Hey guys, Aidan here, from Core Electronics and we're back again with another 3D printing guide and this time we're going to be looking at the intermediate use of Cura. So, no doubt you've played around with Cura's quick print options and you're looking to get a bit more beneath the surface when it comes to slicing your 3d models, it might just be something as simple as changing the way your support to attach to your model or it might even be something as in-depth as printing in VAEs mode or something like that. In any case, you will need to be able to get into the full settings of Cura to access all that. So, I'm going to show you how to do that today and we're also going to have a look at creating our own profiles and materials as well. So, we'll jump over to the computer now and I'll show you first off, how to find the expert settings in Cura.

So here we are in Cura and we have the Roctopus leather on the bed. If you want to know more about the basic operations of Cura, I've made a video for beginners, that you can check out, I'll put the link in the description below, but for now, we're diving straight into the deep end of Cura. So we're going to go to the right-hand side of your workspace, you've got those that big white banner and it's separated up into, Category, Material, Profile and then some general principles, for the most part, if you want to change your support density, you can do that here, you can start your infill density and you can also generate support for your model and some build plate adhesion options, if you want to go any deeper just start the top here there's that sliding radio button and essentially what's going to happen here is it's going to import all of the settings from the high-speed poly maker PLA profile and it's also going to give me the option to expand out any of these submenus, as you can see I'm just working through them here and obviously I'll be able to edit any of these fields. This is very similar in the old Cura, which was Cura 21.08, I think it was the last revision we were using when you got the top and go to expert settings and would copy the profile across, this is the exact same process, however. you can see that there are a ton more options available. So, as you can see this, even things like this experimental mode, here which has got some cool little options and dual extrusion, there's an actual section is explicitly for dual extrusion, which gives you a lot more control. First off let's have a look at all the options that are available.

So, I click on the gear icon, I'll show you again, mousing over any of these headings, you can click on the gear icon there and we're in the Preferences window for, Setting Visibility. If I click on this little box here, I've just checked all those options, which means that all those options will be visible when I back out of this Preferences window. So close that one down and now you can see quality, has all these options here, I'll quickly go over what some of these are. Really, I'll go over the general layout of it, so we've got the line width, now this is the parent setting which is 0.5 millimetres, all the settings underneath here are obviously referencing that top tier I was on. You can change the ones below it, you change the overarching one, say 4.6 or the ones below a change, but you can't go through and change the ones below it to keep them different. So, I hope that makes sense, essentially, we can move through any of these options and change them as we see fit.

Another thing we might want to do when we're using the expert settings within Cura 2.6, updates existing profiles. So, you might find that there is a certain element, a certain aspect of your 3D printing design that you need to have the same when printing with a certain material and what better way to do that then to create your own profile rather than the quick print profiles provided by LulzBot and you can do that very easily and I'll show you how right now.

So, when you're in the full settings menu, you can go through and change anything that you need to change, it might be the print speed, it might be the infill density or even the pattern that you use for the infill, so it might be triangles for example. You could be doing this on say ABS, so go to ABS, we'll take a standard profile and then we'll do a few things, so we'll change it to say cubic infill pattern, will change the density there's a 45 percent, we'll give it an extra wall and the quality can stay the same and what else can we do will, also enable supports, so this will always print supports and give it support opening angle of 65, so anything below that one. So we make all those changes to the current profile but they never stick around so next time I go to print with the ABS standard profile, it will just import all the original settings, what I can do is click on this little drop-down box, I can click on the create profile from current settings/overrides, when I do that I'm prompted for a name for the profile, so I'll call it a "special ABS profile" and it essentially just becomes a part of my repertoire for that type of material. So now when I, maybe I print with HIPS and then I go to PC-ABS and then I come back to ABS one day and I want to print with that profile because I know that that one was perfectly matched for my type of ABS, it's right there I can select it and it will slice using those settings. Fantastic way to keep track of slight changes that you make to a print profile, but you can also iterate on it easily, say you find the wall thickness wasn't the best idea change that one, the layer height you might want to dial in that a bit more, so you get a 0.2, 0.2. So, it's just a bit smaller and then you decide that's what you want your special ABS profile to be, just go ahead and click this star, click that and there's an updated profile with the current settings. So, we do that and that is our new profile. So, we can see it in the list there and the layer height is always displayed, that's a quick and straightforward way to update existing profiles, which is a great tool to have in your repertoire.

Finally, I'm just going to quickly cover off on adding a brand-new material into your Cura 2.6. So essentially you might have a type of filament that isn't just a stock standard plug-and-play filament for Lulzbot 3D printers. Now we always recommend use those filaments, they're the ones that we have available if you're wanting to pick some up, but you might just get some type of filaments that are, 2.85 millimetres, that just aren't on that list and to really narrow down what the best settings are, you're going to have to do a bit of iteration, you're going to have to try a few different things out but you can keep track of those by, first off you can create your new material and then you can use these the profile settings that we were just talking about to improve upon a base stock standard profile, so I'll just show you real quickly how to add a material.

We go to the material drop-down box, there's a couple of ways to get there, but we go to the material drop-down box you can see these are all the supporting materials. Down the bottom I can click on manage materials and I can see them all with their different settings here, say, for example, I have a material like say, there is a Copperfield, for example, is very close to bronze fulfilment, I could duplicate Bronze fill and just change a few things. Alternatively I can click on create up to top it here, create a brand new material and it's all just blank for me to fill in, So if we go to say ABS, I can see that all these materials are under the brand generic and then the material type and display name are the same, so if we follow that we could call it "ABS (Core)", so this might be our special brand of ABS filament and we would call it a nice blue colour, probably and then we can add it up density in, whether it be what have you, add our diameter, we can even say how much it cost per kilogram, forty bucks, per kilogram and we put that in there, that'll give us a cost per meter and also update the little tooltip down the bottom to be reflective of how much it's going to cost per print, which is always nice to know and then we go over to the print settings and we put in a default temperatures all the way through, obviously these are just a base setting to work with, once we've done that everything is fine, we can close out of that and now we have an ABS (Core) option in the list here, you can see that one down the bottom ABS (Core), I can select from.

When I go to that it only has the default profile which loads up for every single custom material and it's just a 0.1-layer height. You would then go through, enter in some things that you know that are likely to work like, layout heights of 0.2 are usually stable and then you would just work with 3D printing models like, the temperature towers and stuff like that to really narrow it down on each Setting in here and then you form your own profile set for that material.

So, I hope that that explains a few of the fun things that we can do or the fun more in-depth things we can do with Cura 2.6 we'll be back more with more 3D printing "goodness" and probably see CAD tutorials soon, so stay posted.

All the best with your projects guys.