In this week's episode I'll show you more tips and tricks within Cura and
then we'll cover some new features in Cura 4.2.1 right here on Filament
Friday
This week's Filament Friday is brought to you by these patreon supporters. the
first trick I want to show you is how to automatically get objects to Center to
your screen. within Cura you go up to the Cura menu and then click on
preferences. slide down to the center camera when item is selected, make sure
that's checked hit close and then you should be able to select an item like
the CHEP Cube here. it'll automatically Center now if I go and click on the
benchy it centers so I can zoom in and zoom out and stays centered now click on
the pawn, same thing. and if I want the whole thing centered just click on the
center item and then the whole screen will be centered to that and you can
zoom in and out. it's that easy. next I'll show you how to get cura to
automatically slice your files when you make a change. once again go up to the
Preferences menu and there's slice automatically. this might be default when
you installed it but if you want to turn it off you just uncheck it. but here I'm
gonna change it to 10% infill, automatically slices, I go back and hit
the reset to go back to the default 25. It automatically slices. this can be
very handy. the next one is the file name prefix and this one bugs a lot of people.
so here's a CHEP pawn that I have and it says ce3 underscore CHEP pawn where does
that c3 come from? Creality Ender 3. that's the machine profile I selected. if you
want to get rid of that, hit preferences go down to add machine prefix to job
name. uncheck it. now I won't instantly go away, it's when you do a new project. so
I'll close this one, start a new project reload the CHEP pawn now look at the
file name just CHEP pawn no CE3.
Here's one that I think will help a lot of people the Cura Settings guide. if you
click on preferences you'll see settings guide show up if it's enabled. if you
don't see that go over to marketplace, go to plugins and scroll down to the Cura
settings guide. click on that and install it. now mine's installed as you see here.
you install it then you'll have to restart Cura and then when you do you
can come up here to preferences click on settings guide and this is awesome
because any of the features has a very good explanation with pictures. a few of
them are missing things that will just show up as empty but many of them have a
great explanation. this is very handy especially if you're new to 3d printing
the latest version of Cura is 4.2.1 which I believe is a beta as I make this
but there's a couple features in it that I really love. the first one is the smart
Z seam. I've showed the various Z seam options before but under the seam corner
preference there's a new option called Smart hiding. now what this tries to do
is calculate the best place to put the seam and most of the time I found it
works really well. now on a round object like this it's really not much different
than the random setting but I've noticed that it is a little bit smarter
depending on the print. now this one's perfectly round but if
it's a mixture of square and round then you'll get a different effect but on a
round object it's like random. but here where we've
got both round and square on the benchy here's the standard without this
Smart Z seam and it starts in the corner, multiple corners here. inside corner and
outside corner but not really a hidden corner. and so this is going to show a
seam over here on the left side at that same spot every time and you end up with
a very thick wall. so now I'm gonna try smart hiding. and you can already see it
goes to an inside hidden corner. does the same thing up here and this one does it
over here on this one. so it's always going to an inside corner which is
really hard to see the seam. now this print also has a round smokestack so
instead of going to a corner which doesn't exist it goes to the random mode.
so it's starting here on the outside then it'll print actually on the inside
and an outside and when it goes outside it'll start at a different point. so you
end up with a random seam on the rounded part of this print. I think this one is
gonna become one of my favorite features of Cura; flow per feature. You have to
enable this but once it's enabled you select flow. There's not only the
standard flow but every feature now has its own setting outer wall, inner wall,
top and bottom, so I like to over extrude a little bit like on my infill and
places like that, but my outer walls always suffered from that.
so now I could set the outer wall to slightly less or 90%. I can set my infill
to 110%. I can adjust my skirt or brim to really
stick 120%. I can make the support like 80% so it breaks away easy.
I have individual control of every bit of the flow so here's the benchy with
the outer flow set to 90% so I got my solid inside but the outer surface looks
fantastic. I was trying out a new atomic filament called candy-apple golden pearl
PLA and I was trying to tune it up and when I did I didn't use the hidden seam on the
first benchy so I went back and used the outer wall all 90 % and a smart
hiding seam and this came out good. I really think I got this filament dialed
in. all these prints were done with my magic 0.2 profile you can download
it from the link in the description below. I hope these tips and tricks help