Bambu Studio

If you already slice your own plates, you can send us the sliced file instead of a mesh and we print exactly that. Nothing is re-sliced, re-oriented or re-arranged. Or send the saved project, and we slice it, in its own colours if it has them. This page covers which profile to slice against, how to export the file Bambu Studio and OrcaSlicer actually produce, what stays adjustable afterwards, and when you are better off letting us slice it.

Mesh or sliced: pick before you start#

Slice it yourself when you care about something a service cannot infer — seam placement, a specific support layout, a modifier region, a tuned first layer. Send a mesh when you want us to make those calls, or when you want to change scale or quantity after seeing the price.

Which profile to target#

• Printer: Bambu Lab H2S. It is the largest plate in the fleet and the build volume the rest of the site is measured against. The fleet also runs P2S machines; a plate sliced for a P2S can only be assigned to a P2S, which narrows the pool of machines that can take your job.
• Nozzle: 0.4 mm. It is the diameter a printer is registered with by default and the diameter the mesh path slices at unless you change it.
• Filament preset: match the plastic you are going to order. PLA, PETG, ABS, ASA and TPU are the five we sell, and the preset sets the temperatures the file will ask for.
• One plate per export. Export the plate you want printed rather than a multi-plate project. To have every plate of a project printed, upload the saved project instead: we slice it plate by plate and print one job per plate.

Exporting the file#

1. 1
   Set the printer and filament

   Bambu Lab H2S, 0.4 mm nozzle, and the filament preset for the plastic you will order. Changing these after slicing means slicing again — the header is written at slice time.

2. 2
   Arrange and slice the plate

   Position, orient, add supports, then press Slice plate. Check the filament weight and time it reports; those two numbers are what we read back out of the file and what your price is worked out from.

3. 3
   Export the sliced file

   File, Export, Export plate sliced file. That writes a .gcode.3mf containing the G-code, which prints exactly as exported. Save project writes a .3mf with no G-code in it: we accept that too, but we slice it ourselves, with our profile, so your plate's own settings do not carry over. See Sending the project below.

4. 4
   Upload it at /print

   Drop the .gcode.3mf on the upload area. A plain .gcode is refused at /print, because the farm starts every print from a plate 3MF; the print API still takes one. Sliced files are capped at 40 MB on the website and 100 MB through the print API. The plate preview embedded by your slicer is what you will see on the order.

5. 5
   Pick material and colour

   These still matter. Material sets the rate per gram and tells the operator which plastic to load; colour tells them which spool. Leave quality on Standard — see the note below.

6. 6
   Order

   The price is worked out from the filament grams your slicer wrote into the file, at the rate for the material and colour you chose.

   bashCopy

   # Or submit it straight to the print API
   curl -X POST https://x3dstudios.com/api/print/orders \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer $X3D_API_KEY" \
     -F "file=@plate_1.gcode.3mf" \
     -F "material=petg" \
     -F "color=Black" \
     -F "quantity=1" \
     -F "recipientName=Ada Lovelace" \
     -F "street1=1 Main St" \
     -F "city=Austin" \
     -F "state=TX" \
     -F "zip=78750"

What we read out of your file#

• Total filament weight in grams — this is what you are billed on, rounded up to the whole gram.
• Estimated print time — used for the machine-time part of the price where the hours exceed what the weight alone would imply, which in practice means multi-colour plates.
• Footprint and maximum Z, from the print moves.
• The printer model the file was sliced for, from printer_model or printer_settings_id.
• Filament types and colours, from filament_type and filament_colour — a multi-slot plate lists each one, and that is what the AMS tray mapping is built from.
• The embedded plate thumbnail, which becomes the image on your order.

Because those numbers come from your slicer rather than from an estimate, a pre-sliced order prices on exactly what your plate will consume — including purge waste and tool-change time on a multi-colour plate. Nothing is added on top for colour changes; the file already contains them. The one addition is hardware: a plate that uses five or more filaments needs a second AMS unit, so it adds the $25 second-AMS fee once per order line. Through the print API the count is a .gcode.3mf plate's own list of the filaments it uses, and a plain .gcode, which lists every filament its project defined whether used or not, is priced as one colour. A five-to-eight colour plate prints once a printer has that many filaments loaded, which can take longer than the live lead time.

Safety validation before it reaches a machine#

Every sliced file is scanned before it is sent to a printer. A valid Bambu or Orca slice for the right printer passes; the checks exist to catch hand-edited and post-processed G-code.

Sending the project#

A saved project carries its filament table, the filament each part and modifier prints in, and any colour painting. Upload it at /print and, when it assigns two or more filaments, the page lists them with their slot numbers and materials and offers Print in N colours or One colour instead. We slice each plate in those colours in the background, with your parts, assignments and paint and our standard 0.2mm profile, and the page shows which plate it is on.

• The colour price is that slice: its grams and hours, purge and changes included. Colours are counted by what lays down plastic, up to eight, and five or more adds the $25 second-AMS fee once per order line.
• In colour the project prints at 100% scale, standard quality, in the plastic its filaments name. A multi-plate project prints as one job per plate.
• Not printable in colour: two filament types on one plate (PLA with PETG, or even PLA with PLA-CF), different base plastics on different plates (PLA on one, PETG on another), a colour change at a set layer height, a height-range modifier that switches filament, or more than eight filaments. The page says which, and the project still prints in one colour.
• Want your own layer height, walls or supports? Slice it and send the plate instead. A project is sliced with our profile.

When to send a mesh instead#

• You want to change scale, infill or quality after seeing the price. All three are locked on a sliced file, and scale is fixed at 100%.
• Your sliced file is over 40 MB. The mesh it came from is almost certainly well under 100 MB.
• You do not know which machine it will land on and do not want to constrain it to one model.
• You want the quote to come from our slice rather than yours. We slice with OrcaSlicer against the official Bambu presets, so the weight we bill is measured the same way yours is.
• You are ordering several copies and would rather we lay out the plate.

Common export problems#