On today's episode I'm going to test Creawsome. it's kind of a plugin for
cura specifically for Creality machines. And I'm going to test it on the
Creality Ender three and a Creality Ender five. And I'll show you how
well it works on today's Filament Friday.
This week's Filament Friday is brought to you by these patron supporters. The
reason I say it's kind of a plugin is because it's not a typical plug-in like
you have in cura where you just select it, install it and then reboot. This one
you have to download. It's a zip file and then you have to modify a folder that's
in the installation of Cura and so really what you're doing is modifying
Cura not necessarily a plug-in. But what it does do is change some features of
Cura that are great or awesome for Creality users. Now it also includes
slicing profiles which a lot of people have said print really really good
at small but haven't got as good of results on large prints. So that's why I
wanted to test. Plus it's got some features that I think you might like. So
the first thing you have to do is download it from their site, and like I
said it's a dot zip file. You unzip it and then there's a resources folder that
you have to replace with their resources folder. And make sure you get the right
one because I did the wrong one there's actually two. There's a resources within
the resources folder on my Mac and I screwed the whole thing up. But I figured
it out with help from one of my patreon supporters and we got it working. But
once you've got that in place what it does is you reboot and Cura and it adds
some really interesting features. Once you've got it installed now you can go
to machine settings and there's a whole set of Creawsome profiles or machine
profiles and one of them is the Ender three. And when you select that it not
only shows the build plate, it shows a picture of the whole printer which is
kind of nice because if you're switching to a different printer it reminds you
that you have the profile of the Ender three. Now there isn't one for Ender five
yet but I think there is one for the CR 10 s Pro. So it's a nice feature I don't
think it adds anything to the quality of the prints or nothing, but it does make
Cura look more like a Creality slicer. Now once you've got
that loaded it also installs or starts the Creawsome slicer settings and
there's really only a couple differences that I saw between the Creawsome
settings and my settings so let me show you what those are. So the first one I
noticed right away is the extrusion width.
They're using a 0.5 extrusion width where I'm using a 0.4 which is typical of cura.
And that actually may help you in some prints. And I think that's why it
actually prints better small. The theory is you should extrude at a width equal
to 1.2 times the diameter of your nozzle so at a 0.4 nozzle you really
should be extruding at about a 0.48. That's kind of a typical
starting point. But I found the 0.4 worked really well for me so
I never changed it. With their's going to a 0.5 their really at a 1.25
times the nozzle with but it did seem to help. Another area where
they had a difference was in retraction. Now retraction I found on the Ender
machines is limited by the extruder speed. The firmware on a stock machine
for both these, limits extruder to 25 millimeters per second so you have to
increase the distance that you're going to retract. And that's what I didn't see
in Creawsome. They had it set to 5 millimeters retraction at 45 millimeters
per second. Well it's gonna limit you to 25 millimeters per second in the
firmware so you're really not getting everything you want. That's why mine is
set to 6 millimeters at 25 millimeters per second to give me a little more
distance. And so I did find the retraction settings worked a little
better in mine than the creawsome. But that's an easy change. They've also got Z
hop enabled which I don't enable. That's an option you can do if you want.
I found it can cause more problems than it actually helps and actually can cause
more stringing as it pulls away and moves because that's Z hop is just it
lifts the nozzle so it doesn't hit as it moves. But then you end up with these
little strings that sometimes are sticking out of your print. So that's an
option you can turn on and turn off. Other than that I really didn't see a
major difference between the two. But when I printed, what I did find is
that on smaller prints Creawsome actually printed slightly better than
what my profiles were getting. So I printed on the Ender three with a bronze
filament. It's an ESun filament that I had lying around I needed to use up.
And this is the Benchy. I printed my own CHEP pawn and I printed my own CHEP
cube. And just, the CHEP cube is beautiful. There is nothing wrong with this thing.
I'll show a close-up of these. The pawn is beautiful the Benchy has the
stringing like I was referring to, but really really good print. I did the same
thing on the Ender five only in this case I used my Filament Friday red
filament and I got again really nice results. The pawn was really good the
CHEP cube awesome and the Bency, because you have a
longer Bowden tube - the stringing was even worse. So I tried three different
times. I actually got it up to eight millimeters of retraction and that
seemed to get rid of most of the stringing. Overall though I would say the
smaller prints do indeed print better with Creawsome than it does with my
profiles. It's minor but I'll give them the thumbs up on that. What I wanted to
do then was print something bigger and I wanted to try some detail and that's
when I printed this. It's an Eiffel Tower print I upsized this like a think 125
percent. And because it had 0.5 I didn't get the detail. First of all the leg
broke right off because there was no strength when I took it off the bed . The
middle section here did not print very well at all so I ended up with this
thing just tearing apart. And the tower top just was hanging by a string. Its just
it's a terrible terrible print. And even the X is all the way up that our cross
beams did not print well at all. So I did the same thing on the Ender
five and it wasn't just,...well there goes the top... the top broke off and this one
separated when I pulled it off the bed. The foot stayed but it's just, it's
actually a terrible print. So this is a very very fine detail but of course you
could say well you probably shouldn't print with
0.5 extrusion width on something so detailed. But just to show you my profile
to 0.4 here's that same print. I've got a lot of the cross bracing here. It's solid.
The feet look really good. The tower is solid the X's across the
beam here look pretty good. So it's more than just a 0.5. Now if you want to go
real detail of course you could go to a smaller nozzle and this is where
Creawsome has a really nice feature . They have this drop down menu where you can
select the nozzle size that you want. It'll automatically adjust the settings
for that nozzle. For my settings I actually made a separate machine profile
just for the 0.2 so if I want a 0.3 or 0.5 I have to do a separate
machine setting. So with their drop-down this is a very nice feature especially
if you're going to be printing with different size nozzles or you got
machines with different size nozzles that you want to print to. Overall I can
recommend Creawsome. I'm really impressed with how well this is done. And it's so
easy to install and use. Now there's a few things that I would tweak or
modify in their settings, but that's with any slicer settings. I know my settings
that people have downloaded, people have told me that they've modified them to
fit their machine or how they print. That's fine. It's just a starting point.
And Creawsome does a great job of giving you a great starting point using
Cura with a Creality machine. So that's it for this week. If you like what I'm
doing here maybe check out some of these videos that are popping up. If you want
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click on that CHEP logo and subscribe. I'll see you next time right here
at Filament Friday.