All You Need to Know About Orca Slicer

In today’s FDM 3D printing landscape, Bambu Lab is a major player. On social media, in printing forums and at international trade fairs such as Formnext, the Chinese manufacturer is on everyone’s lips and in high demand. But 3D printing cannot be done with printers alone. In additive manufacturing, slicers are needed to generate the so-called G-Code, a language that can be understood by the 3D printer. Although Bambu Lab has already excelled in this area with the Bambu Studio, their Orca Slicer software is another highlight from the Bambu Lab sphere. But what’s all the hype about this software, does Orca Slicer deliver what it promises, and is the uproar from the 3D printing community justified?

Orca Slicer was first released in July 2022 and was originally known as Bambu Studio SoftFever. This is due to the fact that it is based on a fork of Bambu Studio and PrusaSlicer and was developed by Bambu Lab user SoftFever. Orca Slicer also has many of the functions of the aforementioned slicing models and also contains SuperSlicer options, especially calibration functions. It was developed to extend the limits of Bambu Studio.

Orca Slicer takes advantage of Bambu Studio’s ease-of-use (Credits: Bambu Lab)

As Orca Slicer also uses the functions of other slicers, it offers important advantages for the user. On the one hand, the tool portfolio is much more interesting and expanded. On the other, the program is an open source slicer for FDM 3D printers. This is because Orca Slicer has evolved from Bambu Studio, which is based on the open source PrusaSlicer, which in turn is based on Slic3r, which is also open source. Although Bambu Lab tries to keep its environment as closed source as possible, this is not possible if the final products are based on open source models. Therefore, Orca Slicer is a free and open source solution.