Is ideaMaker better than Cura and PrusaSlicer?

hi this is herb shepherd of the dr vax channel and today i'm going to talk about software for 3d printing specifically i'm going to talk about a program a slicer that i hadn't used before now kira for me is like an old friend i visit with kira a couple times a week i've done that for about three years i know all of the nooks and crannies i know how to fine-tune cura to get great prints prusa slicer was my first love it was the first slicer i ever used and i put it aside for a while but i've come back to it in the last few months because of its strong support for customizable supports because of its ability to easily manipulate multi-color prints where you change the filament at a specific layer and because of the remarkable new top of print surface infill called monotonic infill so cura and prusa slicer are two software programs i use a lot today i'm going to look with you at idea maker and we're going to discover whether idea maker is going to make it onto my computer desktop when i would use it when i wouldn't use it and even why i started looking at it so stay tuned and let's learn something together now before we talk about idea maker a remarkable actually slicer but more importantly a remarkable component of an infrastructure of an ecosystem that as far as i can tell right now is completely free which is really a bit baffling because of it is much broader than just a slicer but before we get into that i want to introduce anyone who's new to this channel to the dr vaxx community dr vax is a community of people learning together how to use desktop technologies technologies you can use right at home to make things there's a lot of coverage of 3d printing and slicers and cad programs for designing 3d models there's also a bit of coverage of woodworking and programming and electronics so if you want to hear about new videos as they come out subscribe to the channel and click on the bell below and i'm always interested in your comments i can't reply to every comment personally but because i can't reply to every comment personally i created a discussion group a forum at forum.drvax.com where over 1200 passionate viewers of these videos help each other out with questions about technology now let's talk about raised 3d as you can see here rey's 3d brands itself under the phrase industrial 3d printing for flexible manufacturing this is not a grade of printer that i can really review on this channel and the reason is if we look at their product line their 3d printers begin at almost thirty five hundred dollars and go up in price from there these are machines that are specifically designed to go into an industrial setting a factory floor an engineering organization a research lab a university what's interesting about ray's 3d is all their printers are dual extruder dual nozzle printers and because they all work with multiple filaments at the same time the slicer they produced idea maker is optimized for that environment but more importantly ideamaker is part of an overall system designed to produce a digital 3d printing factory now to better understand the overall ecosystem that image maker is part of let's look at this picture together this is called the race3d ecosystem and you'll see here it highlights a raised 3d factory a factory consists of quite a number of 3d printers that are working together idea maker is the slicer that produces the g-code for these printers but then you upload this g-code to the raise cloud and in the raised cloud it schedules these jobs across printers now you can have a single printer and tell it to print on a single printer and what's most important is the raise cloud supports not only raised 3d manufactured 3d printers it also supports as you see here other brands of 3d printers connected with octoprint so believe it or not this ecosystem is free today and you get up to two gigabytes of print storage now i assume in the future there will be pricing for expanding that perhaps there'll be a charge for using third-party printers but right now ideamaker and the raised cloud are free but there's even more if you have a smartphone a iphone or an android there's a really good app that works with ray's cloud now what that lets you do is to monitor your 3d printer from anywhere since your printer connects to octoprint and octoprint connects to the raised cloud you can access it from anywhere so if we look at the race3d website we'll see the first thing you see here is it's a free download for idea maker now dmac maker is a bit different it is a proprietary product it is not open source like cura or prusa slicer so theoretically raise 3d could stop providing it to the community i don't think that's likely but it's possible right now it's completely free what's more remarkable as we'll see is the overall factory ecosystem is free so let's scroll down this page a little bit and you'll see they highlight a very unique feature that's the ability to apply a texture to the outside of an existing model now it doesn't apply to the top or the bottom it wraps it around the model so on the screen here you'll see an example where they're wrapping a texture around a 3d print that then becomes an embossed texture around the outside and we'll take a look at that together in the slicer their support for supports i always find that to be an awkward phrase their capabilities for supports are excellent and they have a unique capability here i'll also demonstrate where you can have the system generate automatic supports and then just by clicking on them you can remove some of them very very interesting capability they do a number of optimizations you can have it produce optimized auto optimized fill percentages throughout your model you can have it produced auto optimize supports throughout your model so you're able to reduce your print times by using these optimizations and get consistent and reliable results and then the next thing they do that's very very well done is at any layer it appears you can change any slicer parameter built in to the slicer but you can also take objects blockers this is sort of how some of the other slicers allow you to customize supports you can take objects and lay them over your print over your model and use those to modify parameters you can have multiple prints on your print bed printing with different parameters and finally a capability that i just love because i used it to take this single color calibration cat and make it into a multi-color calibration cat in about a minute it's the ability to slice your model not as converting it from 3d to g-code but to actually cut apart your model into pieces right on the screen and then they're very good tools for aligning it back together and then you identify each of those cuts as printing with a different material which could be a different color filament or perhaps even pla in petg or other materials combined together now to better understand idea maker let's start by looking at the files that you can use to define your idea maker environment the first file is for your printer and the printer definition defines the size of the bed the number of extruders some characteristics about your printer that's pretty typical what's really nice though is you can import and export these definitions easily in cura that's a bit trickier the second file is a bin file that's the equivalent of a profile in most other 3d printers they call it a template in idea maker because it's a set of rules it's a template for producing 3d prints in your factory across potentially multiple printers these templates have built-in support for idex independent dual extruder features just as the printer template has built-in support for multiple extruder printers the third file listed here is the dot filament file now this is really important because they do something that's a bit different what's important here is in the definition and includes flow rate for your print now you can override that but it's sort of hidden where you overwrite it so i started by making my first prints by just selecting raise 3d 1.75 millimeter pla i thought that would be close enough my prints were heavily extremely under extruded what i realized finally was in the filament definition they include flow rate and so because flow rate is in that definition i needed to define my own pla filament definition and set the flow rate to 100 so now let's look at the actual software and see how these components fit together to install the software on your machine you go to their website you click on the get for free or whatever download tab it'll take you to a download page that looks like this you click on your operating system you installed in the normal way so when you first open up idea maker it's a bit intimidating because it looks very different than things you've seen before you have across the top you have the standard functions for manipulating models you have this wonderful free cut capability we'll talk about you have something i've never seen before another slicer that we already mentioned called textures a excellent repair capability for repairing models that are not completely closed properly connect which is used only with raised 3d printers library which goes to a library of templates and filament definitions on the raise 3d website and raise cloud which is that overall ecosystem that's very powerful so let's start by defining a printer the best way to define a printer is to go to the configuration wizard in most cases for most of my viewers we're going to select other let's call this ender 3 v2 you define your print bed size i believe the ender is about 220 by 220 by i don't know 200 don't remember precisely it has a heated bed it has a controllable fan it has one extruder for right now you can leave this blank because you're going to basically create your own filament you'll see here i have pla so i'm just going to select raise pla and as i mentioned before that got me into a bit of trouble because that filament's defined with a flow rate of 94 percent and uh the default action is export to disk you'll see right here you can set a default app action to upload to raise cloud and then from raise cloud you can go to octa octoprint or you can send a print directly to octoprint right from this printer definition and here we have a single extruder so i'm going to click ok and continue continue finish and now we'll see we have a primary extruder on this printer but we have no template now a template is in essence your 3d printing profile so i could select a existing template if i had one in this case we don't now instead of defining creating this from scratch right now i'm going to switch my printer so we'll go to current type of printer to artist d because then i'll have a template already defined so before we look at the details of the template the profile let's load a model so i'm going to click on add and i'm going to load a calibration cat and then i'm going to click on my calibration cat here and i can use my scroll wheel by rolling it to zoom in by pressing it to move and i'm going to actually scale this a bit to start with let's scale this up to let's say 300 percent so now we have a bigger calibration cat now the rest of the features up here are very similar to what you've seen in most slicers you can de delete it you can set the view you can pan move around you can move the object by pulling on these arrows on the print bed you can rotate it you can scale it so those are relatively simple options we've seen before now how would you go about printing it well you either click on the start slicer button here or here and they show you different things if you click here it's going to this page and it's going to show you your default template for this item if you don't have one you can create one or you can actually import one from the idea maker library on the web i already have one in this particular case so i could click here to edit it now interestingly if i have my model selected and i click on the play button over here it goes to a different screen this is the screen i most often use and i can click on the gear here to edit my template now what you'll see in here are the types of parameters you see in almost every slicer the names are a bit different and there is some help here when you mouse over you get tool tips and you can click on help down here when you click on help down here it takes you to the raise 3d website and the documentation is good not spectacular so let's go back now and you can see you define your layers on layers where you do have a spiral vase mode capability um with uh the path interpolation which is sort of a more advanced feature that was recently introduced in cura as an example you do have separate settings for your first layer and you have the types of small feature compensation you have in cura and prusa slicer you see here there's the ability to have a left extruder and a right extruder in our case we have two extruders so these both show up if you only have a single extruder it'll just say primary extruder here and what's really interesting is you can set the characteristics for each of these completely separately now down here in this section we have parameters specifically for idex or multi-extruder settings which says when you switch from one extruder to the other how do you keep that first extruder from dripping oozing filament well you retract a bit of filament and so you can control that here infill is pretty typical and you'll note you have all of the common infield types that you see across modern slicers you can define a number of layers of solid infill for the top layers and the bottom layers it does support ironing on this printer on this slicer supports we'll get to in a moment standard platform capabilities for raf skirt they do give you the ability though which is interesting to have a skirt a brim and a raft and sort of combine them together cooling support and here's another very advanced feature and that is you can set the cooling for individual layers really a interesting interesting capability likewise you can set the temperature for individual layers so to do a temperature test for let's say stringing would be trivial you just set up a profile with all of the different temperatures you're looking for over here and you can control temperatures for the bed for the left extruder for the right extruder speed settings are relatively simple and straightforward it does support setting acceleration and jerk controls and this whole page the ooze page is really about controlling stringing in particular stringing with multi-nozzle 3d printers and so you can create a wipe wall a wipe wall is a wall around actually a shell around a print so that when the printhead comes up to the print it first prints a shell around and that catches all the oozing then it moves in and prints your print um or you could have a wipe tower a wipe tower is literally that it's a tower that will get printed to collect the oozing before it goes to your print i've tried the wipe tower not the wipe wall the wipe tower actually worked quite well at other you have some other really remarkable features one is posit height it's built right in so if you want to actually change filaments at a particular point you just put a pause right in your print it will stop your print at that point and you can continue from there texture we'll look at in a moment and then this is very important under g code not only does it have the ability to insert g code at the standard places but you'll notice here i can have different g-code when i have one extruder versus two extruders now the only way i know to do that in cura is to define completely separate printer definitions so you define a printer definition for your printer when using it with one extruder separate with two now it's not a really hard thing to do but this is very very nice they also completely document all of the variables you can use in your g-code and something i haven't really seen in other slicers is you can have logic in your g-code you can have if conditions you can say if two extruders do this if one extruder do this if temperature is over this do this remarkable capability so i'm going to assume these parameters are all right and i'm going to click here on slice you'll now see there's an option to upload this to the raise cloud where i could control it from my phone or i could upload it directly to octoprint or i could export it to a standard g-code file we're going to click on preview it does take a second to render the preview and the preview quality is okay it's not the best i've seen you do have the ability to scroll through the layers you can look at individual layers one of the things i found that did not work very well which is much better in prusa and in cura are the ability to look at the movements in a layer when you move this it's pretty hard to see unless you turn on current layer only and then you can see it a bit you can see that drawing it but they don't give you any indication where the print head is that would be a really nice addition you can turn on the ability to show retractions to show travel moves or not and you can turn on or off various components now another really interesting capability is you can click on this tool over here and with this tool over here you can turn on a plane and then you can take and move that plane somewhere inside your model let's say right over there and enable it and it's going to cut your model and now i can look inside my model i'm going to turn the plane off i can look inside my model from a different angle now there also is a capability use this to print just that part of the model so cross sections are another interesting advanced capability and from here as i said you can click on the various buttons here to upload send it to a local printer to send it to raise cloud or send it to octoprint now when you send it to octoprint you also have the ability to go to octoprint on the web via a browser and monitor it the way you normally would so let's close this preview and i'm going to delete this model now and let's look at support for just a moment so let me add in a model here which i call a support test we'll zoom in a bit and here's a remarkable capability i'm going to go over here and i'm going to click on support and i'm going to say create auto supports and you'll see it's added supports here and if i zoom in i can actually see the individual pillars now i can go here and click on the button that says remove and i could select individual pillars so maybe i don't need that one and that one and maybe i don't need this one and this one look at how easy that is to modify the automatically generated supports i think that's a remarkable capability i can also add in supports uh using a similar capability so let's zoom this around and you have to put that in a place where it makes sense and there i added a support so adding and removing supports is really quite easy it's done extremely well now i will tell you if you're using support towers like this when they're not connected to each other if you make them too small that's the pillar size they won't stick well to your print bed so if you use relatively small pillars you probably want to print a raft underneath okay now let me delete this model and let's look at one more feature and let's look at two more features that are really quite interesting so i'm going to add a calibration cat back in i'm going to take and scale that to 300 percent move it back down and now let's add a texture to the surface of this cat so i'm going to select it and then i'm going to go over to texture i'm going to select custom texture and i'm going to add in a texture now i've downloaded these textures from the raised 3d website but a texture is just a black and white image it can be in a variety of different formats and the white areas will be at the original surface level and the black areas will be embossed on top but i can also import from the idea maker library and here you will see a whole range of textures so let's say i wanted to select this one here i could download it manually to my file or i could import it and you'll see when you import to idea maker but it basically does is it puts a url into the cut and paste buffer and now i'm going to go back here it will recognize it i'm going to say download next and now i've added a texture to this i can take and manipulate the a variety of pet items here to manipulate that texture where it's located how it particularly wraps around the item and now let's go ahead and slice this to see what that looks like we're going to go to preview and you can see now that the texture if we zoom in here is embossed on the surface and actually if i go down to a lower level you can see here how it actually is cut in and out of the surface remarkable capability that i haven't seen in other slicers i want to show you one more thing that i find magic we're going to import our cat one more time i'm going to scale this we'll scale it this time to 200 percent and now i'll rotate it around here so let's say i wanted to make just the ears a different color how could i do that well i click on this and then i click on free cut and now i move that plane up and down so we're going to move it to right here and i'm going to say start the cut okay now this is different from this notice i can click on them separately and i can define what extruder they use separately so if i right click here i can say it's the left extruder or the right extruder we'll put the ears on the right extruder and we will put the base on the left extruder now if i go to slice this it's going to generate an error and the reason is if you look down here it says non-manifold edges well because i cut this model apart the triangles that make up the 3d architecture are no longer properly closed so i need to select this and then shift and select the ear so it's all selected and click on repair click ok and now everything is fine so now i could take and slice this model and at this point it's going to change tools now you can change free cut to be vertical horizontal of various rotations and angles now let's say i inadvertently move the ears over or i've imported two models for a two color print well if i want to align them together i can just select the ears shift and select the body go to model align selected models and it will align them back to their original position or origin the position they were designed to sit in in the cad program so what are my thoughts about idea maker i am very very impressed let's summarize my thoughts in a couple slides first things that i found to be challenges well i found it a little harder to learn than cura the screen resolution on my mac wasn't perfect it was slightly blurry the layer view is not as pretty as cura or simplify 3d or prusa slicer and there's no basics search capability when you're setting a parameter now let me show you a little trick and this is important to show you anyways and that is when you're setting up to print down here right below your print is sort of the simple mode and so without clicking on the gear i can see all of the simple things i might want to change and i can change them right here i can add anything i want to that simple mode when i click on add i get a search capability so that's a way i can find all of the individual settings but when i'm in the gear mode here i would have loved to see a search capability somewhere and unless i'm missing it i really just don't see it now as far as i know there is no direct usb support but octoprint works really well there are nose tree supports like you have in cura but the support capabilities you do have are the easiest to manipulate of any slicer i've used and every time you go into printers you're going to see all the raised 3d printer models that's just a slight annoyance now what are the pluses outstanding idex support including including separate gcode start code when you're using the printer with one extruder or with two extruders support capabilities are outstanding the free form slicing up of models and realigning them is unique textures are under wonderful the mesh repair works very very well and a number of people in the various forums i participate in have reported better quality i haven't printed enough prints to know that for sure but i can tell you i've just enjoyed this slicer well folks i hope you found this useful if you did give me a thumbs up subscribe to the channel leave some comments let me know what you think if you want to leave more extensive comments or post photos of some of your prints and discuss them with hundreds and hundreds of other people i believe it's over twelve hundred people now go to forum.drvax.com thanks so much have a great day and let's continue to learn together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 16,041

Keywords: 3d printer, 3d printers, 3d printers under 200, 3d printing, 3d printing videos, ender 5, prusa slicer 2.0, prusaslicer, prusaslicer 2.0, simplify3d, slicer hints, slicer tips, what is 3d printing, what is 3d printing video, cura 4.x, cura 4.9, Cura, Raise3d, ideamaker slicer, ideamaker tutorial, ideamaker texture, ideamaker vs cura, ideamaker dual extrusion, ideamaker supports, ideamaker 4.1, ideamaker support settings, ideamaker modifier, ideamaker review, Make With Tech

Id: xL_IDura2C0

Length: 35min 8sec (2108 seconds)

Published: Wed May 26 2021