Hello, 3D Printing Friends!
Today on the BV3D Channel, we'll see how to get started slicing models to print on your
3D printer in EASY MODE, with UltiMaker Cura 5.3.1!
I'm Bryan, and you... are watching BV3D!
This video is sponsored by PCBWay.
More on them in just a bit.
Hi, welcome back!
Okay, so let's talk about 3D printing in easy mode, with UltiMaker Cura 5.3.1.
Now, maybe you've been using another slicer, and you want to give Cura a try.
Or maybe you just got a 3D printer that came with an older version of Cura, and you want
to run the most recent version with all the updates and bug fixes.
The target audience for this video is NOT the experienced Cura user.
Instead, this is for people who are just coming into it.
And there are chapter markers on the video, so if you're interested in some of this, but
not all of this, you can skip around in the video to get to the parts you want.
Cura has hundreds of settings to control every aspect of slicing a model for 3D printing,
but it can be a challenge to figure out what each individual setting does.
For a while now, Cura's had what it calls recommended print settings that apply to a
set of printing profiles.
The Profiles let you choose the overall print quality, and the Recommended Print Settings
let you adjust the most commonly used settings on the profile to suit your needs.
With the newest versions of Cura, UltiMaker has made improvements to these simple adjustments
available on the Recommended Print Settings, and that's what we're going to cover today.
The major settings categories that are available in this simplified interface are Strength,
Supports, and Adhesion, and we'll cover all three of these.
This video presumes that you've downloaded and installed Cura 5.3.1, so if you haven't
done that, you can get it from ultimaker.com/software/ultimaker-cura.
Once downloaded, in Windows, you'll run an installer, and in Mac OS, you'll just drag
the Cure icon to your applications folder.
The video also presumes you've set up Cura to work with your printer, which for most
printers is as simple as running the Add Printer wizard, locating your printer manufacturer
in the big list of manufacturers, and picking your printer model.
So let's go over the Cura window layout real quick.
Along the top of Cura's window, you'll see the menus.
If you're a Mac user, this will look a little weird to you, having the menus tied to the
window instead of up in the menu bar at the top of the screen.
UltiMaker wants the application to look the same no matter which operating system you're
running it on.
If you're a Mac purist, you might be offended, but if you're more pragmatic, it's just a
quirk of Cura, and anyway, everything I'll be covering today completely ignores the menus.
On the dark blue strip below the menus you'll see Prepare, Preview, and Monitor buttons.
These change what's being displayed in the main area of the window.
Beneath that, there's a folder icon, and then a strip of three controls.
The first shows the active printer, and from that drop down you can select from other printers
you've added, add a new printer, or manage the ones that you've already added.
The next control shows the currently selected material, which in this case is Generic PLA.
From the drop down, you can select another generic material type, or you can choose from
some name brand filaments.
I'll stick with Generic PLA.
The last control is where you choose your printing profile and your settings.
We're going to be focusing our time on the controls in the print settings panel, starting
with Profiles.
But first, this.
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And the clear resin prints of the PCBWay logo?
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Check them out at pcbway.com.
So let's talk about these Print Profiles.
The main thing the profiles control is the vertical resolution of the print.
In other words, it controls the thickness of the layers.
I'm using an Ender-3 S1 Pro, and for this printer, we've got four profiles: Super Quality,
with 0.12 mm layer thickness; Dynamic Quality, with 0.16 mm layer thickness; Standard Quality,
with 0.2 mm layer thickness, and Low Quality, with 0.28 mm layer thickness.
The thinner the layers, the more detail you can get in the Z axis.
So probably the best way to illustrate this is for me to load a model, slice it with the
different profiles, and show you the resulting print.
To load a model, click the folder icon, then select an STL file.
So here, I've got McGuybeer's Cali Dragon model loaded.
I'll set the profile to Super Quality, then click the Slice button to slice it with 0.12
mm layers.
I have the printer's memory card plugged into the computer, so I can click the Save to Removable
Drive button, and Cura will write the file to the card.
When it's done, click the Eject button.
Cura will let you know when it's safe to remove the card.
I've sliced and printed this model with each of the four print profiles, so you can see
what the print quality looks like with each one.
First, the Super Quality one.
It took an hour and 28 minutes to print.
Second, the Dynamic Quality one.
This took a little bit less time, at an hour and 22 minutes.
Third, the Standard Quality one.
This took 50 minutes to print.
And fourth, the Low Quality one.
This only took 43 minutes to print.
So looking at all four of these in a lineup, with the Super Quality on the left, and the
Low Quality on the right, you can see the result of using different layer heights.
The thinner the layers, the higher the detail.
The scales on the dragon's body are more defined on the Super Quality print.
You have to look closely to see the layer lines.
They are less well defined on the Low Quality print, and you can very clearly see the layer
lines.
And looking at them from the top, you can see how the thinner layers look smoother and
less stair-steppy on the top of the dragon's head.
But the Super Quality model took twice as long to print as the Low Quality one.
So, these prints illustrate a bit of knowledge that comes with experience in 3D printing:
Thinner layers give you more detail, but take longer to print.
I find that the Standard Quality profile, with its 0.2 mm layer thicknesses, gives a
nice balance between detail and speed.
So for the vast majority of the things I print, that's the profile I tend to use.
Let's move on to the Print Settings.
The three categories in the recommended print settings are Strength, Support, and Adhesion.
I'm going to cover these in that order.
So let's get started with Strength.
There are three things here that control the strength of a printed part.
The first is Infill Density.
The standard setting here is to use 20% infill density.
Using this slider on the right side of the window, we can look down through the sliced
model to see what the infill looks like.
The infill is shown in orange.
So that's 20% infill.
You can increase or decrease the amount of infill, and the more infill you use, the more
solid the model becomes, and hopefully the stronger it becomes.
Infill not only provides internal strength, it also helps support the top layers of the
model from the inside, as they're being printed.
Well, let's reduce the infill to 10% and re-slice to see what that looks like.
And it's a lot more sparse.
Okay, so let's take it up to 50% and see what that looks like.
There's a lot more infill in there now.
And setting it to 100%, well, the model will be completely solid.
For most models, 20% infill provides a reasonable level of strength.
So I'll take it back to 20%.
The next control in the strength settings is the Infill Pattern.
The default may vary by printer, but for this one, it's set to Cubic.
Other commonly-used patterns are Grid, which looks like this, and Gyroid, which looks like
this.
Gyroid is pretty trippy, and I think it's really cool looking.
Try the different infill patterns and see what they look like.
The last control in the strength settings is Shell Thickness.
This controls how thick the sides of the model will be, and how thick the top and bottom
will be.
In this interface, they're specified in millimeters, and they're set so that the outer shell of
the model will be 0.8 mm thick.
It's useful to specify them this way, because Cura can do the math to ensure you have the
right number of top and bottom layers, when using different quality profiles.
For example, using the Super Quality profile would need over twice as many top and bottom
layers as the Low Quality profile, because the Super Quality profile uses thinner layers.
You need more of those thinner layers to get the specified thickness.
With a 0.4 millimeter nozzle, setting the thickness of the sides to 0.8 mm gives you
two walls.
You can see those here as I scroll down through the sliced model.
The red line is the outer wall, and the green line is the inner wall.
If I wanted to have a little bit more strength on the sides, I could add a third wall.
I mentioned earlier that Cura does the math to figure out how many layers are needed to
get the top and bottom thickness right depending on the thickness of the layers.
But now WE need to do the math to calculate the required thickness, so Cura adds another
wall.
These walls are the same width as the nozzle diameter, which is 0.4 mm.
To get three walls, I multiply 0.4 by 3 to get a value of 1.2 mm.
Slicing with 1.2 millimeters on the vertical gives me three walls instead of two.
With all three of these settings -- infill density, pattern, and shell thickness -- I
usually leave these at the standard settings unless I feel the model needs to be a little
stronger.
Now let's talk about supports.
Some models have design elements like severe overhangs, or even parts that begin somewhere
above the bed with nothing underneath them.
For these, we need to add supports to prevent the collapse of the overhangs, and to give
the parts that start in midair someplace to actually start.
The supports act like a scaffold to hold them in place until the print is complete.
Here's a model I designed to illustrate the issue.
Yes, it looks like an upside down L. Yes, you could print it on its side without
supports, and yes you could print it oriented as a normal L shape without supports.
Look, the point is, it's a demo.
Okay, so if I slice the model without supports, take a look at what happens when the overhanging
part starts to print.
See that?
There's nothing to hold up the far end of that part.
So despite what the tool path animation shows, that filament would just droop down toward
the bed while it was printing.
Kind of like this.
It does eventually recover somewhat, but the final result looks kind of rough.
Clearly we need supports, to give that overhang someplace to land when it's being printed.
So let's see what options we have for supports.
Turning on the Supports slider shows us the Support Type and Placement controls.
There are two support types: Normal and Tree.
And there are two Placement settings: Touching Buildplate, and Everywhere.
The standard setting is Normal and Everywhere.
Let's see what the Normal Everywhere supports look like.
Okay, cool, that looks like it'll give the overhang a place to be when the model prints.
And it does!
Take a look.
This part printed a lot better, because that first overhanging layer had the support of
the supports.
Now there's something to be aware of when using Normal Everywhere supports.
When it says everywhere, it means EVERYWHERE.
Here's an example with a slightly different model.
This model is more of a C shape than an upside down L shape, but it still needs support for
that top part.
Slicing with Normal Everywhere supports will look like this.
The supports are going to have to print inside the open part of the C shape in order to properly
support the overhang.
Supports like this can sometimes be a pain to remove without damaging the print, and
they also tend to leave behind little marks where they were touching the model, like on
the bottom of the C. The next placement option for supports is
Touching Buildplate.
Touching Buildplate means the only supports Cura will generate are ones that can be grown
up from the build plate to support a part.
I'll bring in the upside down L model so you can see how this would work with both models.
So here, you can see the upside down L model gets supports, but the C-shaped model does
not.
And that's because there's no place on the C-shaped model that the supports can support
with the supports being printed only on the build plate.
The bottom part of the model occupies the area of the build plate that Cura needs, so
no normal supports can be generated there.
For the c-shaped model they would have to be printed directly on the bottom part of
the C, like they were when we set the placement to everywhere.
Now these two example models are both simple and extreme to highlight the issues you might
face when using normal supports.
So let's keep these two models as our examples, and change from Normal supports to Tree supports.
And we'll set the placement back to Everywhere.
After a quick slice, here's what they would look like.
Now you can see how tree supports got their name: They look like a tree growing up from
the build plate.
These will support both the upside down L and the C shape.
And even though the placement is set to Everywhere, you can see that the tree supports tend to
avoid starting on the model itself.
When they print, they look like this, and they do an okay job at supporting the overhangs.
They're not 100% perfect, but at the same time they're not like the completely unsupported
one either.
The other position option for tree supports is Touching Buildplate, and here you can see
that it's nearly identical to the result when we sliced for Everywhere.
It still supports the overhang on the c-shaped model, which the Normal supports ignore.
So Tree supports seem better able to provide support to places Normal supports wouldn't
dare to go.
The only big problem you might run into with Tree supports is that sometimes they start
out with small trunks.
With only a small amount of material touching the bed, and getting wider as they go up,
the supports can fail if the nozzle drags across them and snaps them off the bed.
Normal supports, on the other hand, don't get wider as they go up, and they're less
likely to fail that way.
Okay, let's move on to Adhesion.
For some printers, Adhesion defaults to ON.
For others, like this Ender-3 S1 Pro, Adhesion defaults to OFF.
So I'll slice this model, and we'll look at it in the preview mode.
When Adhesion is off, Cura uses a skirt around the model.
That's the light blue outline.
The skirt doesn't help the model adhere to the bed; it makes sure the nozzle is primed
with filament right before the model starts printing.
So what do we get with the adhesion setting turned on?
We get a BRIM!
Brims are like an extra wide first layer, to help hold the edges of the model to the
bed.
Sometimes, when printing big flat shapes that have sharp corners, those corners can lift
off the bed after a few layers.
But a brim will help those corners stay down.
A brim will also help a tall skinny model stick to the bed.
They provide a larger contact area with the bed making, it harder for the corners to lift,
or for a part to get knocked loose.
Not every model requires a brim.
Usually when I turn a brim on, it's because I'm reprinting a model that got knocked loose,
or had a corner lift up.
Brims are useful, but they also have a drawback.
When the print is done, you have to remove the brim from around the edge of your print.
Knowing when to use a brim is part art, and part science, and after 6 years of 3D printing,
I still get it wrong sometimes So that covers the basics of using the Recommended
Print Settings panel in Cura.
I think now you'll have a good base to grow from, and the things you can adjust with the
recommended print settings panel should handle most of what you need to worry about, until
you're ready to start exploring all the settings that exist in Cura.
Big thanks to everyone who supports the channel, whether with Channel memberships, or by using
the links in the description.
If you liked this episode, give it a thumbs up, and maybe consider subscribing so you
don't miss future episodes.
Well, 3D Printing Friends, that's about all the time we have for this episode.
And now that we're at the end, let's go print something cool!
Brims are like an extra wide first layer, to help hold the edges of the model to the
bed.
Sometimes when plinting...ugh...PLINTING?