 So you just got your first 3D printer or you're thinking about getting your first one soon. But where do you start? Well today I'm going to show you. My name is Jim and this is The Edge of Tech. Hey everybody welcome to The Edge of Tech where we aim to educate and entertain the maker community. Like I said today we're going to be walking you through the 3D printing process so you can get started in this awesome hobby. So there's a couple prerequisites before we go any further. Make sure your 3D printer is built and it's leveled. So if you already haven't leveled your bed check out this video right here. So once you have your printer built and it's leveled and if you're like me you probably printed at least one of the test models that's on the SD card. We're going to start from there. We're going to load your slicer. We're going to get a model. We're going to slice it and we're going to print it. So let's not waste any more time. Let's do it. So the first thing you want to do is install a slicer. As you can see I have a few slicers here. I like Prusa Slicer myself but whatever comes on the card is okay too. If we jump into the CR10 Smart card here you can see this comes from the Creality CR10 Smart and they have a software in Drive. This is the Creality Slicer software which is a rebranded Ultimaker Kira. It's totally okay to use that. Once you load that there's usually a profile that they set in there for you if it comes on these SD cards. Now a lot of them will have built-in profiles as well and Prusa Slicer is no different so I'm going to show you a little bit about Prusa Slicer. I really dig Prusa Slicer. It has a lot of great features and this is what we're going to be using today for our slicer. So once a slicer, very quickly a slicer takes the model that you choose and slices it or programs it to work on your 3D printer. That is the fastest easiest way I can say what it does. So we have our slicer here. I'm going to come up. We want the CR10 Smart so I'm going to just choose that CR10 Smart here. In Prusa Slicer you can choose the PLA of course the detail. You can do this in Kira as well. Either way if you want to just start with defaults I would start whatever they have and see what happens. Tune it from there. You don't have to get super involved in this right away. You just want to see your printer print for the first time right? So I'm going to use the CREODI CR10 Smart with a CREODI PLA at point 1-2 detail. So once you have your slicer ready to go and it's installed the next thing we need to do is go find a model. So when you're looking for a model there are several sites you can get them from. You can go to Thingiverse, My Mini Factory, Colts 3D or something like Thangs here. Now Thangs is a free site and they have a ton of models about 7.5 million it looks like. In Thangs you can actually search by whatever you want whether it be geometry or whatever really. In this case I think we should start with a mini gym. So I'm going to type in mini gym and as it searches there we go. The first thing that comes up is the mini gym tree topper. Shane actually remixed the mini gym for this and I showed it in Hot Makes recently. Let's see what else we have here. Oh look the mini gym STL. We have earthworm gym. We have all sorts of stuff. In this case let's use my mini gym STL and the link for this will be in the description as well. So once you're on a site you can kind of grab a hold. You can drag it around and see what it's going to look like all that stuff. So once you know what model you want to use let's use the mini gym for this video. What you want to do is download it. So we will download. It'll download the STL file and that's the file we need to put in the slicer. So from here we jump back to Prusa Slicer or whatever slicer you're using and we'll slice the file and get it ready for the printer. Okay we're back in Prusa Slicer. I'm going to hit the little plus sign up here. I'm going to go to my downloads and double click mini gym and that should bring the mini gym up just like that. Now I'm going to leave this at 100%. You can click and drag around the model and kind of see what it looks like. I always like to make sure I am in the center of the bed which this icon right here will do. In this case I want to use as many stock settings as we can to keep it very easy for your very first sliced model. I'm going to use infill 15% is fine. In this mini gym we do not need any supports. So I'm going to say no supports. Up in the top left I'm going to go to print settings here. We are going to see everything they have. I'm going to use completely stock settings. I'm not changing anything here. Infill like we talked about 15%. There are many different types of infill here. You can choose whatever one you want really. It doesn't matter. In my case I think I'm just going to leave it on a grid. The filament settings it all is based on whatever profile they have. In this case I chose the Creality PLA I believe. I know I'm going to be using a coax filament for this and so I want to change my first layer here to 220 because I always print my coax filament at about 220 and that's PLA. I would definitely suggest starting with PLA and 60 degrees on the bed. So I know the nozzle is going to print at 220. The bed is going to print at 60. I clicked up in the platter button here and you can see it took me back to here. Now I don't want to do anything else to this. Again I'm going to use as many default settings as I can just for this print. So I'm going to go to slice and what this does is it breaks that model up to many different layers and that's how the 3d printer prints it and we can actually get a really quick idea of that. If we break this down you can actually see so that'll be the very first layer it's going to do and if we bring the slider up you can see it builds the model one by one one layer at a time. So once it's done with that layer it goes the next one and the next one and the next one and eventually if we watch this all the way to the top your printer will print this right here and that's a mini-gym so that's perfect. It's ready to go on the printer. You didn't do anything special to it at this point because we're just starting out. So the next step is to get this model on the sd card and then put it in the printer to get it printing. Okay so I took the sd card that came with the cr10 smart. I put it in the sd card reader that came with the cr10 smart and I put it in my computer here. When I did that I got a file that looks like this. This tells you everything that I printed recently so we needed that to be open so we can save our slice to the sd card. Now improves your slicer on the bottom right corner you can actually click right here and that'll bring up the sd card automatically. In Kira you can save it straight to the sd card as well. It's called the mini-gym here and it gives you some other details as well so we're just going to hit save and if you notice this is called a gcode file. The gcode file is what the 3d printer reads and that's what we have to save this as from your slicer to the sd card and it saves in gcode. From here what we need to do is eject our sd card. You can either do it right here in Prusa Slicer or if you bring up the drive you can right click when you find it and you can actually eject it like that as well. Just make sure you eject it and don't pull it straight out because you don't want it to go corrupt. Well I hope you guys are getting value out of the video today. If you are please squish that like button. It really helps the channel out. It spreads the video to more people and I really really appreciate it. Now back to it. Alright so you have your model saved to your sd card. We went through the slicer already. We sliced it with the generic settings and we saved it to our sd card. It could be a micro sd card. It could be a big one like this one for the cr10 smart. Whatever you have the next thing we need to do is put this card in this sd card slot wherever that is on your printer. In this case mine is right in the front of the cr10 smart right here. Yours could be on the side. It could be in the back but wherever it is that's where you need to put it. Always refer to your manual because all the printers are different and I can't tell you exactly where it's going to be. We're going to turn this printer on. I'm going to choose the print option. I'm going to select the file we just saved to that card and then we're going to print a mini gym and voila we're done. We have this awesome mini gym right here printed in this amazing poly alchemy color. You can find poly alchemy on printed solids website. They are going to be printing this now and I absolutely love the poly alchemy colors. I believe this is called emerald green if I remember right and as you can see this thing it just completely shines. It is gorgeous. This little mini gym is a lot of fun to print. It doesn't take that long relatively depending on your printer. I printed this in pretty tight layers at I think .12 so this did take around four hours but it looks so good. There is a little bit of weirdness in the top. When I was away I believe it got clogged or stuck. I'm not sure. I'm going to find out. Other than that you did it. You printed your very first model and we went from getting your slicer slicing it putting it in your printer and getting it printed and from there you can do this many times over and over again. Now you will have to do settings you'll have to dial this thing in you'll have to get the settings right and spend a little time doing that but you have the basic idea of what it takes to start with a model and make it print. With that being said let me know in the comments if you've got value out of this video if it helped you and if there's anything you think I should add next time I do a video like this. I hope this video could help you along to start your 3d printing journey or help you ease your mind about getting into 3d printing because I know it can be really scary when you don't really know where to start. Hopefully this video gave you that. Well I hope you guys learned something today and as always keep printing.