Cura 4.8 Tutorials - Recommended Settings

Welcome folks, TechNiverse here. This is Kira. Now, Kira is a 3D object slicing application. It's used in conjunction with your 3D printer to make almost anything, but how does it work? Stick around and find out. We'll go over each setting one by one, each in 5 minutes or less, and be sure to bookmark this playlist and hit that subscribe button. Please feel free to share, it helps us out a ton, and now without further ado, today on Kira Settings in 5 minutes or less, TechNiverse channel is brought to you by these fine Patreon supporters. Check us out on Patreon at patreon.com slash techniverse. Welcome back, this is episode 2 of my Kira Settings in 5 minutes or less playlist for 2021. Today, this video again might go a little bit longer than the 5 minutes that is expected. After this though, they will all be short, one-topic videos. Today, we are going to go over the recommended print settings that you get when you open up Kira, and that's these settings right here. If you don't see these, go ahead and click on this tab here, and it'll open that up for you. And next, we need to bring in a model so we can see what we're actually doing, and if you need a quick buffer on that one, it is simply drag and drop. We'll grab our STL here, we'll take a second to load, but it shouldn't be too long, and then we can begin to go over these settings. I think we might have to reorient the model, I think this one loads on the side, but while we're waiting, let's talk about this. This is what's known as our profile. The individual settings that we're using all together as a cumulative set is known as a profile, and you can edit, save those, you can load those, you can export or import them. For right now, you don't need to worry about any of that because we are going to simply be using the simple settings. These arrows here on the rotate, I didn't show you last time, but if I click one of those, I can rotate by exactly 90 degrees, and that should allow me to get it on its base if I don't want to use the option I showed you last time. So let's talk about these settings. The first setting you have is your layer height, and that is exactly what it sounds like. So if I slice this model, let's go down to 0.12. If I slice this model, we are going to see a 0.12mm layer height, which means it's going to take the total height of the model and divide it by 0.12, and give us one layer for each segment, basically. So a little bit better explanation, let's take a nice easy number like 0.2 here, and if you go down here to this area here, you can see the dimensions of the model, 21 by 20 by 25.4. So that is the width and the depth by the height. So the height, this dimension right here from top to bottom, this guy is 25.4mm. So if I open my calculator here, and I do 25.4, and I do, nope, I don't need a 125, 25.4 divided by 0.2 gives me 127. That's 127 layers it is going to slice this into, that's why it's called a slicer. Each of those layers is going to have a path like we talked about in the last video. So the reason this is important is because the smaller the layer height, the longer it's going to take to print, because you'll have a lot more layers. But the less you'll see those layer lines, and the finer the details will come out. If you set it to a higher layer height, it'll print a lot faster, but you're going to see a lot of lines in there, and you'll be able to tell where each layer is. So basically if you're doing a rough draft or prototype of something, 0.28, 0.30, that's fine. If you're doing a miniature and you want it to be a really nice quality so you don't have to do much finishing, 0.12 is where you want to start. You can go lower than that if you get a smaller nozzle. This is the settings for the standard nozzle size of 0.4mm. The next setting we're going to talk about is infill. I'm going to, real quick, before we get into discussing this, I'm going to make this a little larger. Let's do 350. Okay, and then I'm going to start slicing it, and you'll see why in a minute. So the infill we talked about a little bit last time. It is basically how much of the model is filled in, which is exactly what it sounds like. Off the bat, it's at 20. 15 to 20 percent is your standard infill for whatever you happen to be doing. If you need a part that is solid, go ahead and kick it up to 100 percent, or there's another way to make a part solid as well with using the shells. We'll look at that later when we're looking at detail and the quality settings. So for right now, all you need to know is the higher you fill this, the more plastic it's going to take, and the more solid the model is going to be. You can click this gradual infill button, and as it says here, it will increase infill towards the top, meaning the bottom of the model may start at about 10 percent, and then at the top you might be at about 25-30 percent, but on average, since it's set to 20, the model will be still 20 percent infill. Support is ticked. Support is one of those things that I said is necessary, like I said, for say this overhang of the arm here where it's showing in red. You're not going to be able to print that in mid-air, so you need something for it to print on top of. Support will build up pieces, and you'll see that in just a second when we go to preview mode, and then you have adhesion. So let's talk about adhesion first because we didn't really touch on that in the last video. So we go over to preview mode. All of this additional stuff down here, that is my adhesion, and there's a couple different modes for adhesion, but basically this is what's known as a raft. Thinking about the root of the word adhesion itself allows you to realize that it's talking about how well you're adhering. So the only thing you're really adhering to in this situation is the bed itself. So adhesion is simply referring to making sure that your model sticks. Now say I have a model where it puts down the first layer, and it seems to be sticking, and then it shifts a little bit, or it doesn't quite stick to the bed. The nozzle can push the plastic around, leading to a failed print. So adhesion is a really, really necessary step as far as making sure you don't waste plastic down the road, although rafts like this aren't necessarily needed in most situations. I do use them for a few situations in particular, but we'll talk about that when we talk about the different types of adhesion in the adhesion video. So that's basically the gist of it. You can see I have my model ready to go and ready to print here, and you are now well aware of what each of these four settings do. The reason we went over this this way is because each of these settings is going to be affected by basically all the other settings we're going to be doing in this playlist. They're not all listed under all of these, but I'll explain how and why, but they're going to interact with these and make subtle changes to these. But as long as you have these settings down, you can basically run a slicer for any printer and get a decent print. As far as getting a good high quality print, that has a lot to do with knowing your machine, and in this instance we are using an Ender 3 V2, and I also use the same profile for an Ender 3 Pro, so you shouldn't have any issues if you're using a Creality printer with using these tutorials. Although I will say they should work just fine for any other printer as well. So if I wanted to, now I could save the file and go over to my printer. We are going to go ahead and wrap up this video. I will see you in the next one, where we jump over to the custom settings and we will begin discussing the quality setting. It looks like we will be looking at the differences in layer heights between the layer height, initial layer height, the line width, and all of this stuff in here. So stay with me for that one, and TechNiverse out. Well guys, that about wraps it up. Don't forget to leave a like on this video and smash that subscribe button. Ring the notification bell so you can get notified about future videos. And on a side note, make sure you check out our new web page. The website is technivore.club. That's T-E-C-H-N-I-V-O-R-E dot C-L-U-B, and on that site you can find all sorts of stuff relating to the channel here, as well as some awesome affiliate links for you to purchase printers and printer supplies, which helps the channel grow quite a bit. So definitely check that out, and we appreciate you stopping by.