Skip to content
3MF Translator

What it is

A .3mf project holds more than the model. It also holds the slicer’s own project: the plates, the objects and their parts, which filament prints what, the filament colors, the color changes and the print settings. Every slicer writes that part its own way, so opening another slicer’s project usually gives you the model and little else, and you set the rest up again by hand.

3MF Translator rewrites the project for the slicer and printer you choose, so it opens as that slicer’s own project, set up with your printer’s presets from that slicer.

What it does

  • Native projects, not just meshes. Plates, objects and parts, filament assignments and colors, color changes, height range modifiers and your print settings come across in the target slicer’s own format. See What carries over.
  • One project, every printer you own. Save each printer once as a target, group targets in tabs, and one click makes a project for every target in the tab. See Set up your printers.
  • Fit any project to your filament slots. Merge, reorder and recolor the project’s filaments to fit your printer’s AMS, CFS, MMU or toolheads. See Filaments and printer slots.
  • Pick your plates, check the fit. Translate every plate or just some, see a warning when a plate won’t fit a printer’s bed, and turn plates 90° when that makes them fit. See Plates, bed fit and Rotate 90°.
  • See it first. The Plates view shows every plate in 3D, in its filament colors with its color changes.
  • Opens right in your slicer. Each finished project can open in the slicer you translated it for. See Opening in your slicer.

It doesn’t slice or print: it writes the project file, and you slice and print from your slicer as usual. Your original file is never changed; every translation is saved as a new file.

Supported slicers

Translate from any of these slicers to any other. Each target gets the format it expects, written the way that slicer writes its own projects.

  • Bambu Studio
  • Orca Slicer
  • Snapmaker Orca
  • Creality Print
  • Anycubic Slicer Next
  • Elegoo Slicer
  • Flash Studio Desktop
  • QIDI Studio
  • PrusaSlicer
  • QIDISlicer
  • SuperSlicer
  • UltiMaker Cura

It also opens projects saved by the PrusaSlicer 3.0 alpha.

The project you open must have been saved by one of these slicers. A 3MF with only the model in it, such as an export from a modeling program, has no slicer project to translate.

What you need

  • Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit), macOS 12 or newer (Apple Silicon and Intel), or Linux (Ubuntu 22.04 or newer, or another distribution with glibc 2.35 or newer). See Install.
  • The slicers you translate to, installed on the same computer. 3MF Translator takes the printer and filament presets from that slicer’s own install, so the project opens with presets your slicer knows. The slicer the project came from doesn’t need to be installed.

On Linux, 3MF Translator finds the Flatpaks of Bambu Studio, Orca Slicer, PrusaSlicer, Snapmaker Orca, Creality Print and UltiMaker Cura by itself. For a slicer you run as an AppImage, point it to the AppImage once: see Opening in your slicer.