Cura For Beginners! - 2023 - Beginner's guide to Cura

Hey everybody and welcome. I am Tech Nervous. Today we're going to go over a quick how-to course with Kira. So stick around, make sure you reduce your Z offset on that subscribe button down below and ring the notification bell so you get updated when we post new videos because I have a ton of content on Kira and it's only getting better and better folks. If you're curious about how to use this software and how easy it is to 3D print with Kira, I'm going to show you right now. Let's jump right into this and get going. All right, so here's the deal. When you begin printing, you start to hear of slicing software and you may be hearing different things about all kinds of different software from different companies. One of the names that comes up most often and generally with everybody who's involved in 3D printing at one point or another is going to be Ultimaker Kira. Now this is developed by a company for their specific 3D printers, however it is open source and the community that helps to develop it has put out profiles for pretty much every printer imaginable. As you can see, my bed here says Ender. This is for an Ender 3 V2 and the profile is pretty dang tuned in. But what I want to point out to you is the ease of use here because it can be kind of daunting and intimidating when you set out for the first time to use this software. Basically, the first thing you're going to do when you open Kira is enter your printer settings. So let's go ahead and go to our manage printer setting and I can kind of show you what it's going to look like here. So if I click on let's see printers, let's go to add new and this is basically the options you're going to get when you start up. So you're going to want to click add non-networked unless you're plugged into it and you can pretty much see all of these great brands here that they already have profiles for. Any one of these is going to work pretty well right out of the box for you. Creality is a pretty popular one so that's how I end up with so many Creality 3D printing profiles. I'm not going to add this right now but basically all you're going to do is go and hit add and hit accept and you shouldn't have to change much. It should be ready to go right out of the box. There will be a few settings that down the road after you start printing a few prints that you want to go back and tweak. We'll touch on those in some of my later videos but for now all you need to know is once your machine settings are set this is where you end up. Right here you have a nice build plate based on your machine if it was one of the pre-built profiles. If your machine isn't in there don't worry you can go ahead and add it manually. You will need some items for specifying the line or excuse me the bed width height and your print dimensions things like that but you can usually find those on your manufacturer's website so if you're having any problems I recommend a quick google search to find the exact specifications of your printer but for the most part pretty much any cartesian machine that you can find that's about the size of an Ender 3 will work really well with that Ender 3 profile and I have done that tons of times to save myself some setup time. So let's talk about navigation here for a second. As you can see I'm just kind of grabbing the screen and turning it around and that is my right mouse button click. If I hold down shift and click that's going to give you a pan to let you drag around. If you want to zoom into the scene or out that is the scroll wheel pretty simple pretty straightforward and that's actually one of the most common interface designs as far as like CAD software and things like that and if you do a lot of 3d printing you're going to get into making your own models and using some design software so it's pretty intuitive once you get used to it once you turn on one of these programs and it kind of just falls into place. There are other ways to navigate the scene such as using the arrow keys that don't seem to want to work right now but you can also use these buttons down here to get the front face the top the left side the right side and a three-quarter view that works really really well and basically for navigation that's pretty much all you need to know. The mouse is your friend here and you definitely want to have it handy and available. So let's look at some of these settings now these are the recommended settings that Kira would suggest you look over before printing any print just to make sure you have them where you want for that specific model and those things are the resolution this is going to be your layer height the smaller this number the harder it is to see the lines between your layers but the longer it takes to print because it's printing more layers and you do have a minimal floor here depending on what printer you're using sometimes the minimum resolution you can't you can't get a good quality with it because it takes too long and sometimes the minimum resolution is not quite what they say on the printer so that's one of those things you'll want to play around with for quality obviously more time usually equals better quality but that is one of the major things that will add print time if you want to print a prototype and you want it to be fast and dirty and you just want the model out as soon as possible go ahead and increase this number to another number within the tolerance of your machine at the higher end and it will print faster because it will print less layers so this is basically the thickness that it slices each layer to of your model and the total number of layers will be determined by the model's height divided by this number so keep that in mind the next thing it tells you to check here is the infill i have lots of videos on printing with zero infill there are a couple videos out there i'm printing with 100% infill it just depends on what you're doing but for most models if you don't want to worry about droopage or anything in in large coverage areas you're going to want your infill to be around 20% so 15 to 20 is generally a good rule i like to keep mine right about 18 here so that's uh that's generally where i roll but uh like i said for specific purposes you might want to increase it if you want more weight in the object or more structural integrity if it doesn't really have any steep overhangs or right angles at the top of the model you can almost always print them with zero so it's one of those things where it's a per model basis this gradual infill button comes in handy it just uses less plastic at the bottom and more at the top which is more for supporting the top surfaces i was talking about than for strength of the actual model the other two things listed here are support and adhesion these are two of the most important things to work with in kira so if i click the support button i guess it would probably help let's go ahead and grab a model i've kind of been messing around here i didn't even realize i didn't have one in there let's grab let's grab this model right here we'll drag it that's all you got to do to get the model in click drag drop and it'll pop up and there it is so this red area here that is the part of the model that's going to need support now you can go in and designate the exact angle at which the model turns red and you start to print that support if you go into the custom settings we're going to talk about that just a minute here for right now let's just go ahead and hit the slice button and i'll show you what this support does wait a minute before we go any further i have to point out that it is now 2023 and there's no better time to start investing than right now the stock market's been down a little bit lately and as you know in the game you'd like to buy low and sell high so if you're thinking about making any investments i definitely encourage you to check out the link to webull below because if you sign up now you and i both get free stocks and it helps the channel out quite a lot if you're spending time thinking that this year is the year you might want to actually start making some investments in the stock market now's the time check it out guys and as you can see now that i've hit the slice button nothing has happened but if we go up here to preview mode instead of prepare prepares for putting our models in moving them and setting our settings once we slice the preview is where all the magic happens so now it's going to process the actual build path for this object and it's going to process it in layers so let's go ahead and watch this breakdown and you'll notice in here a build-up of material that was not shown on the prepare page so this is my support the settings on this support model are actually pretty thick i don't think i would have gone with the wall there but that's a particular thing that we can talk about in a support video and as you can see it looks solid but when you rotate up it is putting in this pattern here now the pattern the grid pattern you see here i believe this is zigzag because it goes back and forth and it has an outer perimeter support wall that outer perimeter support wall you really don't want that on it's kind of a pain in the butt when it comes to removal but sometimes in some cases it can be handy the number of lines in between here actually supporting the overhang are determined by your percentage of infill so as i scroll up here you'll see that those lines begin to meet with the model and as the model gets larger they scale down in the middle there until finally they create what is called a support interface or skin so you see these lines all around here that are pretty uniform they're light blue teal color and they compose the walls of the support you see these slightly darker bluish color where it's like bluish purple this cross hatching that is the support interface and that's important to get your support to not mesh to the inside of your model so makes it a little bit easier to remove support interface settings are very important settings but also something that you're going to want to play around with after seeing how they work basically i can tell you right now this model is extremely over supported realistically i would really only need enough support to cover this front lip here and then the rest of that is probably going to be okay with my bridging capabilities and that's another term that we'll talk about later maybe when we get all the way up here to the top that big gap there that's a great explanation a great see this is the interface that'll allow it to release however like i said going all the way into the handle with all that support you're going to be digging it out of the screwdriver forever so support is your friend but you generally want as little as possible so now that we've discussed support let's go ahead and turn it off to save us some slicing time and we're going to select adhesion and i'm not sure what i have for settings in here in adhesion there are some other options like i said we'll go a little bit into the custom options here in a minute for these settings but let's go ahead and slice it like this and it looks like we have a brim set that's a good adhesion type especially for a shape like this these teal lines in this model are representing the extra layer that's putting down to adhere the actual model to the surface so in a lot of cases people will use a brim in this case you're going to be peeling all this extra teal material off of here there is also another option so i think this is a good time to go ahead and segue into the custom stuff now don't be overwhelmed here there are a lot of options here and i have some extensions that change some of my options we're going to go ahead and go down to adhesion because that should be pretty stock so build plate adhesion here we are it says brim brim minimum length 250 that means there's at least 250 millimeters of perimeter going around the outside of this and 20 lines so it's going to print 20 lines out from the side of the model that's going to keep it from knocking over as the nozzle pushes around up here the higher you go the stronger you want your adhesion to be especially if it's something tall and narrow so that's something to keep in mind but it's not really necessary if you're printing something large small and flat or excuse me wide and deep but not high and flat does that make sense so let's go ahead and take a look at what happens when we change this to skirt we're gonna have to slice it again and now you'll notice that it's just putting this outer perimeter line around it and not connecting it with the model so this is what they call a skirt this is useful for purging anything that might be in the head of your nozzle before actually starting the print and making sure that things are flowing nicely instead of maybe uh maybe there's some debris in there and it doesn't or you're getting a little curling under your nozzle because it's not perfectly level this will basically wipe the nozzle and then start the print which is a very handy thing to do this is what i use in most cases however the other option is raft and that is basically going to print a sheet of plastic underneath it and then print the model on top and that's a very very handy one as well i encourage you to look into that on your own time but for now we're getting a little long-winded in this video so basically i want to point out if i go back to recommended i have these four settings if i go into custom each of those settings adhesion support infill resolution has a bunch more settings so here you see the adhesion this is the support setting category and if i click on it i get a lot more options so now i can change all of this stuff some of these are hidden and if you want to find a setting that you don't have showing basically you do the search settings here and you'll find it uh otherwise if you go to where is it at preferences configure kira and then settings that's your settings visibility all of these are checked because they're the ones that i want to be able to tune all the time you you of course will have less options at first because i did have to go in and turn a lot of these options on and they're really only for fine tuning so use the options you have available for you now and then when you run into a problem or an issue that you'd like to correct come back here and i have some handy videos that will teach you each of these settings and while we're speaking about that now that you have the gist of it uh i have a handy settings video playlist which is kira in five minutes or less each one of these settings has its own five minute video and you can check that out up here at the top make sure that you hit subscribe because i'm always adding to it as they always change the settings and make sure that you leave a like on this video if this was helpful to you i really appreciate you guys stopping by i hope you've learned something from this video and i hope that you stick around and check out some of the other stuff on the page because i'm sure you can learn a lot more i have a ton of videos and a good majority of them are on kira and how to use it easily and comfortably so that's going to be it for this video guys thank you for stopping in techniverse out