Now that you have your digital model exported and checked for errors, you're pretty eager to get the printing process going. This lecture focuses on the basic operations of 3D printer control software, the software tools you will use to prepare your design to be fabricated using the settings and configuration that you will specify. As I mentioned elsewhere in this series, thankfully for the scores of new users pouring into this field with no coding background, you don't have to be a programmer to use these machines. While I suppose it is possible to build job files in G code line by line manually, people very, very rarely do so. Instead, they make use of 3D printing applications that assist them in this process. Translating the mesh model into a print job doesn't require a computer science degree. Thanks to the efforts of thousands of coders who have helped develop and refine tools designed to automate as much of this process as possible. There are two stages of this process. The first stage, 3D printer control software, involves importing a 3D mesh model and then locking it into a specific size and orientation within the bounds of the printers fabrication stage, the build platform. The second stage, 3D printer slicing software, governs the process of tuning and tweaking every aspect of how that digital template will be used to specifically direct the device itself to produce a physical object. In this video, we'll be taking a deeper dive into the 3D printer control software side using the open-source software Ultimaker Cura to demonstrate. What is 3D printer control software? 3D printer control software is a generic name for the cam-type tool that is used to receive the mesh export file from a completed design project and then produce an output via instructions, the job file. That job file will then be used by your desktop 3D printer to produce the final printed object. In this video, we will explore the basics of 3D control software, how to install, configure and operate the software, the pipeline from mesh export file to G code job file. As well as best practices you can apply to any 3D control software package to keep this process manageable, repeatable and efficient. While I will share a number of the 3D printer control software options available for you to use, I will demonstrate using Ultimaker Cura. A freely available software package that can be used for a diverse range of desktop 3D printers, regardless of vendor. We will go into detail about how to use Cura in specific, exploring the specific layout of this as an example program. What is 3D printer control software? Select 3D printer software, operate 3D hardware, import, translate, validate digital assets, platter and batch preparation. 3D printer control software prep stage complete. Parts in place within Cura's virtual representation of the build platform. Scaled, ready for specific decisions about how to implement it. Time to open and explore the wide range of options and decisions we will face as we move on to the 3D printer slicing software stage. Pipeline, the parts and processes. Identify and select 3D hardware, select and identify 3D printer hardware. Probably the most important element, though often overlooked. This is how vendors can specify custom requests while still using general purpose utilities. Establish the hardware accessories installed for use, specify dimensions and insertion requirements for tool heads. Create and tweak a machine profile, manage/operate 3D hardware. Control comes from the role to manage printer hardware, identify and establish communications with hardware. Before excellent interfaces were so readily available, the key role was to actually set up print jobs on physical hardware using software to drive its various features. Running print jobs tethered has been largely replaced by onboard interfaces, except where saving costs is so crucial. 3D printing host platforms such as OctoPrint, AstroPrint, 3D Printer OS and MatterControl are on-board embedded computers for remote control and offer pre-configured automation processes. Updating firmware, updating firmware remains a key function, software that acts as a bridge between your printer and the internet. More and more printers are able to access the internet with an aim to receive firmware updates and report back print successes and failures, with an aim to receive firmware updates and report back print successes and failures. Import/translate/validate digital assets. You import mesh models STL, OBJ, 3MF and AMF. Translate from other file types and mesh standards, you can also use geo data and DICOM files. Import 2D files such as SPGs and PNGs, validate files or alert operators of issues. Platter/batch preparation, lock objects into a specific size and orientation within the bounds of the printer's fabrication stage, the build platform. You can also duplicate and mirror parts. Nesting and pack it, establish the baseline for slicing. What to look for in 3D printer control software? Install and configuration and other options, slicers and hosts. Later we will take up Ultimaker Cura, but for this lecture let's take a wider view. What is 3D printer control software and how does it function? Cura is now developed at Ultimaker and used as a core tool by a number of desktop 3D printer manufacturers. One, import and plate. Import into the build envelope, commit your mesh to scale, position, material, and quantity. In summary, this is plating your part design or designs. Two, transform and translation tools. What is translation and transformation? You can scale, orient, mirror, create multiples, group and take advantage of the origin reference from the design file. Commit to a strategy for executing your design. Select and customize a slicing profile to produce the instructions for your machine. I'd like to circle back around and explore concepts associated with these two distinct areas, tweaking your design within 3D printer control software. 3D printer control software can be a design tool. Scale is powerful, try a one-axis scale to see what kind of results you can have from your part. Three, profiles and configuration. And now, returning to the slicer and material profile management aspect of 3D printer control software. While you might love how your model appears within the virtual build platform, surprise, surprise. Your goal at the end of the day is to get the physical part out of the machine. 3D printer control software often ships with a default Quick Print setting and tools to help you quickly load and plate your part. As tempting as these options can be, I suggest that you first ask yourself what do I need out of this printed object? Do you need a strong part, suitable for a mechanical working prototype? Do you need an extra-thick outer shell so that you can sand the surface to paint it or prepare for a molding and casting process? Which features need to be the highest resolution? Which need to be the strongest? How many do you want to produce at one time? What colors or materials do you want to assign to each part? Do you want the print as fast as possible, or printed with the most care and finest resolution? This is the stage for you to make all these decisions. Why cheat yourself of these opportunities? Three, profiles and configuration. To editorialize, I do not think using the quick print options is ever a good idea. They are there to make your life easy by bringing the latest optimized settings for each material and each resolution into play. However, as I have said before, the optimized settings for FFF style 3D printing, desktop or industrial, are always geometrically specific and unique to the part itself. The quick print settings and material profiles are excellent across a number of vendors. But they are generalized settings meant to suit a variety of possible needs. While the slicers software stacks are getting better every release at detecting and attempting to break out elements that suggest a particular set of adjustments are optimal printing. This is still an ongoing process. It will be years before there are enough points of data from enough types of parts to truly approach the idea of the one-click print. And in the meantime, these settings often evolve and change. Sometimes shifting in the direction of optimization and speed. And sometimes shifting back to safer, slower, lower customer support triggering settings. And what is critical? While the slicer tools themselves are constantly undergoing tuning and tweaking to better recognize and resolve tough path planning problems for specific classes of geometry. The process of profile development isn't subjected to the same level of systematic review. Changes from one default profile to the next published version of a default profile are judged in terms of improvements to the particular parts and prints assessed. Not to evolving a single strategy reinforced by each discrete slicer tool. Three, profiles and configuration. At the end of the day, 3D printer slicing operation is accomplished via a stack of discrete but interdependent tiny programs that tune and tweak baseline operation to improve how the machine can execute each element of the intended part. While these tools themselves offer more and more opportunities to tune the process to give the operators control, a profile that groups together an array of adjustments cannot be understood by any single setting value. The group of settings accomplish something together that can be very difficult to intuit separately. If you've ever wondered why slicing is hard and why you don't feel you have precise enough control in there to effect the changes you need, this is why. A slicing profile that works better for a larger range of parts is said to be better. But what elements have been tuned and tweaked to achieve that result? To date, I have never seen clear change notes or context shared by profile developers. So when you dive in to change a setting or two as a means of improving your output, you might discover that the effect of your adjustment has a marginal or even negative impact on the aspect of the printed part that you'd like to improve. How you can learn from slicing over time. I've watched first time users for years now opting for the quick print settings because they just want their part as quickly as possible and feel uneasy when they see over 200 settings available to them in Cura. It is better to rename a quick print setting for your purpose and then have a chance to return to it and tweak it rather than losing the knowledge of what has been applied each and every time. Rather than seeing the process of mastering a 3D slicer as a major hurdle, I suggest flipping it into something you learn gradually as you get to know what you want. Potentially changing a preset very little each time, but in a direction where you want to go and that you can access at the conclusion of your printing cycle. Four, print simulation and part analysis. Use path simulation tools to help you master slicing. Lately, the Ultimaker Cura team has spent a lot of time improving the path preview tools. And these are not just handy as a gut check before you run your next part. These are the best way to really understand what's going on. Five, file management, job file and project file export. Using 3D printer control software as a documenting tool. You can also use this software to document and preserve a history of all of your decisions and all of your part transformations and translations. >> Hello, in this video, we'll be going over some basics of Cura. So this is Cura, it's a slicing software, meaning that we could transfer 3D model objects into a G-Code file for our 3D printer to understand and print. So you might not have an Ultimaker printer. But if you click here, you could manage your printers to add printers from a network or non-network printer. You could edit printers by IP as well. Here we're using a Ultimaker 2+ because that's what the University of Illinois MakerLab uses. So we need to open up a file to look at 3D model. So we could open up a file in two ways. One way will be clicking this file folder right here. The other way will actually be clicking File and you could click up Open Files. You could click up Open Recent Files. You could create a new project if you wanted to make another Cura file for G-Code. Well, we're going to click Open File. Here are some files I already made previously. So I'm going to open up these two files. So we open up these two files. Cura automatically tries to adjust the scaling of the object. We could change how the scaling works. You can also see that these files are not both on the bed. Sometimes this error happens. But a easy way to fix it is if we left-click, we could click on these arrows and move the object any direction x, y, z. So I'm going to move this object back on to the build plate, hopefully. I'm going to click this object, left-click, and move it with the arrow. If you right-click, you could be able to move around and look around the entire Cura assembly file. So I'm going to move this a little more. Okay, so now that's yellow, you know that's fully on the bed plate itself. So the Ultimaker, Cura is able to open up STL files which is what these two files were, an OBJ file, 3MF file, AMF file, tons of other files as well also, Up to D files as well such as SVG files. So we could rename the Cura file. So I'm going to rename this from to train to, I was going to leave it as to train. So going to delete all that. To train. Another thing we could do is multiple functions. So you already showed the movement here. You could move it from the XYZ coordinates using millimeters. We could change that with preferences if you want to use inches. You could click Lock Model to prevent any further movement of this model. So if I click this, I can't move this anymore. You would have to individually lock the models though. So let me unlock this. Another feature is scaling. You click s for scaling. You could scale with either XYZ coordinates or percentages. You could also use these axises to scale as well. You could use uniform scaling or snap scaling to make intervals to make it easier. You click this button to reset your object to its original size. This is the original size of the file itself, Cura Change the size, because when I export it I exported it micrometers. So I'm going to increase the size. Next thing is rotation. So if you click R in your keyboard it will rotate, or you click this button right here. You could use snap rotation to make it easier for intervals such as 0, 45, 90. So this 90, 75 60 45 0. You could rotate it again, XYZ axes as well. You can reset clicking this button. You could also lay it flat. If you had an object in an awkward angle and you could change the, you could change it to face a specific face on the build plate. So I want this bottom part to be very smooth. So I'm going to put this facing upward because the top part of your print will be the smoothest compared to the bottom part. Next one is M which is mirroring. Mirroring allows you to flip your object around upside down, right side up. The next one is the mesh modeling. So there's different types of mesh types. It's a little hard to explain. But normal mesh type allows you to print it normally, ie normal model. It prints using just the PLA function itself, interprets this object as a file to be printed as a final product. The next one is Print as support. If you click this, you see that the object looks different now. This will be used as a support feature then if you want to add other parts onto it to allow the print to work better. The third one is modifying settings for overlaps. If you look at the image it probably explains this a little better. It allows part of your file to be used as support and then the other part will disappear. So if you have a awkward-looking object, you could edit the model of a file to make it instead of final normal file, into a support file to help the normal file print out. The third one is, don't support overlaps, which means that the two files will be reprinted next on top of each other, assuming that it is one model. So, let me make this as a normal type. The last one is support blockers. This is usually done in the last stages of 3D printing when you generate support for material and you want to make it, and you realize there's too much support and you want to delete some of it. Well when you click this button or right-click E on your keyboard, it creates small little cubes which we could demonstrate here. If you scroll inward you can zoom into your object. So if we click on here it creates a box. This box shows that nothing will be printed on within that area. So let me, when you click Ctrl+Z to undo that. And we finish there. The next thing we're going to do is attempting to select all, both of these prints. So if I click Ctrl + A, it selects both of them. If I click Ctrl + R, it rearranges them to make it more effective or more closer together for printing. Now if we click the Edit up here, we could see different ways of the shortcuts here that we just did. We could also learn that Ctrl + D is clearing the build plate. So we click Ctrl + A, Ctrl + D it will delete them all. We could reset our model positions and reset the transformations, which are two more important things if you accidentally scale your object incorrectly. Next one is View. View, you could change your camera view from perspective to orthographic. Also, you can change camera positions from 3D view, left view, right view. You could also get access to this in the bottom corner right here. This is 3D. This is singular views. We'll use 3D for now. And if you scroll inward again, you'll zoom in. Next one is Extensions. Here you could update Cura by going to Update checker. You can also modify the final G-Code after you export it. And you can also if you click Object List, you could choose which file you want to access. So I want to click this one for this file. And if I click this one I can get X as a. >> Okay. Now that we have the basic operation stage of 3D printer control software tackled, with parts in place within Ultimaker Cura's virtual representation of the build platform scaled and ready to go. It is time to look under the hood to explore the range of options and decisions available to us for slicing. While there isn't time in this course to explore all of the 3D printer control software options available to you, check the resources with the course for links and recommendations to help you learn more about how to operate other 3D printer control software packages, such as Simplify 3D, Slicer, Repetier, Matter Control. You can select any object within a group of objects and assign per model settings. This is useful for a range of support, infill and shell settings. But there is also a secondary use of this tool to transform the model you have selected as the utility model for performing other work inside of Cura. Here are the five types of models. Normal, doesn't change the nature of the model but using the Select Settings button allows you to assign slicer tweaks to just that model. Support mesh. Under the label Print as Support, you can turn a mesh into a utility model to be assigned to be prepared the way that support pathways are prepared. A great option if you use another design tool to manually design your support material. Anti-overhang mesh. Under the label Don't Support Overlap with other Models, assign that mesh to be a utility model for you to place where it will overlap with other models, where support material should be generated. This is best to used if you already created a model in your design tool that can usefully and efficiently block the support you want to block. If you don't have such a model created, Ultimaker Cura has the support blocker tool to manually generate cubes for you to use for this type of effect. Cutting mesh. Under the label Modify Settings for Overlap with Other Models, you can assign that mesh to be a utility model for stamping a series of per object settings into the places where your model overlaps with another model. This tends to be used only for very specific spot fixes, such as beefing up the infill, or a number of parameter shells for a specific part or model, to better handle mechanical wear and tear. But I have seen really clever experiments, such as cylinders and towers, that really can change the behavior and visuals on printed parts. Infill mesh. Under the label Modify Settings for infill and other models, you can assign a mesh to be a utility model for one of the most useful transform features, adjusting the infill density for the area of overlap between the utility model and a target model. Say you have a pad feature on a model you intend to sand back and paint, or the head of a hammer. Overlap a unique shape that increases or decreases the infill density where you need it. What is Ultimaker Cura? Who created Ultimaker Cura, who created Cura? How is Cura open source? Where can I find it? What operating systems can I use? What version should I download between stable and beta? What is GitHub? And why would I want to compile Cura myself? What are the parts of Ultimaker Cura software? What sequence should I follow to prepare my files? [BLANK AUDIO]. How do I import models? The file I want won't import, what's wrong? The part isn't in the optimized orientation, how do I fix that? My part isn't the right size. It's too big or too small. How many parts can I open at once? What is the X-ray view for? Should I print one part or many parts? Where can I learn more about Cura to keep updated with changes? [BLANK AUDIO]
