I just watched the video for the new alpha of PrusaSlicer 3.0, and it seems to show some interesting features and redesign. I am curious if anyone has an inkling if there are features worth the time and effort if these will eventually percolate over to Bambu Slicer and is so, how long would you expect it to take?
The plugin support would be a great addition. Especially the ability to share plugins amongst the various slicer forks. Project tabs would be another nice feature to port over.
Have a look
Nice new features.
Still the different nozzle sizes use the same layer height.
Not a serious issue, but definitely not yet an optimal solution. When I want to use a small nozzle, all other layer heights are linked to the max layer height used on the small nozzle.
Depending upon where the small nozzle is required, you might play with variable layer height to improve time.
Let’s hope they solve the individual layer heights soon also.
I guess that depends entirely on what, how and if Bambu intends to implement (read copy) into its Studio what Prusa has already implement in its new slicer version… and to what degree (whether Bambu’s implementation is successful or requires further patching).
I am very curious myself to see if Bambu decides to adopt PrusaSlicer 3.0. They’ve invested quite a lot of time and development effort into adding new features to Bambu Studio (e.g., Filament Manager). They may decide the sunk costs are too great for them to port their work to an almost all-new codebase. It’s a lot of short-term pain, and with a huge customer base of less-technical users, it’s a high risk move.
There seem like a lot of upsides to PS3.0, especially the plug-in system & plug-in store they’re developing. I would expect Bambu to be all over that idea. It’s worked out really well for Elgato’s Stream Deck; the plug-in store (with mostly free plug-ins but some paid too) makes the whole platform more useful and attractive to customers. A 3D printer maker could really make some hay out of that.
I did find it interesting that Prussia’s blog post on PS3 mentioned their GUI code is such as complete re-write that they could have closed sourced it. Given that PrusaSlicer is AGPL v3 licensed, I would have expected that not to be possible – the Affero license is intentionally highly infective. So, if Prusa thinks they could have made it stick, that supports Bambu’s rationale for closed-sourcing the BS networking code despite the AGPL license that Bambu Studio inherited when they forked it from PrusaSlicer.
Of course, Prusa being Prusa, they still released it as AGPL. So, I hope that even if Bambu doesn’t adopt 3.0 for Studio, projects such as OrcaSlicer may.
Bambu, being Bambu… will probably make it so that only Bambu signed plugins will run on Bambu Studio and nowhere else. They’ll probably even charge a licensing fee like Apple does.
Maybe, but if MakerWorld is any indication on how much effort Bambu wants to put into reviewing a repository I doubt it. I am not truly holding out any hope that they will put too much effort into the software either, but it would be nice. One can dream!