**Downloading and Printing a 3D Model: A Step-by-Step Guide**

The process of downloading and printing a 3D model is relatively easy, but it requires some basic knowledge of computer software and 3D printing principles. In this article, we will walk through the step-by-step process of downloading a 3D model from Thingiverse, preparing it for printing, and successfully printing it using an Ultimaker machine.

**Downloading a 3D Model from Thingiverse**

To start, open a web browser and navigate to Thingiverse, a popular online platform for sharing and discovering 3D models. Type in the search bar "articulated Dragon" and browse through the available models. Once you find a suitable model, click on it to view its details page. From here, you can download the STL file of the model, which is the standard format used by most 3D printing software.

**Preparing the Model for Printing**

After downloading the STL file, open the Ultimaker slicing software and drag and drop the file into the program. Make sure to select the correct settings for your machine, such as layer thickness and infill density. The slicing software will then analyze the model and generate a print plan that takes into account the specific requirements of your printer.

**Preparing the Printer**

Before printing, make sure that your Ultimaker machine is properly calibrated and ready for use. This includes leveling the bed, checking the temperature settings, and ensuring that the filament is properly fed into the machine. The article author notes that it's essential to prepare the printer carefully before starting a print job.

**Printing the Model**

With the model prepared and the printer set up, it's time to start the printing process. Open the slicing software and select the print plan generated earlier. Click on "Slice" to begin the slicing process, which may take several minutes depending on the complexity of the model. Once the slice is complete, insert the SD card into your computer and eject it from the machine.

**Manually Leveling the Machine**

The article author notes that manual leveling of the machine can be a crucial step in ensuring successful prints. This involves manually adjusting the bed's position to ensure that the print bed is level and even. The author links to a video tutorial on how to perform manual leveling, which provides additional guidance for readers.

**Feeding the Filament**

After manual leveling, the article author prepares the filament by hanging it on the machine and feeding it through the printer's extruder. This step is essential to ensure that the filament is properly fed into the machine during the printing process.

**Monitoring the Print Job**

With the filament prepared and the print job started, the next step is to monitor the print job and ensure that everything goes smoothly. The article author notes that it's essential to be present during the printing process to troubleshoot any issues that may arise.

**Overcoming Printing Challenges**

Unfortunately, not all prints go as planned. The article author notes that they experienced two failed prints due to ambient temperature changes in the room. They plan to start the print job again the next morning when the temperature is more stable.

**Final Thoughts and Recommendations**

The article concludes by highlighting the importance of proper preparation, calibration, and monitoring during the 3D printing process. It also provides additional tips for troubleshooting common issues that may arise during printing. By following these steps and taking a few extra precautions, readers can ensure successful prints with their Ultimaker machine.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enas a complete Noob with hardly any experience of the 3D printer that I would try to print one of the hardest prints you can print on a 3D printer you guys want to buy some filament what is up cupcakes I am Nick and this is Bill Dad build I've been a maker in some way shape or fashion my entire life and slowly along the way I've learned different tool sets but there's always been one machine that I thought was too nerdy even for me and that's 3D printing not to insult my 3D printing Brethren out there because I always just felt like the learning curve was going to be way too steep for one of these machines and those guys are much smarter than I am you might even say they're kung fu is better than mine it's better than yours so when creality reached out and wanted me to review their Ender S1 Plus I was a little nervous to say the least it just seemed that when 3D printers first came out you had to be really detail-oriented and Technical and I'm not good at either one of them but more and more I kept seeing people say oh I can just 3D print that and I wanted to have that ability so they sent this bad boy out and I thought I would do like a how to assemble video but it's just way too easy I'll link up here to the live that I did while I was putting it together but it's it's literally like four or five pieces the instructions are spot on and it just really didn't seem like that was enough for a video so once it was set up I just ran one of the test files that they have this little bunny and it turned out flipping Perfect Look at that so then just to make sure everything was working correctly I printed out a calibration queue and this thing turned out fine too look at that so next up every 3D printers right of passages you got to print a benchy which is this little guy all I know is that this has some specific measurements and things on it that lets you if your 3D printer is working correctly again I'm a complete nibb to this entire situation and I remember talking some people in a 3D printing group and somebody said and it'll always stick with me that a 3D printer or using a 3D printer is the closest thing that we have to Magic in today's society and so the question became did I just learn magic that easily do I now know said Kung Fu I know Kung Fu show me by the way I don't know why I'm making so many Kung Fu and karate references in this video yeah yeah so I decided that as a complete Noob with hardly any experience of the 3D printer that I would try to print one of the hardest prints you can print on a 3D printer that's right an articulated dragon let's do this I thought I'd show you how easy this process is if you just want to download someone else's design so I just came here to thingiverse and I'm going to type in here articulated Dragon see that we get several of them coming up I'm gonna go ahead and go with this one so from here you're just gonna download the font and for the most part this process is free and thingiverse but you can't tip your design so once I have this guy I'm just gonna pull it out on my desktop I'm gonna drop this down and then I'm just going to open this and this is going to have a couple files in it usually so we've got the files we've got images of what the files are supposed to look like and then the files themselves this is what you're going to put into your slicer so what we're going to use today is ultimaker by Cura you open that up and then I'm going to grab the dragon file and just drop it right in here and there we go and this is stuff that I found out after the fact but if you click on it you can hit rotate you can turn it around stuff like that you want to make sure that it's stays flat so there's this lay flat function so drop it down onto the printer bed anyway you always want it to lay flat when it prints it's just going to print a little bit better and then I'm leaving all the settings the the machine settings so I'm not messing with anything so now now that you put your STL file in here you want to hit slice and while it's doing that I'm putting the SD card that came with the printer into my computer and it should recognize it so we've got my Ender 3 disc in there I'm gonna hit no action and now it says saved or removable but so now it's saved it to my removable drive and I can just eject it from there there we go we're good to go we can go put this in the machine now okay so now we're gonna home the machine let it do its thing and then here I am doing a manual leveling of the machine I'll link to a video to show how to do this down below and now I'm letting the machine auto level itself uh this might be Overkill but hey here and then just pick the file next up I'm preparing the filament just getting it ready to go here I am hanging it on the machine and you just want to pull it through this little guy right here and then feed it into the machine itself all right and then we're just gonna hit play and let the machine start doing its job so here it is looks like it's printing great doing its thing looking at printing printing Printing and then all of a sudden so I don't know what happened but it barfed on itself in like the 11th well I say 11th Hour like the 15th hour like everything was cool up until that very cool all right let's try again sorry about the horrible lighting um this is the second failure where we just kind of went Spaghetti Head on the top of it what I've been told is that that might be a change in the uh ambient temperature in the room and as the end of this President happening in the middle of the night it's cold in Houston right now or it's cold at night and this is on the second floor I don't have the temperature I don't have the heaters high up here because nobody's up here in the evenings I'm gonna do start the print first thing tomorrow morning and that way it will print all throughout the day and it won't actually hit that cold time at night and we'll see if we can get rid of a get rid of Old Spaghetti Head there groovy groovy check out the shirt the wife and I are getting ready to go out this is just each of it in here real quick tomorrow morning tomorrow morning we feast or we started and it might be hard to tell on camera but all three of these prints failed and fuzzed out on me about the same place on the head now if I was a more experienced 3D printer I would have thought of a couple of things that I found out after the fact one is you can take an object and re-slice it which I didn't know that or I could just run it through the slicer again that may have taken care of the problem two in most slicers you can go layer by layer and see if anything looks out of place now I did that with this model after I had already downloaded a new articulated Dragon model so I didn't see anything wrong with it but it already downloaded and printed a new one and I'm happy to say it was a success check that bad boy out roll it roll that beautiful beam footage thank you foreignas a complete Noob with hardly any experience of the 3D printer that I would try to print one of the hardest prints you can print on a 3D printer you guys want to buy some filament what is up cupcakes I am Nick and this is Bill Dad build I've been a maker in some way shape or fashion my entire life and slowly along the way I've learned different tool sets but there's always been one machine that I thought was too nerdy even for me and that's 3D printing not to insult my 3D printing Brethren out there because I always just felt like the learning curve was going to be way too steep for one of these machines and those guys are much smarter than I am you might even say they're kung fu is better than mine it's better than yours so when creality reached out and wanted me to review their Ender S1 Plus I was a little nervous to say the least it just seemed that when 3D printers first came out you had to be really detail-oriented and Technical and I'm not good at either one of them but more and more I kept seeing people say oh I can just 3D print that and I wanted to have that ability so they sent this bad boy out and I thought I would do like a how to assemble video but it's just way too easy I'll link up here to the live that I did while I was putting it together but it's it's literally like four or five pieces the instructions are spot on and it just really didn't seem like that was enough for a video so once it was set up I just ran one of the test files that they have this little bunny and it turned out flipping Perfect Look at that so then just to make sure everything was working correctly I printed out a calibration queue and this thing turned out fine too look at that so next up every 3D printers right of passages you got to print a benchy which is this little guy all I know is that this has some specific measurements and things on it that lets you if your 3D printer is working correctly again I'm a complete nibb to this entire situation and I remember talking some people in a 3D printing group and somebody said and it'll always stick with me that a 3D printer or using a 3D printer is the closest thing that we have to Magic in today's society and so the question became did I just learn magic that easily do I now know said Kung Fu I know Kung Fu show me by the way I don't know why I'm making so many Kung Fu and karate references in this video yeah yeah so I decided that as a complete Noob with hardly any experience of the 3D printer that I would try to print one of the hardest prints you can print on a 3D printer that's right an articulated dragon let's do this I thought I'd show you how easy this process is if you just want to download someone else's design so I just came here to thingiverse and I'm going to type in here articulated Dragon see that we get several of them coming up I'm gonna go ahead and go with this one so from here you're just gonna download the font and for the most part this process is free and thingiverse but you can't tip your design so once I have this guy I'm just gonna pull it out on my desktop I'm gonna drop this down and then I'm just going to open this and this is going to have a couple files in it usually so we've got the files we've got images of what the files are supposed to look like and then the files themselves this is what you're going to put into your slicer so what we're going to use today is ultimaker by Cura you open that up and then I'm going to grab the dragon file and just drop it right in here and there we go and this is stuff that I found out after the fact but if you click on it you can hit rotate you can turn it around stuff like that you want to make sure that it's stays flat so there's this lay flat function so drop it down onto the printer bed anyway you always want it to lay flat when it prints it's just going to print a little bit better and then I'm leaving all the settings the the machine settings so I'm not messing with anything so now now that you put your STL file in here you want to hit slice and while it's doing that I'm putting the SD card that came with the printer into my computer and it should recognize it so we've got my Ender 3 disc in there I'm gonna hit no action and now it says saved or removable but so now it's saved it to my removable drive and I can just eject it from there there we go we're good to go we can go put this in the machine now okay so now we're gonna home the machine let it do its thing and then here I am doing a manual leveling of the machine I'll link to a video to show how to do this down below and now I'm letting the machine auto level itself uh this might be Overkill but hey here and then just pick the file next up I'm preparing the filament just getting it ready to go here I am hanging it on the machine and you just want to pull it through this little guy right here and then feed it into the machine itself all right and then we're just gonna hit play and let the machine start doing its job so here it is looks like it's printing great doing its thing looking at printing printing Printing and then all of a sudden so I don't know what happened but it barfed on itself in like the 11th well I say 11th Hour like the 15th hour like everything was cool up until that very cool all right let's try again sorry about the horrible lighting um this is the second failure where we just kind of went Spaghetti Head on the top of it what I've been told is that that might be a change in the uh ambient temperature in the room and as the end of this President happening in the middle of the night it's cold in Houston right now or it's cold at night and this is on the second floor I don't have the temperature I don't have the heaters high up here because nobody's up here in the evenings I'm gonna do start the print first thing tomorrow morning and that way it will print all throughout the day and it won't actually hit that cold time at night and we'll see if we can get rid of a get rid of Old Spaghetti Head there groovy groovy check out the shirt the wife and I are getting ready to go out this is just each of it in here real quick tomorrow morning tomorrow morning we feast or we started and it might be hard to tell on camera but all three of these prints failed and fuzzed out on me about the same place on the head now if I was a more experienced 3D printer I would have thought of a couple of things that I found out after the fact one is you can take an object and re-slice it which I didn't know that or I could just run it through the slicer again that may have taken care of the problem two in most slicers you can go layer by layer and see if anything looks out of place now I did that with this model after I had already downloaded a new articulated Dragon model so I didn't see anything wrong with it but it already downloaded and printed a new one and I'm happy to say it was a success check that bad boy out roll it roll that beautiful beam footage thank you foreign\n"