How to Use Ultimaker Cura 5: A Beginner's Guide 2023

hey everybody Chris here from it's meet made and welcome to the Ultimate Guide to ultimaker Cura for beginners now in this video I am going to be covering everything a beginner needs to know to get started using Cura so we're going to go from installation the things in the interfaces and how to slice your files so you can send it to your 3D printer and start printing away so if you're ready to get started let's jump in [Music] all right guys let's go ahead and do it we're going to address the elephant in the room and that is the size of this video it's a long one and I've went ahead and I've already chaptered out this video for you so if you've already installed the software for example go ahead and just skip that chapter but I will say I will miss you while I'm still talking to the other people so now that we've gotten that out of the way and we've addressed that elephant let's go ahead and get started on this video so what is Kira for those of you that do not know what Cura is it is a free open source program that allows you to take 3D models and It prepares them for a 3D printer it is a powerful program you can optimize just about every single setting for your specific 3D printer and then you can also preview those files and see what it's going to look like when it's 3D printing and after that you can send it to your 3D printer to start printing so before we get started I just wanted to say one thing cure is huge it's a gigantic program and there's so many things when it comes to 3D printing it's okay if you get overwhelmed because there's a lot but over time you're going to get more and more comfortable in this program because you're going to be 3D printing a lot but in this video I'm going to take you step by step and show you all of the things that you need to know right now and then you just keep expanding so now I think we're ready to get started one of the biggest misconceptions about 3D printing is that you can just simply set up your file and hit print unfortunately that's not the case there is no easy button there's a lot to learn and especially when it comes to Kira it's important that you take your time and you start to learn what these settings are and how they affect your prints and that being said it's really important to start 3D printing easy things like simple objects just because you don't want to start this like crazy intricate model or anything like that for your very first print because that takes a lot of advanced settings to get just right and you've got to tune in your 3D printer to make it just print beautifully and that comes in time but to start out let's keep it simple one important thing to realize is 3D printing and the softwares are constantly evolving and you need to keep up to date with those settings and features because it's just going to make your life easier and give you better results in your 3D prints so never never stop learning so let's take a minute to explain what Kira actually does now Cura converts your 3D models into a stack or a series of 2D layers and then your printer can understand what those layers mean and it draws each layer then it moves up and it draws the next layer and it moves up and draws the next layer so a 3D print is honestly just a bunch of sheets of plastic stacked on top of each other in a unique shape and all of those put together create your 3D model when you're exporting out your files for your 3D printer Cura actually creates something called G-Code G-Code is that special language only the printer can understand it has all of the information for the entire 3D print it tells it how to move and when at what speed when to extrude the plastic filament and when to retract it when to push it out all of that like it tells it all of the settings and all of those settings that it has in that G-Code are all determined by your settings in Cura now another thing I feel like I should tell you is there are other 3D printing slicers out there on the market Cura isn't the only one I just think it's the most popular one and that's what we're focusing in on this video but some of the other ones are simplified 3D but you have to pay for it and another good free one is the process slicer and I'll put links to those down in the description below so you can check those out too throughout this video I have a bunch of different terms that I might be using and if you're new to 3D printing you might not know what these are so I've went ahead and created a downloadable PDF and I'll put a link below to my website that it shows you what those terms are or what those things do it's going to be really helpful especially if you're new to 3D printing so one of the biggest questions always to new 3D printers is what can I actually print and I'm going to tell you this the world is your oyster because is there are millions of files out there for you to be able to 3D print and Cura allows multiple different formats of files that you can print the three main ones are STL obj and 3mf but STL is really the most popular file format so there's an array of websites out there that you can get 3D models to 3D print some are free some you have to pay for a few of my favorite places is number one thingiverse I always go here first because thingiverse is amazing because everything is free so always check your free sites when you're looking for something first another one is Cults 3D it's kind of a blend some of the models on there are for free some of them you have to pay for another great one is my mini Factory my mini Factory has a bunch of beautiful 3D models that you can purchase and then 3D print but one of the greatest things about 3D printing is you can 3D model your own models and print them yourself one of my favorite places to go to create my own 3D models is tinkercad it's a free software online that you can use to create 3D models and then it exports it out in the files for your 3D printer I've done a whole series on teaching you how to use tinkercad and I'll go ahead and put a link to that down below so you can watch that right after this video so now that we've gone over all of the basics you really need to know let's jump over to the computer and start installing Cura so first you want to go to ultimaker.com and I'll also have a link to this in the description below once you come here you want to go to software and then click ultimaker Kira and this is the landing page to download Cura now all you have to do is go right here and click download for free then it's going to give you a couple options so if you're a Windows person you want to download this if you're on a Mac you can download this and then these are for Linux so I'm running a Mac right now so I'm going to click the Mac installer just click it and then it'll start downloading so first I'm going to show you how to install it on a Mac so if you have a Windows now's a good time to skip to the next chapter so you get your DMG file and then just double click and it's going to give you the terms of use so you can scroll through this and read it but ultimately if you disagree you will not install but you're going to have to hit agree to actually install it then it will pop open this window and the beautiful thing about installing things on a Mac all you have to do is take this icon and drag it and drop it onto your applications folder then it will be copying to your applications folder once done you can close the window then your installer boot in the top right you can just drag that to your trash can and eject it then you can go to your applications folder and then just drag it in your dock now we're ready to open it so now we're over on the Windows side of the installation process so I'm just going to go ahead and click ultimaker for Windows 64-bit then it's going to start downloading in my browser once I have the install downloaded I'm just going to double click it and start to install it then it's going to give us the installation process so all you have to do is Click next and say you'd agree to the terms and conditions here because if you don't agree you either cancel or go back so if you want Cura you gotta agree then you select the directory where you want it to be installed I'm just going to put mine in my program files one thing to note you need 1.3 gigabytes of space to be able to install this so as long as you have enough space and it'll tell you how much space you have here I have 800 left so I have plenty of room for Cura so I'm going to go ahead and hit next then I'm going to go ahead I'm not going to touch any of these settings and just click install and then it's going to start the installation process so once the installation is complete if you have this box checked and hit run ultimaker when I hit finish it's going to load the program so depending on the type of system you may be running and your security access levels that you have set this may come up and prompt you to allow access to your private networks such as your home and network I go ahead and I just click allow access then we're ready to get started in Cura when you open Cura for the first time you're going to be getting this prompt screen so all you have to do is make your way through that so we're going to hit get started then we're going to agree to the user agreement then there's a prompt of them asking to collect data to be able to make Cura even better on this slide you can actually create a free ultimaker account and if you already have one you can sign in here but for this we're going to go ahead and just skip this step now we have the option to add our first printer now if you have an ultimaker printer you click this if you do not have an ultimaker printer you're going to click this so let's click non-ultimaker printer now we're going to see this list of how to add our first printer now if we have a networked printer we could add this but for our purposes we're going to be adding a non-networked printer so we can just click this box and then the other one will show up now all you have to do is scroll through all of the different brands available so I'm going to go ahead and add my creality 3D Ender 3 Pro so let's go to creality 3D so if I click the drop down then I can see all of the different creality 3D printers so right down here at the bottom I see creality Ender 3 Pro so I'm just going to click that box and over here I can give a custom name to my printer so I'm going to go ahead and just name this my Ender 3 Pro and there we go so now I'm just going to hit next and here it's going to show me all of the settings for my printer and in the other tab the settings for my extruder so let's jump back to our printer and you're going to see printer settings now this is your printer bed size so for the Ender 3 Pro it's 220 millimeters by 220 millimeters is the bed size the height it prints is 250 millimeters now if you have a heated bed you want to check this and my printer does so it's checked there are also some more custom settings for your 3D printer and if you got it on the list I recommend leaving it on the settings that it already has filled out for you it also has some start g code and some indige code the start g code will actually prime your nozzle and create a little plastic strip on the edge of your bed to be able to get the plastic actually flowing through it before it starts Printing and then the NG code will allow the printer to move away from the print and push the bed forward once we have these settings we're going to go ahead and click next here it's going to show us all of the new things that they've actually added to Kira and this goes all the way back to what I was saying about you never stop learning you there are so many things they're constantly evolving in Kira so all you have to do is just click through here if you want to read them and understand what they do great but we're just going to click right through and then once we're done we hit finish alright so once you've made it through all of the prompts and Kira finally opens you're going to see something like this and let's just take a minute to kind of go through all of the panels just so you understand what everything does so first we have this big area and this is just our workspace now if you notice we have this plane right here and then we have these blue lines now what this has done is it has already taken all of the settings from your 3D printer that we just put in and it has created a build plate and then these blue lines is your print area so you can 3D print anything that can fit within this Cube now if we go up here to our top left you see a little folder icon now this is how we're going to open our 3D files and import them into Cura now if you see to the right of that it says Ender 3 Pro now this is the printer that I just added and if you click the drop down you can also see it right here now if you get another 3D printer which I highly recommend or you have multiples already you can click add printer right here and it will take you to the settings to where you can add more 3D printers now if you have multiple 3D printers or do you just want to edit this 3D printer you have you can click on manage printers and that will give you all of the settings to be able to change anything on your 3D printer next we have our material and nozzle size menu so if we click the drop down here you can actually select the type of material you're using in other words what filament you're using right now I have PLA and if you click the drop down you can actually see there are different types of brands that you can select so if you have any of these Brands you can actually just get that exact brand and click it and have those preferences of that filament personally I like to always use generic so I go to generic and then I'm going to click pla because that's what I print in next is the nozzle size almost all of the printers on the market now come with a 0.4 millimeter nozzle but I will tell you check the specifications of the 3D printer that you have to make sure that's accurate now if you have the wrong nozzle size put in here your 3D prints might not turn out very well so make sure you actually have the right nozzle next we have the settings panel and if you click this this gives you the settings that you can change on your 3D prints we're gonna get more into this later so I'm just going to click it and close it and on the top you're going to see prepare preview and monitor now prepare is where we're at right now this is the area that we're actually going to bring in our models position them and get them all ready for 3D printing now once we slice our model we're going to go over here to preview and preview will allow us to see what it's going to look like when it's 3D printing then we have Monitor and monitor is really for those people that connect their 3D printer to their computer so they can actually see the status of it as it's printing but in this video we're not really going to cover monitor at all now if we jump down here to the bottom left of the screen you're going to see these five cubes and these are quick switch views so we can quickly switch to the different views if we just click on them so right now we're in the three-quarter View mode but if I click the front view it'll switch us to the front view top same thing it switches to the top then you can see left and right and this is really handy when you've got stuff going on and you want to see the different angles to make sure everything looks good for your printing now let's go to the top view that these lines these vertical lines are bowing out and that is because we have perspective on so this is one of those things that I strongly recommend you turn off because perspective can really mess with you because if you have a bigger object and you're looking down on it it'll look like it's coming off of the build plate but it's not so we need to turn off perspective so we're looking at it perfectly straight down so we know when things are on that build plate and the exact positioning of them so let me show you how to change that so all you have to do is come up here to view then you go to camera view and you see that perspective is checked so now what we want to do is click on orthographic now you see how everything just changed those lines are perfectly straight now and if we click on a side view that's the build plate and then this is the Box our build volume and turning it that way there's no perspective anymore everything is perfect so this is the best view you can have when you're bringing in your models to make sure everything looks right so let's go ahead and click on our top left icon the little folder and then we're going to click this it's going to bring up our window to find a file on our computer and then we can select it and hit open so I previously mentioned thingiverse is a place where you can get free 3D models to 3D print I've actually selected a model today that is specifically from thingiverse and it has its own issues and problems because the one thing I will tell you is not all 3D files are created equally sometimes they're not imported the right way or exported the right way when it comes to the 3D softwares that somebody might be using and I think you're going to see exactly what I'm talking about in the file that I'm about to open so I found this file on thingiverse downloaded it and just imported it and you can see it right there exactly you probably can't there's a little tiny dot right there of my file so if we zoom into this I mean really zoom in and move down here you can see this tiny tiny tiny little gecko and that isn't right he's standing on his head you can see how he should be laying flat and that just that doesn't look right at all so this is what we're going to do so we're actually going to be using this modifier panel on the left hand side that just appeared and this actually shows up once you have a file placed on your build plate so let's click this model and when we click it you can see that there is a blue outline around it and that denotes that it's actually selected this is very handy when you have multiple things on your build plate at once so to move it around you can left click and hold anywhere on the yellow model and it will move around on the build plate the other thing you can do is move your mouse over these arrows until they highlight and then left click and drag and it will move your model in that specific Direction on that axis so this is our x-axis and our z-axis now you notice when I click him and then I move him up and let go he automatically drops down to the ground and that is because I have this setting right here checked drop down model so if I uncheck this I could click it and then move it up and it'll just stay hovering in in place right there but I want it to drop down so we're going to click that you can also lock your model so if you check this box now I can't do anything to this whatsoever to unlock your model all you have to do is check that box again and now I can move them around so the next one is probably our most important one at least for us right now and that's scale so this is just like your move tool so I can actually scale this in only one Axis or I could scale the whole thing the one thing I always want to make sure though is I have uniform scaling checked so I'm going to left click on this white box and drag and now he is getting bigger so let's zoom out and we can see that this is now looking like a little gecko so I am going to scale this up even more okay I like the size of that and because it's a 3D model we can scale this as big as we want now let's move to the rotate and see if we can get him laying flat on this there are two ways that I can do this I can either grab onto one of these circles and click and drag and position him in such a way to where he would actually be flat on the actual build plate so you can see how this might be a little bit challenging to get just right or they've actually given us this wonderful feature here and that is Select face to align to the build plate so I can actually select a face of the model and it will align it to the build plate itself there's also this setting called lay flat lay flat I'm not going to lie it works sometimes not all the times so you actually selecting the face you want to be flat against the build plate is honestly always your best choice so first all you got to do is click it and once it's clicked it'll turn blue then you go up underneath your model and click those areas you want to be flat so honestly this all looks flat so I'm just going to click the bottom of the tail and there we go so now it just laid him perfectly flat on the build plate but we now have another problem when an object leaves the build plate area you will get these caution Stripes throughout your model which means it it's not going to 3D print it because it can't 3D print out here so you need to be able to manipulate your model so he's going to stay inside the build plate so let me just go to my move tool I'm going to click and just drag him up and there he is now I can go to the top view and I can try to organize him a little better on my build plate so I can try to Center him up the best I can or I can right click on him in a drop down menu shows up and this is where I can Center him directly to the build plate so right there he's directly centered a few more options you have here is if you wanted to delete him you could delete him by clicking that you can actually multiply him so we can actually create multiple copies of the same model or you can select all you can arrange all of your models and these are all things when you have multiple things in your workspace but for right now we just need to focus on Center selected another thing I like to do is I like to be able to have my models kind of at a 45 so they're more in the center of the build plate so for this one that makes a lot of sense right there I could even move him over just a little bit and just make him visually look like he's on there now one thing that's happened that I did not realize when I restarted Kira is my perspective came back because when I'm looking at the top here I can see these lines so I want to go back to my view camera view orthographic and there we go now I can get a better representation of what this is going to look like from all angles and I think that's going to be pretty cool to 3D print now the last three features are more advanced features and I'm not going to be covering these in this tutorial I'll actually do another tutorial where I cover that now there's one thing in here that I get asked all the time when people are first starting out especially when they see some of my tutorials and that is all about the display mode of Kira because this is the standard ultimaker display mode which is this bright background I like to use ultimaker dark so let's just take a minute and change our theme in Cura so we can kind of see what's going on a little bit easier so all you have to do is first you go to your preferences and then configure Cura then you want to hop over to your general Tab and then right here the third one theme now you'll see it says ultimaker now let's click the drop down box and hit ultimaker dark there's also a colorblind assist dark and a color blind assist light which is really nice if you're colorblind but we're going to just go with ultimaker dark close this out and switch back to Cura and there we go and I'm I'm kidding this is probably the second most question I get when I show people how to do this and that is because your theme does not change until you restart Cura so let's go ahead and restart this and then we can have the Dark theme in Kira and here we go so so here we are in the dark theme and I like this a lot better because it's easier to see your models because all of the white and the model being yellow it it strains my eyes so you can change it back if you want but this is the way that I like to do it so before we get into the settings and start slicing our files I think it's important to be able to talk about filament filament is important it's what we use to 3D print and there are so many different kinds of filament out there pla ABS pet G nylon and don't even get me started on the specialty filaments because I mean there's some that's wood infused and some that have carbon fiber in them to make it stronger there's so many and each one of these filaments has their unique properties and all of these filaments have their own unique challenges such as warping or stringing and some are very prone to clogging your nozzle so it's really important to understand this settings of your printer because you have to change those settings specifically for different types of filament and that's why for beginners I recommend starting out with a standard spool of pla it can be whatever color you want but just don't get anything crazy like Silk pla or anything like that just start with regular pla now what pla is is it's a biodegradable thermoplastic which means it can 3D print at lower temperatures and it has little to no odor whatsoever and I think it's also worth mentioning that pla is the most popular filament to print with which means it's readily available and you can get it a lot cheaper than a lot of those other types of filaments out there so after you've been printing with pla for a little while and you've got a few spools under your belt and you're ready to start experimenting with different types of filament there's a few things you need to know you got to make sure that you actually get the right kind of filament as in the right thickness because pla comes in different thicknesses the standard size is 1.75 and that's what most 3D printers take but not all and then the other thing is is when you're looking at that filament make sure that your 3D printer is compatible to print that filament because there's some that have to print at very high temperatures and your printer might not be able to get to that high of a temperature so cross reference with your manufacturer of your printer and the filament spool itself and make sure that it's able to 3D print it alright so now we're going to go into Cura and start messing with our settings to be able to get our first 3D print so while we're on the track of just keeping things simple in the beginning we're going to keep things simple for the settings in Cura we're going to be in the basic mode of settings which only allow you a few things and I think it's important for your first few prints not to get bogged down in all the settings and just keep it in the basic settings because there are so many things that you can change in Cura and I'm going to show you how you can get to those but for these first few prints let's just stay in the settings I'm about to show you so let's go to the top right corner of the screen and click on our settings panel and this is the basic settings there's not a lot here it's just the bare bones of what you really need to make a successful 3D print so the first thing is our resolution our resolution is our layer height how much of a layer height we want so if we click on the drop down it'll give us four settings it'll give us super quality Dynamic quality standard and low quality now I recommend us sticking to standard but let me take a minute to explain to you what the difference is so we all understand that a 3D printer prints a two-dimensional outline of something and then moves up and then prints another one and it keeps making these layers to be able to make whatever object we are printing now it's the height of those layers that determines your quality so the smaller the layer height the better the quality the bigger the layer height the lower the quality and that's where you're going to start to see a lot more of those layer lines so if we click this drop down under resolution we have super quality Dynamic standard and low and then we can see what our actual layer height is going to be so super quality is making our layer height 0.12 millimeters tall then standard is making it 0.2 millimeters tall now the biggest thing to keep in mind is the smaller the layer height number or the smaller your resolution the longer it's going to take to print and just the opposite a bigger layer height is going to print faster so for now we're just going to keep it on standard because 0.2 is a good resolution and it's going to turn out to be a nice clean print so let's click that next we have the strength settings in these all play into how strong we want our 3D print to be the first settings are our infill settings in the infill setting determines how much material is being used to fill inside your 3D print so the first settings are all related to our infill our infill density is the setting that determines how much material is going to be used inside of your 3D print so the higher the percentage that will make it a stronger 3D print but it will take longer to 3D print the higher this number goes and just to help you out zero percent means it's going to be a completely Hollow model and a hundred percent means this is going to be a solid plastic 3D print and this will take forever and it will be using a lot of filament I typically recommend to stay anywhere from 10 to 20 percent when you're first starting out then we have our pattern if you click this drop down you're going to see a lot of different choices here but to help you out I recommend and either going with a grid triangles or cubic these are all really great infills that will make a pretty strong print my personal favorites though are gyroid because it is a very strong infill and then there's lightning which is the exact opposite it's not a very strong infill it only gives you infill where it's needed so it's not wasting filament creating an infill in areas it's not needed on your 3D print for now we're just going to leave it at cubic the next setting we have here is our shell thickness this setting determines the thickness of our outer walls of our 3D print the thicker the walls the stronger your 3D print is going to be and just like we're talking about our density the stronger your walls the more time it's going to take to 3D print if you see the two numbers here this is your walls the vertical lines right here and these horizontal lines are your top and bottom layers so this is the top and bottom of your shell and this is the walls of your shell when things are going vertical I don't want to get too technical with this but I think it's important that you understand how to get this number and how to achieve a stronger print the shell thickness always has to be divisible by your nozzle size because the lines that it's drawing out for your 3D print is the thickness of your nozzle so it's not going to go wider than that you can see here that this is actually printing two walls on this 3D print and then it's putting a two wall count on the bottom and top Ridges of my 3D print so if I wanted to make this stronger I could go 1.2 millimeters by one 0.2 millimeters and then that is still divisible by our 0.4 millimeter nozzle size so this will actually give me four walls instead of two now and this is going to make it a lot stronger so the next thing we have is our support setting and I'm going to skip this one right now and we're going to come back to that so the next setting we're going to talk about is our adhesion now the adhesion setting in these basic settings mode just does one thing it increases the surface area of your very first layer so it's drawing this little skirt is what we call it all the way around the 3D print but only for one layer that way it's a broader base and it can stick to your bed a lot better and when we actually slice this we're going to go over that and I'll show you so for now let's just click this and leave it at that so I've went ahead and removed our Gecko and I put a couple letters here and these are actually keychains and you can put them on your keychain through this little hole right here but we're going to use these to talk about supports so what are supports supports are additional structures that are printed right beside your 3D print and it holds up the overhangs or in other words the unsupported areas of your 3D prints these are essential for some 3D prints so your print comes out correctly but adding supports can significant gently add printing time and it uses more material so that's just something to keep in mind so the big thing is is how can we actually determine when we need supports so if we look here our models are nice and yellow but when I rotate underneath this you start to see these really bright red areas and what these red areas indicate is these are overhangs and they need supported so we're going to go ahead and turn on our supports so if we scroll down we have two options the support type and the placement so first let's just get into the placement everywhere means anywhere it sees red it's going to make a support there it doesn't matter if it's inside the model or on top of the model it'll start printing a support on the model itself and it'll actually print it off of the build plate now the next one is touching build plate now touching build plate means it's only going to be creating the support words off of the build plate so it's not going to create any kind of support on top of your model now the next setting is normal and tree supports normal creates pillars and there's straight vertical pillars that will support your models then there's tree supports tree supports are organic looking supports that will create a support structure and then start branching out like a tree to support your 3D model so let's turn off supports first and let's slice our model so we haven't sliced anything yet and let's look at this all you have to do is Click slice and what that does is it will actually process your model and then you can preview how it's going to 3D print so let's click preview up here in the top middle of the screen or we can come down here and click preview now you can see our model has turned red and this is our outer shell and anything yellow is the top part of our shell and the other thing we notice is you see this little ring all the way around our supports this is our adhesion setting so this is all on the very first layer to connect to your print to make it more stable and give it more surface area to connect to your build plate so if we close the dialog box on the right side of the screen you're going to see this bar and then a number above it you'll see 279 for my print that is how many layers it's actually printing so if we zoom into this tee you can see every single layer it's going to be 3D printing and the nice thing is is you can preview how it's going to print by left clicking on this Dot and clicking and dragging and I'm just dragging it down so you can see how it's going to print layer by layer so here's our very first layer then it starts to build up and create our 3D print now one thing to note inside here all of this orange is actually our infill pattern the cubic infill pattern so let's stop right here right on this line as we're previewing it now this is printing one layer on this tee with nothing underneath it so that's actually a lot of surface area to just 3D print so if I just left this as it is it's actually going to be printing all of this movement right here and just squirting filament into the air and that is going to create a beautiful spaghetti mess and this is where we're going to need some supports but the difference on the other side with this W it starts on the very bottom and then it just keeps coming up and expands a little bit each layer so you can see how it keeps coming out and then eventually it connects to be one piece and then it finishes so something like this that has a slight angle is perfectly fine to print without any supports now the only issue we might have is this little circle right here but some 3D printers will print holes like this perfectly fine so now let's jump back into our prepare view so now we have our models and if we open up our settings again and we click on supports we're going to just start with our normal supports touching the build plate so now I'm going to slice this again and it's going to process this and now we can preview it now we see something different here we see blue pillars on this print and we see a blue pillar right here as well because it's trying to figure out how to help us with this hole so let's take a front view of this and let's zoom in so all of these red lines is actually our T but these blue lines are our support structure and you notice this slight Gap it actually skips one layer and that is so when this is 3D printing if this starts to fall it can actually rest on this support pillar that way you don't get any failures you can see here that the hole does not have any supports in it so let's go ahead and change this touching build plate placement to everywhere and let's slice that so now you can see it's actually creating a support inside that hole and it's starting on top of my model so if we scrub down through our print we can see that it's printing that hole then a support structure is created and it's filling in that hole to be able to give us a nice Bridge right here for these overhangs to rest on so now let's talk about tree supports so click normal and then tree now we're going to go back to just touching build plate once again and let's go ahead and slice this and see what it looks like so now that we can see our wnt there's no supports needed on this W but on this T we definitely need them now if you see the pillar it's creating is almost like a tree trunk and then it branches out when it gets close to the model hence the name tree support the nice thing about using tree supports is it does use less filament which means it speeds up your print time just a little bit so you can see with the tree supports right before it starts printing this overhang it actually creates this grid for our print to lay on and what that means is the supports are easier to remove now if we switch to a front view of this you can see that it still leaves us a nice Gap so when this filament starts to drop it has something to rest on so the next thing let's go everywhere now with our trees supports and let's slice that so now it's actually creating a tree support inside these holes in the W and the T that way we're going to get a proper amount of support when it's doing the overhangs on the top of this hole so identifying when you need supports on your model is a very important skill that you need to learn early now there's another thing that this T doesn't really show us because everything is coming off of the model and it just needs support being able to identify when you need supports and when you don't need supports is a skill that you need to adapt very early when you're starting to 3D print now one thing I haven't talked about is what happens when you're making a 3D print of a model let's say a person let's say we're 3D printing a model of a person standing like this with the T everything was just coming off of the person or the model okay but if they're like this when it starts printing your elbow is going to be right down here it's going to be printing in midair so you're going to need to be able to identify what we call Islands and let me show you what an island looks in Cura so what I've done is I've just turned this t on its side so when you're looking at this these branches of the tea are no longer just going flat straight out there's one that actually starts right here at the tip so let me slice this and show you so if I go down on my slice here you can see this starts to print and what is it printing on there's nothing here this right here is what we call an island and this can honestly just absolutely destroy some of your 3D prints if you miss an island what we need to do is we need to have supports because eventually it connects and then it'll be okay but we need to be able to support this area when there's nothing attached to it so let's turn on our supports again and we're gonna go to tree supports and then I'm just going to be touching the build plate and let's slice that so now you can see there are supports along this entire Edge so if we zoom in here right before it starts and start to see how it's going to be printing these layers you can see there's that grid pattern creating and then it starts 3D printing the actual t and it's supporting all the way along the edge here of our print and it even creates a couple pillars to come out and try to support underneath that hole so this is an instance where you absolutely would need supports because we have an island now let me just show you real quick what it would look like with normal supports now the normal supports is doing the same thing it's supporting it right here and along this Edge and trying to support this angle and if we zoom in we can also see that it's supporting that corner as well as this wall right here so if there's any drooping it will catch it so now we're back to our little Gecko and if we actually go up underneath here we see that there is no red on this model which means we don't need any supports on this and this is a good little tip for you when you're starting out it's good to use models that don't require any supports so if you go into say thingiverse and you type in support free and then the name of your model that you're looking for it'll probably give you some options that you don't need any supports so support free is going to be your best friend I know it's my best friend and I've been 3D printing for nine years now so we've got our little guy and I've turned off supports now I wanted to take a second to explain what happens when we hit slice the slicing engine takes over and converts your 3D model into a bunch of two-dimensional layers that your 3D printer can understand and recognize so let's hit slice and you can see the slicing process it's converting your 3D model into all of these layers now once it's done you can see a few things here you can see the amount of time now one thing I'll tell you when it comes to the estimated time on your 3D prints in Cura it's an estimate it's not 100 accurate so if it says it's going to take four hours for you to 3D print you set a timer for four hours and you come back in four hours and it's like 95 percent it happens so just use this as a ballpark don't actually use this as like a set in stone it'll be done at this exact time it's just an estimate the longer the print the more loose of an estimate it is the shorter of a print say an hour it's going to be pretty accurate next it also shows you how much filament it's using so it's using 33 grams of filament and 11.02 meters of filament as well so not only does it show you the weight of filament it's using but the length of filament off of your spool that it's using so once you've seen that you click preview and preview is jumping us over into that screen that we previously have seen when we're messing with our supports now let's close our dialog box and I've already discussed this bar right here so if we click and drag it will actually slide through our 3D print and show us how every single layer is going to be sliced and a few things to know the light blue here is all of our support structures so this is the adhesion check that we did on our settings so this is increasing that surface area of our first layer then you're going to see this Orange area right here and this is our infill and this is giving a structure so our outer shell has something to 3D print onto just like we were using with our supports so not only can we see what each layer is going to look like we can see the actual path of the 3D print so if we come down here to the bottom and we hit play this will actually draw out what it's going to look like while it's 3D printing this exact layer now this is doing it in real time so you can actually scrub through this and see that it's doing the inner walls then the red is the outer walls and it's printing that and after it's done with that it starts printing the infill layer and after it's all done it moves up to the next layer now one important thing I'm going to tell you is every single time you hit Slice on a Model you need to scrub through your model and look to see how it's actually 3D printing because this is where you can catch failures before they happen on your 3D printer because this is giving you an exact representation of what it's telling the 3D printer to do with this 3D model so let me show you what to look for I always bring this all the way down to the very first layer I make sure my very first layer has a lot of surface area so I have a good skirt it's all attached and I can even scrub through this to see okay it's going to be printing the skirt and then it's going to be printing the outer walls and then it's infilling the rest then I go up to my second layer now my second layer is I make sure that this doesn't like have any big areas that it's coming off of the very first layer let me give you an example of this so I just rotated my my model a half a degree so 0.5 degrees and I just rotated this it still looks like it's on there it's on the build plate but this is where it can be deceiving let me hit preview and I'm going to go all the way down to my first layer wait what it's only touching by the tail this is how you can recognize a failed print the next layer is that I'm going to have this crazy overhang right here and if I keep going it's printing all of this in just five layers so you can see here it's printing these layers and it's just suspending it out and this would absolutely be a failed print so you really want to bring your model all the way down to the first layer and look at it so now I went back and put it how it was it's now flat the other thing I do is I always just do a slow scrub through all of my layers to make sure that I don't see any islands and to just make sure that there isn't any kind of weird imperfections or anything like that that I notice and for this it honestly looks perfect this is going to be a nice clean print so we've checked our model over and it's ready to save it to whatever we need to save it to for 3D print enter most 3D printers take a Micro SD card some take an SD card others take a USB drive so it doesn't really matter what your printer takes but you want to put this into your computer so if you have a card reader go ahead and put that into your card reader now if you see here I haven't actually put my card into my computer yet so this is going to say save to disk and this is just going to save it to my computer but when I put in an SD card it automatically recognizes that SD card and it says saved a removable drive now one thing you do have to be careful of if you have multiple SD cards connected to your computer you have to click this little drop down and then this will tell you which one it's going to actually save to so my removable drive or do I want to save it to this other SD card which is my camera SD card which is a bigger one or I can save it to the disk so for this we're just going to save it right to my removable drive now now one thing to note over here on your left side is actually going to be the name of your file so this is going to be ce3 Pro which means creality Ender 3 Pro and then it's underscore gecko underscore three so I don't want that I just want to name this gecko so I can select that text and just say Gecko and now I can click off of that and then save this to my removable drive and then it'll process and save the file so then you can see file saved saved to removable Drive Untitled as gecko dot g code and this G-Code is what your 3D printer is going to read so now all you have to do is eject your removable drive and then put it in your printer select it and hit print now once you actually have your file on your 3D printer and you're selecting it and hitting print it's important to stay there and wait watch your first layer your first layer is like I said the most important layer and you have to make sure it's successful because if you walk away from it and it doesn't stick you're going to come back to this spaghetti mess because it doesn't know that it's failed it's just going to keep doing as it's told because it's reading the G-Code that Kira is telling it to do one quick thing that you can do to be able to help with bed adhesion my favorite purple glue sticks you can just smear some of this on your bed and then it will help with that adhesion and the great thing is you can pop your bed off when you're done take the print off then you can just wash that with water and it'll come right off and you've got a clean build plate again or you could be like me and you just keep adding more layers and more layers until it gets so thick you've got to go wash it that's just me so once your first layer is finished and you see printing the second layer successfully chances are you're going to have a pretty good print not always some things happen sometimes but for the most part when I see that my first layer is perfect I get good results and the rest of my model turns out just fine because it has that solid foundation so once you've been 3D printing for a while and you're really feeling comfortable in the settings that we went over in this video it's time to expand your wings because then it's time for you to get into the advanced settings of cura and that really opens up this program and you're going to really see all of the different functionalities that this program really has there are so many things when it comes to your infill your supports your your speeds of your printer you can change that now there's just a lot in it so now let me just show you how we can switch into our advanced settings in Cura so what you want to do is go up to your settings you're going to click this then all you have to do is come over here where it says show custom and we're going to click that button now you're going to see a whole lot more settings and I mean a whole lot more settings so if we click on speed that we didn't have the option to change previously you can actually go here and change the setting of your printer to make it print faster but if you come over here to this little hamburger icon you click that and you can see that you're just in the basic settings right now so you can go to Advanced expert or you just go all so let's click all you can see there's a lot more settings when it comes to the speed of your 3D printer you can change how fast you want your infill your walls your initial layer speed there's all kinds of things you can change and that's in every single one of these there are tons of options so once you have those advanced settings in Cura you have a lot more open to you and I'm not just talking about settings one of the major things that you have is you can actually take other people's profiles in their presets and save them into your own Cura you can also save your own profiles if you've actually altered theirs in any way so let me show you how to do that so if we come up to our settings panel and you see right here at the top it'll say profile and this is a lot like how we were determining what the quality was in the previous version of our settings but if we click this drop down we can still see those same settings right here but then if you come down here there's a custom profiles and I've actually got a profile I've already created now one thing you can do is let's say that I want my quality to be a 0.1 not a one two eight so I want to make this that my new super quality so once you have your settings how you want them all you have to do is click this little save so we're going to save this and it's going to tell me what's different and I can save as a new profile so I'm going to save this and I'm going to call this means super quality profile and now I'm going to go ahead and save new profile so now if we come up to our drop down we can see I have my regular profile and I have my super quality profile and you can switch in between them now the big question is how do I import profiles all you have to do is come over here to manage profiles and click that then it's going to take you to the settings panel now if you want to see any of the settings of those profiles all you have to do is click on them and then they will tell you what the actual settings are you can also export these by hitting this little hamburger icon in the top right corner and then you just go to export you can also remove it here too so if you've accidentally created a profile you can remove it so let's remove this one and it's going to ask me do you want to remove this you cannot undo it and I want to say yes so now that profile is gone and I want to bring in my new profile so you come up here to the import button in the top right of your screen click it and then you go and find the cura profile mine's just saved right here on my desktop so it's a DOT Cura profile file format so I'm going to click it and then just click open then it'll tell me that I successfully imported this profile and I click ok so here is mead settings three so this is my new setting and I am ready to use it in my Cura once we close that we can come back here and we can click on the drop down and see there it is my medes setting 3 profile so we have gone through everything that you need to know to be able to get you started 3D printing your models on your 3D printer it can be a little overwhelming I'm not going to lie to you but these are just repetitive things that you're going to be doing over and over and you're always going to be looking at these certain things but we've gone over how you import your model how you place your model on the bed properly how to adjust your settings how to slice it and previewing your model before you actually save it to make sure there's no errors then saving it to our SD card and then getting ready to put it into your printer and hitting print it's a lot and that is just the basics I have created an advanced tutorial Series where I go to the nitty gritty details of everything you need to know when it comes to really fine-tuning your 3D printer and I'll go ahead and put all of those videos right here in a playlist for you now the one thing I did want to mention we don't have to part ways here you can actually join my free YouTube Discord server where you can ask all of the questions you may have and are still struggling maybe it's a great place where people can help answer your questions and I'll be answering your questions too and I'll put a link to that down below thanks a lot for watching I hope you have a great day and I will see you in these next videos I don't know if you hear the people storming the castle up the stairs

Channel: ItsMeaDMaDe

Views: 146,360

Keywords: Ultimaker Cura, Beginners Guide, Slicer Software, Printing Tips, Printing Techniques, Printing Tutorial, 3D Printed Models, Filament, Cura Slicer, GCode, 3D Printing Software, Printing For Beginners, DIY Printing, 3D Printing Community, 3D Printer Setup, 3D Printing Tips And Tricks, Printing Troubleshooting, Printing Support, Printing Profiles, Printing Projects, Printing Ideas, Cura Settings, Slicing Software, Slicing Settings, Printing Process, Printing Walkthrough

Id: qHJSz4V7DJk

Length: 61min 34sec (3694 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023