A Bambu Labs 3D printer is shown printing a cube. The cube has a division between yellow and purple plastic running at an angle through the cube. The printer is printing the purple section, and the face on which it is printing is angled at nearly 40 degrees to the print bed.

Printing Smooth Upper Surfaces With A Non-Planar Slicer

November 15, 2026 by Aaron Beckendorf 4 Comments

One of the most tantalizing prospects for 3D printing has been non-planar printing, which promises smoother surfaces without a staircase pattern, reduced or eliminated support structures in some incarnations, and the possibility of greater strength in others. One of the biggest limits to its adoption has been the lack of non-planar slicer programs, a gap which [Zimeng Xiong] of [Alpaca Engineering] has worked to eliminate with the non-planar PancakeSlicer.

PancakeSlicer is designed to work with standard 3-axis printers (a Bambu Labs A1 Mini in this case), so the non-planar paths available to it are limited by the print head’s clearance on each side of the nozzle. In the case of the A1 Mini, this could be substantially improved by removing the cooling shroud from the print head, relying instead on a remote static cooling system (RSCS), which blows cooling air in from the sides of the print bed. Being meant for 3-axis printers, the main goal of PancakeSlicer is to print smooth top surfaces without a stair-step pattern.

Continue reading “Printing Smooth Upper Surfaces With A Non-Planar Slicer” →

Is Manual Filament Tuning Still Worth It?

August 11, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

In this era of consumer-grade FDM printers that have automatic bed levelling, automatic pressure advance tuning, automatic temperature regulation and so on buttoned away behind bullet-proof presets and automation, something as archaic as manual filament tuning does seem a bit out of place. Unless you’re running that hot rod Voron FDM printer, does it make sense to ‘waste time’ with manual tuning your off-the-shelf FDM printer? In a recent video [MandicReally] argues that it still makes sense to unlock more performance.

Up front it’s made clear that these auto-tuned configurations are perfectly fine for the average user, who will be perfectly happy with something like a ‘generic PLA’ preset combined with whatever auto-configuration the printer did. That said, not every filament is the same, nor is each heating element, nozzle and feeding system. In that sense it can be worth it to take a deeper look.

In the video basic aspects like preparing the material, such as properly drying, are looked at, before running through tests for temperature, flow ratio and rate, pressure advance, retraction speeds, material shrinkage etc. before doing a test between such a tuned profile versus a generic preset for ASA filament.

Although the difference isn’t night and day, the tuned profile was faster due to less conservative settings and had better accuracy on the final print due to taking the target FDM printer’s performance into account. Even if not something that the average hobbyist would be interested in, if you’re doing something like production runs with FDM, this might be something you’d want to look at.

Continue reading “Is Manual Filament Tuning Still Worth It?” →

Commercialization And Innovation

August 1, 2026 by Elliot Williams 17 Comments

The last year or two has seen relatively affordable multi-material printers hit the market, and the question that [Tom Nardi] and I were kicking around when he was writing up the 2025 year-in-review article was what it was going to mean for our folks. I don’t think he got it wrong per se, but his heading for that section “Grandma is 3D-Printing in Color” only tells half the story.

He did get that part right, though. We’ve certainly seen a flourishing of multi-material designs out there that take advantage of the availability of (usually) four colors. The ability to print in color has given life to the purely decorative models, of course. Think full-color Pokemon desktop toys, for instance. But even functional prints have benefited from contrasting color labels printed right into the box, not to even mention the multi-material supports that pull off easier and cleaner than ever before.

Since most of these multi-filament machines are pretty much locked down as far as hardware tinkering goes, our sights were firmly locked on what the end-user would do with the new capability. But we overlooked the third axis of 3D printering: the software hackers. And it’s precisely in this area of slicer and path-planning that we’ve seen some of the coolest developments this year. Why? Because people have the hardware in their hands that they need to test out the algorithms.

FullSpectrum and the more recent ImageMap are two techniques to get the missing in-between colors out of a four-filament printer, and in particular ImageMap tries to get the job done faster, and with fewer purges. We are amazed to see two different approaches to color blending popping up in just a few months of each other, and we have no doubt that work on this is going to continue.

At the end of the day, this really is just “put new tools in the hands of creative hackers, and they’ll find new ways to use them”, so we shouldn’t have been surprised at all. But if this is what comes out of the commercialization of the multi-material printer, what’s going to come when some of the more esoteric machine designs go mainstream? We can’t wait to find out!

PreFlight Slicer Brings Added Part Strength Feature, And Many More

May 15, 2026 by Donald Papp 39 Comments

Interested in taking some wild new 3D printing features for a test drive? preFlight is a free and open source slicer that brings a host of processing improvements as well as fascinating new features and interesting twists on old ones. There are almost too many to list, so here are a few that caught our eye.

Cross-sectional view of *Interlocking Perimeters*, which increases Z-strength. Unlike brick layers, layer height stays constant.

Want to mix and match different support types on the same object? No problem. How about use Nip & Tuck seams to better hide where layers start and stop? You can emboss images directly onto print surfaces with a real-time preview and use smart bridging for counter-bored holes. We particularly like the ability to preview a sliced object from the side instead of just by layer. That’s not all, either.

Those features alone are pretty intriguing, but there’s one in particular that is particularly relevant to creating stronger parts. Interlocking Perimeters increases layer bonding to increase object strength. Unlike brick layers, which staggers layers vertically, interlocking perimeters plays with spacing and compression to increase bonding in the Z axis while keeping layer heights constant. This is possible thanks in part to the greater control offered by Athena, the new perimeter generator.

There are plenty more features — like a full Python runtime embedded directly into the slicing pipeline, and a host of export pathways — so check out the GitHub repository for added detail and let us know in the comments if you give it a try.

A wooden frame is shown with a scale pulling down on a 3D-printed part held in the frame. A phone on a stand is taking video of the part.

Changing Print Layer Patterns To Increase Strength

January 31, 2026 by Aaron Beckendorf 3 Comments

Dy default, the slicing software used for 3D printers has the printer first create the walls around the edges of a print, then goes back to deposit the infill pattern. [NeedItMakeIt], however, experimented with a different approach to line placement, and found significant strength improvements for some filaments.

The problem, as [NeedItMakeIt] identified with a thermal camera, is that laying down walls around a print gives the extruded plastic time to cool of. This means new plastic is being deposited onto an already-cooled surface, which reduces bonding strength. Instead, he used an aligned rectilinear fill pattern to print the solid parts. In this pattern, the printer is usually extruding filament right next to the filament it just deposited, which is still hot and therefore adheres better. The extrusion pattern is also aligned vertically, which might improve inter-layer bonding at the transition point.

To try it out, he printed a lever-type test piece, then recorded the amount of force it took to break a column free from the base. He tried it with a default fill pattern, aligned fill, and aligned fill with a single wall around the outside, and printed copies in PLA, plain PETG, and carbon fiber-reinforced PETG. He found that aligned fill improved strength in PLA and carbon fiber PETG, in both cases by about 46%, but led to worse performance in plain PETG. Strangely, the aligned fill with a single outside wall performed better than default for PLA, but worse than default in both forms of PETG. The takeaway seems to be that aligned fill improves layer adhesion when it’s lacking, but when adhesion is already good, as with PETG, it’s a weaker pattern overall.

Interesting, [MakeItPrintIt]’s test results fit in well with previous testing that found carbon fiber makes prints weaker. Another way to get stronger print fill patterns is with brick layers.

Continue reading “Changing Print Layer Patterns To Increase Strength” →

Open Source 5-Axis Printer Has Its Own Slicer

August 4, 2025 by Tyler August 22 Comments

Three-axis 3D printing has been with us long enough that everybody knows the limitations, but so far, adding extra axes has been very much a niche endeavor. [Daniel] at Fractal Robotics wants to change that, with the Fractal 5 Pro 5-axis printer, and its corresponding Fractal Cortex slicer.

The printer looks like an extra-beefy Voron from a distance, which is no surprise as [Daniel] admits to taking heavy inspiration from the Voron Trident. The Fractal 5 shares a core-XY geometry with the Voron, using beefy 30 mm x 30 mm extrusions. Also like the Voron, it runs Klipper on a Raspberry Pi hiding in the base. Under a standard-looking printhead using a BondTech extruder and E3D volcano hotend, we find the extra two axes hiding under the circular build plate. The B axis is a gantry that can pivot the build plate assembly a full 90 degrees; the A axis spins the plate without limit thanks to the slip rings built into the design.

The extruder may look fairly normal, but it has actually been designed very carefully to allow the nozzle to get as close as possible to the build plate when the B-axis is at 90 degrees. It looks like the E3D hotend is actually the limiting factor there, which gives plenty of design freedom when planning prints in the accompanying Fractal Cortex slicer.

Continue reading “Open Source 5-Axis Printer Has Its Own Slicer” →

3D Printed Brick Layers For Everyone

March 17, 2025 by Al Williams 19 Comments

Some slicers have introduced brick layers, and more slicers plan to add them. Until that happens, you can use this new script from [Geek Detour] to get brick layer goodness on Prusa, Orca, and Bambu slicers. Check out the video below for more details.

The idea behind brick layers is that outer walls can be stronger if they are staggered vertically so each layer interlocks with the layer below it. The pattern resembles a series of interlocking bricks and can drastically increase strength. Apparently, using the script breaks the canceling object functionality in some printers, but that’s a small price to pay. Multi-material isn’t an option either, but — typically — you’ll want to use the technique on functional parts, which you probably aren’t printing in colors. Also, the Arachne algorithm option only works reliably on Prusa slicer, so far.

The video covers a lot of detail on how hard it was to do this in an external script, and we are impressed. It should be easier to write inside the slicer since it already has to figure out much of the geometry that this script has to figure out by observation.

If you want more information, we’ve covered brick layers (and the controversy around them) back in November. Of course, scripts that add functions to slicers, tend to get outdated once the slicers catch up.

Continue reading “3D Printed Brick Layers For Everyone” →