3D Printing Software

It's been a few weeks since we took a look at the massive list of features coming to OrcaSlicer. In the developers' own words, it's "the biggest update in OrcaSlicer's history", adding texture displacement, a new tab for creating CAD models in-slicer, support for multi-printhead machines printing in parrallel, mixed nozzles sizes and plug-in support, and more than we have the wordcount here to cover. It's a doozy, and now you can try it for yourself (without the risk that comes with testing Alpha or Beta releases).

If your 3D printer farm has reached the point where “just open another browser tab” no longer qualifies as management, Watchtower would like a word. Now on Kickstarter, the locally hosted dashboard corrals Bambu Lab, Klipper, OctoPrint, and PrusaLink machines into one interface, with camera feeds, filament tracking, error monitoring, job queues, and automatic routing of prints to suitable machines. Its makers are leaning heavily on local operation rather than funneling your print farm through yet another cloud account – a concept apparently novel enough to be a selling point in 2026.

gathering user feedback about its software and how it could be better at the little things – all in preparation for launching what it calls Anycubic Software 2.0. The release brings a raft of updates that touches both Anycubic Slicer Next and the Anycubic App. Highlights include making features like spaghetti detection toggleable in-app, syncing materials settings, better support for third-party filament in the material library, and adding file search and full print history to the slicer. It's a solid collection of quality-of-life improvements.

Forget awkwardly holding parts together while explaining where everything goes. Bambu Studio’s new Model Assembly Guides feature in the 2.8.0 Public Beta lets you present an exploded view of your project directly in the software and automatically split the model into assembly steps downloadable as PDFs or MP4s.

– a new Prusa subscription expands usage limits. Starting at $8.99 a month for the "Basic" tier, you get 20 GB of file storage plus HD camera streaming and longer slicing time using the EasyPrint cloud printing tool. A "Premium" tier adds even more of all three at $29.99. There are discounts for annual subscriptions.

Paid users will get access to the Prusa Connect Farm mode when it launches soon, too. Regular Prusa Connect can handle multiple printers already, but only in isolation. Farm mode treats them as nodes in a network for job assignment and other more productive usage.

Possibly. Buried in the release notes for the latest PrusaSlicer 2.9.5 beta is a frank note explaining recent delays – it suggests the long-awaited major update is just a matter of weeks away (though curiously, "maybe more than four").

Seven years after the launch of PrusaSlicer 2.0, version 3.0 is expected to bring a massive overhaul to the tool, freshening up the UI, expanding your workflow with tabbed projects and updating the engine under the hood.