Part 2:
First steps into the world of 3D printing

By Julian Stromer and Steven Stromer, Mar 25, 2023

We began our 3D printing education by looking directly to the printer manufacturer, Creality, for instruction and direction, but quickly came to understand that beginner instruction is not a primary focus for the company. The manual that comes with the printer best serves for leveling the legs of the table your printer is resting atop. The company does not provide anything looking like beginner support in any location that was apparent to us.

To some degree, this feels like the possible result of a language barrier between a Chinese product manufacturer and a multinational user base. However, 3D printing is also a DIY/maker activity, and 3D printer users are low-key expected to be your bleeding-edge engineering types, who subtilely prefer for there to be some barrier to entry. This is fair, but also know that there will inevitably be some among us who feel the obligation to mark the path for others who wish to follow, without having to first blaze a trail.

Besides, in only our first days of exploration, we discovered that much of the most widely-distributed, so-called authoritative 3D printing wisdom is just patently wrong, meaning that there remains an opportunity to do some good by closely documenting our self-directed 3D printing education, and making a sincere attempt to separate fact from fiction, as we proceed.

Creality's main website, creality.com, focuses on listing available hardware products and offering links to the main software downloads (the two most prominent being Creality Slicer and Creality Print). Future articles in this series will cover Creality's, and other 3D printing software applications in depth. The primary location for what one might consider usage instruction and support is crealitycloud.com. Creality Cloud is an entire ecosystem on its own, and we will cover it in a future installment in this series.

The Creality Cloud blog contains many articles of practical use to a beginner. They are, however, unorganized and non-sequential, and so, we've taken the liberty of organizing and categorizing the more useful of the articles that we found there:

As you can see, even with some organization, these resources aren't exactly a comprehensive instruction manual for successful 3D printing with a Creality printer. However, with the reading of all of these articles, the language of 3D printing begins to reveal itself.

In our next article in this series, Part 3. Setting up the Creality CR-10S 3D printer, we'll cover the proper setup of the CR-10S. Proper setup is not anything like the instruction manual describes, nor like any single source that we've found on the Web. To us, it appears that many of the problems users experience with 3D printers are directly attributable to improper initial setup. More on this in the next installment.

A note about this article series...

Having recently entered into the world of 3D printing, we have found the information available on the subject to be both broad and deep, but not always clear, organized, or reliable, especially for beginners. This series of articles attempts to bring some order to the massive amount of available information.

The information in this series will tend to be specific to the Creality CR-10S Smart 3D printer and to the suite of Creality software, as this is the platform we're learning on. However, it is quickly becoming clear that much of this information will apply to not only other Creality printer models, but to many similar 3D printers and software packages. Hope you find this information useful.

Available articles in this series:

part 1.
the Creality CR-10S printer: making sense of the product specifications

part 2:
first steps into the world of 3D printing

part 3.
setting up the Creality CR-10S 3D printer

Planned future installments:

one, simple explanation for why prints fail, and the best solution to resolve this issue

all about Creality CR-10S automated bed-leveling

Creality Print and Slicer application basics

stepping into the world of Creality Cloud

adding the Creality CRCC-S7 web camera to your 3D printer setup

how to replace the extruder nozzle on the CR-10S, step-by-step

Exploring the Creality CR-10S Smart 3D Printer, Part 2

Part 2:First steps into the world of 3D printing

By Julian Stromer and Steven Stromer, Mar 25, 2023

Printing Issues

Extruder Hot-end

Bed

Filament

Molding Methods

Creality Slicer Software

File Formats

Model Planning & Design

Connecting To Octoprint Or Pronterface

Part 2:
First steps into the world of 3D printing