Basic

TinkerCad and Basic Designs

A colleague of mine asked if I could 3D printer her a cake topper for her daughter’s wedding. She had a concept in mind and thought that 3D printing could take it to a different level.

There are a lot of great programs out there to allow you to build 3D models that can be 3D printed. A program like TinkerCad is great for young children or beginners to begin “tinkering” with 3D modeling. The controls are intuitive and objects are built with basic shapes.

Something more advanced is software from Autodesk called Fusion 360. It is something that I have barely scratched the surface with and I’d love to explore more in the future when time allows. It is a much more advanced program and something that provides a lot of freedom. This freedom, however, does come with a pretty steep learning curve. There are a number of YouTube videos out and about that detail the Fusion 360 process.

For many of my designs, I ust TinkerCad. I try not to reach out beyond my safety level when I’m working on projects for others, and I’m honest with my skills. Each project I complete, I gain experience and am getting ready to take on Fusion 360 soon.

Totally Creawesome Dude!

As a beginning 3D printer things can be overwhelming. That’s why Eric Ptak over on GitHub created the Creawesome modification for Cura 4.0

There are so many settings that can be adjusted in your slicer of choice.

I use Cura 4.0 and there are settings that will be valuable to learn right away, such as:

  • Infill – The percentage amount that will be filled inside of the object
  • Adhesion – Raft, brim, skirt or naked – if you dare. Get that print to stick to your print bed on the all important first layer.
  • Supports – Make sure your tricky prints don’t fail by adding extra material that can easily be removed.

Of course you’ll find a host of other, and much more advanced settings, that you’ll eventually venture out on and tweak until your prints are to your liking.

If you use an Ender 3, like me, you just might want to try out the Creawesome Modification. It changes key settings that are tried and true for Creality printers. Along with many surface settings, it also changes some settings that beginner users would never touch.

All in, many users, including myself are reporting much improved print quality over their pesronal slicer settings.

Not to mention, it updates Cura with this sweet model of your Creality printer

Hit this link for a direct downlad. Installation is easy:

  • Unzip the Creawesome package.
  • Backup your Cura resources file – In your Ultimaker Cura directory, simply rename your resources file to “resources_old”
  • Copy the Creawesome resources folder to your Ultimaker Cura directory.

If you don’t notice a difference, maybe your original Cura settings were tuned to perfection. Simply delete the Creawesome resources folder and remove “_old” from your resource folder to get back to your initial settings.

Keep an eye here as I will update the blog frequently with Creawesome Mod results.