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Slicing and 3D printing

Turn a modeled part into printable layers plus G-code, preview them in the viewport, and hand the result to your printer. Slicing runs a built-in FDM engine and never changes your model.

Set up a printer

Open the slice panel (Slice for 3D Printing from the F1 palette, or the Slice tab of the Export panel). The Printer section works out of the box:

  • Pick a model (Generic FDM, Bambu Lab X1C, Bambu Lab H2S). This fills the bed size, nozzle diameter and G-code flavor.
  • Adjust bed size or nozzle diameter if needed; edits save automatically.

There is no filament to pick: a part prints in the material it is designed in.

Choose the filament

The Filament row in the Setup section shows the material the part will print with, taken from the body's assigned material. Click it to open the Material panel, where its temperatures, cooling and flow live under Printing (see Materials). Assign a different material and the slice follows.

Two cases have no printable material: nothing assigned yet, or a material that cannot be printed (a metal, when you are prototyping a part you intend to machine). Either way the row becomes a dropdown: pick what to print the part as, defaulting to generic PLA, and slice normally. The choice is saved with the setup and the part's own material is left alone.

A part made of several bodies can print each in its own filament. Give two bodies different printable materials (click a body, apply a material in the Material panel) and the slice follows. There is no switch to flip, and nothing changes for a part whose bodies share one material.

The printer swaps filament between bodies. With an AMS the swap is automatic; anywhere else it is an M600 pause, so a tall two-material part means a lot of pauses. Right after each swap the nozzle still holds the last of the previous colour, so it is purged into a prime tower: a small block beside the part on the bed and in the layer preview, which goes in the bin afterwards.

The preview colours each path by its filament, and the panel breaks the filament figures down per spool alongside the number of swaps.

Position the part on the bed

With the panel open the printer bed appears as a translucent plate with the part resting on its lowest point, centered. The part itself never moves; you move the bed to change how the part is placed:

  • Rotate / tilt the bed with the ring handles to lay the part down a different way, for example on its side to avoid supports. After a tilt the part re-settles onto its new lowest point.
  • Move the part across the plate with the in-plane arrows.
  • Rest face: click the field in Placement, then a flat face of the part; that face becomes the bottom. Reset returns to the automatic bottom-rest. The eye button shows or hides the bed and gizmo, hidden by default.

The part always rests flat on the plate, since a floating gap is not printable. If it is bigger than the plate the bed turns red and the panel warns. The placement is saved with the setup and used when you slice.

Slice a part

Select a part, then in Setup:

  1. Choose a quality preset (Draft 0.28mm, Standard 0.20mm, High Quality 0.20mm (Bambu), Fine 0.12mm) and the fields below fill with its defaults. A Bambu printer selects the Bambu-tuned preset automatically; its values match BambuStudio's "0.20mm High Quality" profile for the same machine and filament.
  2. Adjust anything: layer height, walls, top/bottom layers, infill density and pattern (grid, gyroid, honeycomb and more), seam, skirt/brim. Each field shows the value that will be used.
  3. Pick a Wall type. arachne (the default) gives variable-width walls following the shape's medial axis, so thin features and gaps fill cleanly; classic gives concentric perimeters, where Gap fill (off by default) adds a thin bead into gaps too narrow for a full perimeter. The preview draws each wall at its true bead width, so Arachne's variation is visible. Ironing (on by default) re-traces top surfaces with a fine low-flow pass.
  4. Turn on Supports if the part has overhangs (grid or tree, with an overhang-angle threshold).
  5. Press Slice.

The part hides so the layers read clearly, and the panel shows layer count, estimated print time and filament usage. Drag the layer scrubber to walk up through the print; the viewport draws each toolpath coloured by its role (walls, skin, infill, supports). Clear Slice resets the preview and brings the part back.

Check how well the layers will bond

A printed part is weaker across its layers than along them, because each road has only the seconds before it cools to weld itself to the one below. Switch the preview from Roles to Bonding and the toolpaths are recoloured by how well that weld is predicted to go: blue is a bond as strong as the material itself, red is barely joined. The panel reports the mean and worst ratio, which layer is weakest (click it to jump there), and how much void the bead packing leaves.

Grey roads were not scored: the first layer, which bonds to the bed; supports and other sacrificial paths; and any road sitting on a different filament, where the weld depends on how the two materials get on rather than on either alone.

What moves the number is what you would expect: a hotter nozzle, a slower layer or less part cooling all leave the interface hot for longer. Materials without melt-flow data cannot be scored at all, and the panel says so rather than guessing.

Accuracy

A comparison tool, not a strength prediction. A ratio is meaningful against another ratio and is not a number of megapascals. PLA and PETG are each calibrated against published upright-versus-flat tensile measurements, so ranking those two is on measured ground, and the measurements say PETG welds worse than PLA, the opposite of the common claim. TPU is not calibrated: no published pair could be found, so it carries PLA's constant and its number is a placeholder.

Both calibrations come from small test coupons, whose layers print in seconds and weld about as well as a print can. A big part, where a layer takes a minute, welds worse than the ratio suggests. Use it to see which layer of a part is the risk, and which settings improve it.

Slice a whole assembly

To print a whole assembly as one plate, open the Slice tab of the Export panel and use the cog on an assembly row instead of a part row. Every part is placed by its assembly position and sliced together as a single plate, so the modeled arrangement is preserved (where two parts overlap, the one modeled first wins).

Filaments follow each part's own material, so a multi-material assembly prints in all of them; the Filament field sets the stand-in for any part whose material is not printable. The bed-placement controls are hidden for an assembly plate, since it keeps its modeled layout. Everything else works the same, and the download is named after the assembly.

The slice panel only generates the preview. Download from the Slice tab of the Export panel, which lists every part with a shortcut to open its slice setup or download it. Pick the format (.gcode or .gcode.3mf) from the dropdown above the list.

For a Bambu Lab printer use .gcode.3mf: it is a container built to the same shape BambuStudio exports (plate G-code, its checksum, and the plate metadata), so a Bambu machine accepts it. Either open it in BambuStudio (File > Open, it loads as a sliced plate) and send it to the printer, or copy it onto an SD card or USB stick and select it from the printer's touchscreen.

Use an external spool for the first print, since AMS filament mapping is not wired up yet. The preview tile shows the model from the home view, rendered when the file is downloaded; a blank tile does not affect printing.

A direct Print button that sends over your LAN is planned. It needs the printer in LAN Developer Mode.