a
programming language. So what's really going on is that the slicer is writing a program for your
3D printer. And I guess when you think about it, the 3D printer is a robot. so really, the slicer
is programming a robot to make things for you. Pretty cool, right? Okay, now we know a little
bit about STL files, and what slicers are, and what g-code is. You can probably guess that
Creality Slicer is a slicer that's designed for use with Creality 3D printers, and you'd be
correct. Creality Slicer is a customized version of Ultimaker's Cura slicer, with configurations
for pretty much every filament-based printer Creality has ever made. It's a few versions
behind the official Cura release, but that's okay. The official Cura release has a much shorter list
of Creality printers, mostly ones released in the past couple of years, and does not include the
newest Creality printers, like the Ender-3 S1, that are in Creality Slicer. But the official
Cura release has printer profiles for hundreds of non-Creality printers. Apart from the printer
list, some Creality branding, and a connection to the Creality cloud service, it seems identical
to Cura. They both pretty much look and work exactly the same. Creality Slicer is usually
included on the memory card that comes with the printer, but it's not always the most recent
release. So I recommend opening a web browser, and visiting Creality.com, going to Support, and
clicking Downloads. Then get the current release for Windows or macOS. For the actual software
installation and first run, I'll show this for both operating systems, because the installation
is slightly different between the two. But once it's installed and running, it operates
the same on Windows as it does on Mac. So first, the Windows installation. If you're a Mac user,
you can skip past this section using the chapter markers down on the video's timeline. Okay Windows
users, ready? Let's go! After you unzip the file you downloaded from Creality. open its folder, and
then open the Setup application. When prompted, give the installer permission to write to your
hard drive. In the Setup app, click the Next button to get started. Then agree to the license
terms with the I Agree button. Select a location for the installation. I just took the default, and
installed it into program files. Then click the Next button to continue. The setup app wants to
create a Creality Slicer folder in the Start menu, and I'm fine with that. So I'll click the Next
button. Then the Setup app wants to know which additional components to install, in addition
to Creality Slicer itself. It wants to install Arduino drivers, some Visual Studio stuff, and
the ability for Creality Slicer to read STL files. For this video, we don't need to include any other
components beyond what Setup wants to install, so click the Install button. It'll take a moment
for Setup to install the software. Once it's done, there's a check box already checked that will run
Creality Slicer. Leave that checked, and click the Finish button. A few seconds later, Creality
Slicer begins to launch, and when it's done, we're presented with a Welcome screen. Click
the Get Started button to... uh... get started. Agree to its license terms, click past the data
collection notice, and then you can select your Creality printer from a HUGE list of Creality
printers, both past and present. I'm going to select the Ender-3 S1, but if you have an Ender-3
V2, or a CR-200, or pretty much any Creality printer, find your printer in the list, and select
it. Then, click the Next button. The printer gets added, and all the settings are configured for
that particular kind of printer. Even the Start G-code and End G-code fields are set up for you.
Click Next one last time, and you're done with the installation, and with adding a printer. There
is one thing I want to make you aware of, though. Up here in the top center area, right between your
printer's name and the name of the print settings, there should be a Materials menu. That's
how you select the kind of filament you want to print with. To make that menu appear, it's
necessary to widen the Creality Slicer window. I think the problem is that the Print Settings
menu is locked into being really, really wide, and it pushes over into the space where the
materials menu would be. Once you make the window wide enough, that Materials menu will be
able to peek through. That's it for installing Creality Slicer, and adding a printer. Now, bear
with me for a moment, while I show the Mac users how to do it on their computers. If you want
to skip ahead a bit, use the chapter markers down in the video's timeline. Ok, Mac users, let's
get this installed! After you unzip the file you downloaded from Creality, open the resulting
disk image. To install Creality Slicer, drag its icon onto the applications icon. You may be
prompted for Admin credentials to do this. If so, provide them, and click the OK button. Creality
Slicer will be copied to the Applications folder. Close the disk image's window, and then
look inside the Applications folder. Double-click the Creality Slicer icon to run it.
Once Creality Slicer starts up, click the Get Started button to...uh... get started. Agree to
its license terms, click past the data collection notice, and then you can select your Creality
printer from a HUGE list of Creality printers, both past and present. I'm going to select the
Ender-3 S1, but if you have an Ender-3 V2, or a CR-200, or pretty much any Creality printer, find
your printer in the list, and select it. You may have noticed that the blue text showing the name
of the printer we selected suddenly went wacky. That's been a thing in Cura for a long time,
and since it's in Cura, it's also in Creality Slicer. I've pretty much given up hope of it ever
getting fixed. Anyway, click the Next button, and the printer gets added. All the settings are
configured for that particular kind of printer. Even the Start G-code and End G-code fields
are set up for you. Click Next one last time, and you're done with the installation, and with
adding a printer. There is one thing I want to make you aware of, though. Up here in the top
center area, right between your printer's name and the name of the printing profile, there should be
a Materials menu. That's how you select the kind of filament you want to print with. To make that
menu appear, it's necessary to widen the Creality Slicer window. I think the problem is that the
Printing Profile menu is locked into being really, really wide, and it pushes over into the
space where the Materials menu would be. Once you make the window wide enough, that
Materials menu will be able to peek through. And that's it for installing Creality Slicer, and
adding a printer. Okay, at this point you've got Creality Slicer installed, and ready to do its
thing. Now you need a file to slice. I'll show you Thingiverse, since that's a site I'm pretty
familiar with, and navigating it is usually pretty easy. You don't need an account to search
or download models, but you will need one if you want to mark things as favorites, or gather things
into collections, or upload anything to the site. We're just here to download, so there's no need
for an account. And just as a reminder, there are several different sites you can get models from,
all linked in the description. And I think I want to print a Flexi-Rex like the one I've got on the
Plastic Park T-shirt that I got for Christmas. This is a fun little print because it's got
articulating hinged joints between all its segments. It's not something that prints in
different parts and gets snapped together; the hinges are part of the print. When it's done,
and we take it off the printer, it'll be nice and wiggly. So searching for something when you know
the name is pretty easy. Here on Thingiverse, there's a big search bar at the top. I know this
is called a Flexi-Rex because I printed it before. But what if I didn't know the name? Well, it
still looks like a T-Rex, so I'll type that in the search field and press return. And here, in
among various T-Rex skulls and skeletons, and... shower heads? Anyway, here's what I'm looking
for: The Flexi-Rex with Stronger Links. Clicking its picture takes me to its page, and from there
I can click the Download All Files button. That'll switch to the list of Thing files associated
with this model, and from there I can click the Download button next to Flexi-Rex-improved.stl.
A few moments later, I've got that STL file in my downloads folder. And now that it's downloaded.
let's get it into Creality Slicer. To do that, click the Folder icon here, then find your way
into your Downloads folder, and open the file. You should see the Flexi-Rex centered on the grid.
By the way, that grid represents the bed on the printer, and it's sized based on the dimensions
specified in the printer settings screen when we added the printer earlier. That darker gray
border around the edge is kind of a no-fly zone for the nozzle. Creality Slicer reserves that area
to keep the nozzle away from the edge of the bed. Some printers have glass print surfaces, and
they're held in place with clips. So this feature keeps the nozzle from crashing into the clips.
Before slicing this model, let's go over some basic controls in Creality Slicer. First, let's
cover how to adjust your view of the model. There is a set of five icons at the bottom left corner
of the window, which set the view of the bed. These change to a 3D view, a front view, a top
view, a left view, and a right view. Looking at the 3D view, the blue outline shows the printer's
entire build volume. As long as the thing you want to print fits inside those boundaries, your
printer can print it. Once you set a view, you're free to click drag and move around to look at your
model. You can zoom in and out by scrolling up and down with your mouse's scroll wheel, or if
you have a trackpad, using the scroll gesture. You can adjust to any arbitrary view by clicking
with the right mouse button and dragging. If you have a trackpad, use the right-click gesture and
move the pointer while doing it. To slide the view around within the window, hold the shift
key while dragging with the left mouse button. Next, there is a set of icons along the left side
of the window. These become active when the model is selected. So, click once on the Flexi-Rex to
select it. And don't worry about accidentally messing up the model. The undo command on the
Edit menu will undo what you've done if you make a mistake. And in a worst-case scenario, you
can use Edit > Reset All Model Transformations to return the model to the condition it was
when it was brought into Creality Slicer. The first icon lets you move the model around on
the bed. I mean you can just drag the model around and put it at any location you want, but the
controls on the first icon allow you to move the model a very precise number of millimeters from
its starting point. The second icon allows you to scale the model up or down. You can specify a
particular size, or percentage for scaling on the X, Y, and Z axes, or you can drag the red, green,
or blue handles on the model itself to scale it. That Uniform Scaling checkbox is checked, and it
means that when you scale the model in one axis, it scales proportionally in the other two.
The Snap Scaling checkbox is not checked, and so you can adjust the scaling to any arbitrary
value. If you turn it on, the scaling occurs in ten percent increments. The third icon allows you
to rotate the model around its X, Y, or Z axis. The fourth icon allows you to mirror, or flip, the
model on its X, Y, or Z axis. The fifth and sixth icons are related to supports. One helps generate
custom supports, and the other blocks supports from being created. Supports are extra structures
the slicer adds when there are parts of a model that would otherwise be printed in mid-air.
In a gravity-rich environment such as ours, printing in mid-air usually doesn't work that
well. And while there are exceptions to that, the Flexi-Rex won't need supports, and
it definitely won't need custom supports. The seventh icon allows you to place
anti-warping tabs on the model. These are also known as mouse ears, and they're just
little circles about one layer high, that keep sharp corners of the model stuck down onto the
bed. Flexi-Rex isn't going to need these either. Okay. We've gone over some basic controls, but
before slicing the model, you need to know the temperature range for the filament you're
going to print with, and you need to know the recommended bed temperature. The temperature
range is usually on the spool's label, and if not, check on the box it came in. If you can't find it
there, check the filament manufacturer's website. A good strategy is to pick a temperature in
the middle of the filament's temperature range. For example, you might have a spool of PLA, and
the label says it prints between 190˚C and 220˚C. That's a 30 degree range. Taking half of that
is 15 degrees, and 190˚C plus 15˚C is 205˚C. So that's the temperature I'd want to start
printing at. And the bed temperature for PLA is almost always 60˚C. Now that the temperatures are
decided, let's look into slicing this Flexi-Rex. The standard settings are already set here, but
click the Print Settings menu anyway, so you can see your options. The profiles are listed by layer
thickness, or layer height. I usually say layer height. The thinner the layers, the more vertical
detail a model will have. But increasing the vertical detail also increases the printing time.
The available print settings have layer heights of 0.12 mm, 0.16 mm 0.2 mm and 0.28 mm. The 0.12 mm
layer height would give a lot of vertical detail, but would take a lot longer to print. The 0.28
layer height would not have a lot of vertical detail, but would print faster. Personally,
I tend to use a 0.2 mm layer height for most of my prints, since it's a good balance between
speed and quality. You can also set the amount of infill. Infill is a pattern that gets printed
inside the model to give it some structure, without having to print the entire model as a
solid chunk of plastic. I'll slice this as I go over some of these settings, so you can see what
they do. For example the orange lines here inside the model are the infill. Setting the infill to a
10 or 20 percent value is usually sufficient for most decorative prints. You may want to go higher
on functional prints where you need more strength, but values above 50 percent are probably not
necessary. Remember when we talked about supports earlier, with those icons on the left side of the
window? This checkbox controls whether supports are on or off. We'll leave them off for the
Flexi-Rex because it doesn't really need them. And this Adhesion checkbox controls whether
the model is printed with a brim around it, or just a skirt. When the check box is on,
a brim will be printed, and when it's off, a skirt will be printed. A brim is extra material
attached to the outside of the first layer, intended to help the model stick to the bed
by preventing the edges of it from lifting. A skirt is just a couple of laps around the
outside of the first layer of the model, spaced a few millimeters away from it. so that it doesn't
actually touch it. It's a way of making sure the nozzle is primed, and filament is flowing, before
the model starts printing. Anyway, Flexi-Rex doesn't need a brim, so we'll leave that off.
At this point, even though the model is sliced, it would really be a good idea to verify the
printing temperatures before we actually print it. To do that, click the Custom button. You'll
see a bunch of settings categories appear. Click the one for Material. This is where you can
change the printing temperature if you need to. I'll set the printing temperature to 205˚C. And
I'll leave the bed temperature set at 60 degrees. So another component to a model structure, besides
infill, is how thick the outer wall of it gets printed. Click into the Shell settings, and you'll
see this is set to have a wall thickness of 0.8 mm. Since this printer has a 0.4 mm nozzle, that
translates into a wall two lines wide. Greater wall thickness adds strength, and some models
may need another line or two of wall thickness. With all its little built-in hinges, I think
Flexi-Rex could benefit from adding an extra wall, so I'll change the wall line count from 2 to 3.
Okay. So having made changes to the temperature and the wall thickness, I'll close the Print
Settings panel to get it out of the way. And now, click the Slice button, for real this time.
Finally, right? Okay, after it slices the file, it gives us a printing time estimate. Sometimes these
are pretty close, and sometimes they're WAAAY off, so take that with a grain of salt. Okay, click the
Save to File button, and save this to the desktop. Then put the printer's memory card into the
computer. You may need to use the USB card reader that came with it, if your computer doesn't
have a slot for the kind of card the printer uses. Copy the file to the card, then eject it, and
remove it from the computer. Just a side note, Creality Slicer can usually detect the card, and
can show a Save to Removable Media button instead of Save to File. But I chose the Save to File
method, because that will always work. Meanwhile, back at the printer... Make sure it's turned
on. Make sure you've got some filament loaded. Then insert the card into the printer's slot, and
select the Flexi-Rex file to start printing it. Here is a quick time lapse of the Flexi-Rex
being printed. And this is sped up quite a bit. Now that it's done, I can pop it off the flex
plate. If you've got a printer with a glass bed, you'll need to let it cool back down to
room temperature before trying to remove it. And here we go, a fine, fancy, flexible
T-Rex-ible. Just like the one I'm wearing! I know I said it before, but I like this little
model because it shows one of the cool things you can do with a 3D printer, that you can't
do with traditional manufacturing techniques. Each of these segments is hinged, but
the hinge pin prints inside the hinge, so it's all one thing. Nothing snaps together.
It's... I don't know, I just think it's neat. So that's the basics of using Creality Slicer. Now
I know I didn't really get into using supports, apart from just briefly touching on what they
are. If you'd like to see a video about using supports in Creality Slicer, let me know in the
comments. But this should hopefully be enough to get you started. And feel free to share
what you're making, and tag me on Twitter. I'd love to see what you're printing! Well, 3D
printing friends, that's about all the time we have for this episode. And now that we're
at the end, let's go print something cool! Hey, real quick before you go, I wanted
to say THANKS! for being one of the Super Awesome People who sticks around all the way
to the end, and thanks for all the likes, comments, and shares. And an especially big thanks
to those of you who directly support what I do. You're all wonderful for doing that, and I
really appreciate it. If you liked this episode, a thumbs up would be great. And if you'd like to
help support the channel, check the description for ways you can do exactly that. And hey. If
you haven't already subscribed, please do! It's absolutely free, and it's an excellent way
to help keep me making these videos for you! Well, that's it for this one. Thanks again, and
I'll see you next time here, on the BV3D Channel.
