the amazing Prusa Slicer and Ender 3 - Why you should ditch Cura

Alright, so after yesterday's atrocity with the quote-unquote stable release of Kira 4.2 and the fact that it would not let you slice if you used regular supports no matter what, I've decided to go ahead and give a shot to another free slicer, the Prusa Slicer. Now this is like the Slicer Slicer, but as you can see I got Simplify 3D too, but not a big fan of Simplify 3D. I prefer Kira to that, but with Kira being so buggy right now I'm going to give this a shot. I did already set up a profile and get everything I think dialed in how it's supposed to be, and I will run a test print and I will show you how that test print comes out. Alright, so I brought my model in. To add a model you click right here, and the scale I was changing in Kira to 75%. I change one, it scales all of them. That's great. I have supports turned on, my infill's turned on. I'm not using a brim right now, and I'm going to leave it like that. We'll see how well it does. Actually, no, let's put a brim on there because it's a little bit taller than it is. It's quite a bit taller than it is wide, so we'll see what happens. I'm going to hit slice now. Not really having any problems with my object so far. They've all come in manifold. There is an option in here I noticed to fix your repair STL file. I haven't tried that yet. I'm not sure what that does. Okay, so there we have it. There we have our breakdown. Pretty smooth, pretty fluid. It was pretty fast actually, and I can scroll through the layers just like this. I set a honeycomb infill. There's lots of cool infills you can try with this. We'll experiment with those as we get into this slicer as well. Like I said, if this print comes out even somewhat decent, basically we'll do a whole tutorial series on using this with your Ender 3 because that's what I'm doing right now, and that's what I think a lot of people will be doing once they get sick of Kira and their bugginess. All right, so this was my first official print with the slicer. As you can see, it looks a little bit rough, but this was an initial run without changing most of the settings that are in there. I didn't notice, if you look, the layer height was set at 0.3, so it cranked this model out. It actually did a really good job at 0.3. The layer lines are a little too obvious for me, and you can see right in here that the support was a little bit too thick, so I had a little trouble removing it. Now, the support has a skin of its own, and you can determine how many layers thick that is. In the beginning, it was set to 3, and with that coupled with the thickness of 0.3 millimeters, it was really, really tough to remove. So this model ended up looking a little rough, and because of that, I ended up annealing it in some boiling water to kind of remove some of the burrs and the discolored spots where the support had not quite broken away properly. It also caused this item to change color quite a bit, and you can see that compared to the next model I printed. I did go in, and I adjusted the layer height. Now, these are pawns for my Egyptian chess set, so there are several of them, so it's perfect for doing test prints and comparisons. I'm not actually going to use the first print. I'm not happy with the layer height. It's a little bit too chunky, but these ones are at 0.16 after a couple adjustments, and they came out pretty fine. I'm actually very happy with these. So I do also have the last one that I printed. I haven't quite removed the support because I wanted to show you that skin that I'm talking about. Now, if you look here really closely, you can see that right here, there's a little line going across there, and that line... let's shine a little light on this here... that line, that little white line you see right there, is where the skin is. So basically, that skin allows you to remove the support without leaving any support attachment marks on the model. So after reducing that skin to one, I've had immensely better luck not only with the support removal, but with, as you can see here, you can see his clavicle and his collarbone, whereas with this one with the rougher support, you can still see some of the support dug in there. Like I said, here you can see the color difference a little bit better. This red color turns this nice brownish bronze, but it still has the glint to it. So I'm not sure if I'm going to end up annealing all of these parts just to make them this color. I'm probably just going to finish printing them and peeling them and enjoy them how they are because I do like the red but so far PrusaSlicer has been a great success for me. Now I've printed one, two, three, four models with my good profile, plus the fifth original model, which I consider a test model to get my profile dialed in. So that's four models that I've printed compared to probably the the hundreds, probably close to a thousand I've printed in Kira. So got a long way to go before I can say that I like this better than Kira, but at the moment it functions better than Kira and the supports actually work. So definitely going to recommend you give this slicer a try. I'll put a link to it down below and then I think we're going to do a little tutorial series on how to use it and what some of the better settings are. The infill options with this slicer are amazing. I did this one in honeycomb and watching it print with the honeycomb infill is like mesmerizing. So definitely stay tuned for the tutorial series we're going to do on PrusaSlicer. Between now and then definitely recommend giving it a shot. There is a little bit of a learning curve as with any slicer, but the options are pretty pretty serious. I mean there's a lot of things you can do with this. So if you're into being able to customize your g-code easily, if you're into printing anything with support on a new version of software, definitely check out the link below. So thanks guys. Don't forget to leave a like on this video if it was helpful at all. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button to stay tuned for future videos. Ring that bell and you'll get notifications when we put up our tutorial updates for the PrusaSlicer and we look forward to seeing you next time.