Is BambuStudio good enough now to do all the calibration, or is Orca Slicer still the go-to? All I can find on YouTube about calibration are 10 months or older showing how to use Orca Slicer, but nothing recent talking about BambuStudio, even though a lot has improved over the last year.
Here is the Bambu menu at the top and Orca at the bottom. Notice something missing?
Oh yeah⌠thatâs right⌠a calibration menu. Orca has it Bambu doesnât.
The reason you havenât seen anything recent is because the calibration menus in Orca have changed very little. Aside from PA Pattern and now the newer YOLO flow rate test, the calibration options and methodology have not changed much. It should also be noted that these calibration options themselves are years old and are only incorporated into Orca Slicer.
Bambu has decided to devote their resources to self-promotion in the form of MakerWorld and getting you to buy more filament. Whereas Orca is a slicer by hobbyists, for hobbyists and has proven that they will incorporate quality of life enhancements well before Bambu does and often Bambu simply doesnât bother. There are too many of those enhancements to list but just do a side by side of their preferences page and it will give you a glimpse. Turn on the advanced mode and a whole new world of granular control also can be seen. Guess which one of these preference menus belongs to Orca?
2 Likes
Yesterday I was running around in circles trying to get a new filament calibrated and visible as an option from the âDeviceâ tab in Bambu Studio. Long story short, I had to abandon my attempts in Bambu Studio and do it in Orca Slicer for the settings to stick.
My process in Bambu Studio:
- Click into filaments and âCreate New Filamentâ by going into the âGearâ icon here!
then click âCustom Filamentsâ - Filled out the âCreate Filamentâ form
- Go into Calibration and perform flow calibration on the new filament, which should be under âUser presetsâ. I went ahead and zoomed in between 0.03 and 0.045
- I ended up with 0.035 PA for my 3DHOJOR filament
- The filament will now be visible on the Device page drop down. Set the filament and make sure correct PA is selected too, then head over to the Flow Rate Calibration
- Make sure Flow Rate Calibration is set to textured plate, and correct filament selected and the run the first test.
- Finally after both FR calibrations I get this:
My Bambu Studio issue then presented itself. While this new filament, its calibrated version and the PA Profile are all visible in Bambu Studio, attempting to âsetâ the filament via the Device window would initially look like it worked
but after about 10 to 30 seconds the filament would change to a question mark â?â name and appear to be an unknown filament. Sorry I donât have a screen capture of this, and Iâm nervous to fiddle with it again just to produce a screen shot.
I tried a handful of online solutions, such as disconnecting my A1 Mini from my account, then logging in again. But none of them worked.
The only thing that worked was to set the filament via Orca Slicer. Which feels very strange to me.
Have you actually tried clicking on that link?
This is not a calibration tool. Itâs simply a lecture. In other words, itâs an over-glorified help screen, thatâs all.
What do you mean âDo-Nothing Buttonsâ ?
1 Like
Also why does your Bambu Studio say âNo printerâ
Itâs also available on the Fedora appImage install.
1 Like
I have been using the 3 calibration options from within Bambu (2 styles of flow dynamics, and flow rate) and it seems to be working reasonably well. I have seen issues where the custom filament doesnât show up in drop-downs until I restart Bambu, but the calibrations seem to work.
From the above threads I take it that the options in Orca are more comprehensive. So my question really still stands: assuming that the Bambu optimizations are functional (you probably have to have a printer selected for them to work, etc.), when are the instances that you would reach for Orca Slicer? In other words, are there scenarios where the Bambu optimizations are not enough?
@Olias @JJTechPrints thanks for your thorough replies above. I take it that maybe people are fed up with Bambu being quirky and not necessarily reliable, and default to Orca because its a more stable experience? Perhaps thatâs the answer to my question? I guess Orca has more optimization options, as well? Sorry for my lack of focus, being so new to this I am trying to see if I should build my workflow around Orca, or keep using Bambu until I need to switch due to its limitations. Of course I donât know what I donât know, so I may not realize something is a limitation.
Thanks again!
1 Like
I would prefer to use Bambu Studio 100% of the time, however the custom filament stuff has been far too unreliable. My workaround for a LONG time now has been to just always leave âFlow Dynamics Calibrationâ checked whenever I print an object. But thatâs a bandaid solution. In Orca Slicer the custom filament calibration just works, and I also purchased the K2 Plus which Orca Slicer already mostly supports.
I wish Bambu would add the calibration menu. Anycubic Next has it as well, like orca.
Forgive my ignorance, if one calibrates with Orca Slicer, does one print with Orca Slicer, or can we use those calibrated filaments in Bambu as well? Or is that the unreliable part?
You can use your calibration findings from Orca, in studio. Youâd have to manually input the changes in both regardless.
I feel Bambu has to walk that line between providing core functionality and providing endless calibration options that trip up new people to 3d printing. If they provide too many options some people get lost and itâs a support nightmare. Fortunately there is a 3rd party slicer (Orca) that can provide all of the options for those folks that want to really dig into calibration.
4 Likes
Thanks @CRracer712 I think that addresses my newb question and perspective. Thanks @JonRaymond for providing additional perspective, that makes sense. I will basically end up âgraduatingâ to using Orca in various capacities when Iâm ready and more comfortable with the entire process.
Thanks everyone for your input and helping me understand the differences.
1 Like
Youâre probably correct, using the KISS method
The nice thing about orca is they (all variants) look and feel similar. Youl just notice some options added here and there.
And orca can use the Bambu plug-in to print through the cloud, just like studio.
I still mostly use studio for itâs convenience of Makerworld integration.
And I donât mind entering filament settings manually in Bambu, if they work as expected. The integration with MakerWorld is like like when Linspire (old Linux distro) introduced one-click app installs.
1 Like
Itâs not that itâs more stable, itâs that Orca is simply a better slicer on so many levels that matter to hobbyists. It should be underscored that Orca is Bambu Studio re-compiled and fined-tuned for us, the 3D hobbyist.
Hereâs the thing: Bambu Studio has some originality; that we cannot take away from them. But it is far from original. Orca itself is compiled from the open-source code that anyone can download from Bambuâs GitHub, which is derived from open-source code that is derived from Prusa Slicer, which is derived from Cura and also is derived from the granddaddy of all modern slicers, Slic3r. Bambu even credits orca 7 times in release 1.9 for code that the Orca community developed and if you peel back that onion even more, Orca simply re-installed features that were in Prusa or Cura that Bambu pulled out when they ported Prusa over to Bambu Studio.
It is helpful to remember that until Bambu came on the scene, this community had a more share and share alike vibe. Bambu is only making the bare minimum available as open source and based on current trajectory, I thoroughly expect them to try to close off any user-mod enhancements they donât like just like Apple who they say they want to emulate. Thatâs bad for the community in my view.
____________________________________________________________
Citation direct from Bambu Wiki as one such example:
The issue with Bambu Studio is that they hit a grand slam with their vision of what a slicer should be upon its first release, and then they sat on their ass, implementing only incremental improvements and, most of all, turning Studio into a marketing tool for Makerworld. While I donât begrudge a company for self-promotion, I know of nobody who likes it shoved in their face. By that, I mean Orca allows you to launch directly into the design page, whereas Bambu force-feeds us advertising. Mark my words: itâs only a matter of time before we have to click past popups!!!
___________________________________________________________
Here is the list of predecessor and dependent libraries that Bambu cites in their âaboutâ page that one can find under Help in Bambu Studio.
License
Bambu Studio is licensed under GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.
Bambu Studio is based on PrusaSlicer by Prusa Research, which is based on Slic3r by Alessandro Ranellucci and the RepRap community.
Libraries
This software uses open source components whose copyright and other proprietary rights belong to their respective owners:
Admesh
https://admesh.readthedocs.io/
Anti-Grain Geometry
http://antigrain.com
ArcWelderLib
https://plugins.octoprint.org/plugins/arc_welder
Boost
http://www.boost.org
Cereal
http://uscilab.github.io/cereal
CGAL
https://www.cgal.org
Clipper
http://www.angusj.co
libcurl
https://curl.se/libcurl
Eigen3
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org
Expat
http://www.libexpat.org
fast_float
https://github.com/fastfloat/fast_float
GLEW (The OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library)
http://glew.sourceforge.net
GLFW
https://www.glfw.org
GNU gettext
https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext
ImGUI
https://github.com/ocornut/imgui
Libigl
https://libigl.github.io
libnest2d
https://github.com/tamasmeszaros/libnest2d
lib_fts
https://www.forrestthewoods.com
Mesa 3D
https://mesa3d.org
Miniz
https://github.com/richgel999/miniz
Nanosvg
https://github.com/memononen/nanosvg
nlohmann/json
https://json.nlohmann.me
Qhull
http://qhull.org
Open Cascade
https://www.opencascade.com
OpenGL
https://www.opengl.org
PoEdit
https://poedit.net
PrusaSlicer
https://www.prusa3d.com
Real-Time DXT1/DXT5 C compression library
https://github.com/Cyan4973/RygsDXTc
SemVer
https://semver.org
Shinyprofiler
https://code.google.com/p/shinyprofiler
SuperSlicer
https://github.com/supermerill/SuperSlicer
TBB
https://www.intel.cn/content/www/cn/zh/developer/tools/oneapi/onetbb.html
wxWidgets
https://www.wxwidgets.org
zlib
http://zlib.net
1 Like
Thanks for all the context on this, I had no idea!