Prusa team: You might want to look at the woodworking industry for different ways to join parts using the Cut Tool. There's dowels (the round parts in the video), biscuits, dovetail, etc. With printing these parts you can do more geometric designs like +, octagon, H, etc.

I like the direction they're headed, toward more complete "build prep software" that takes care of a lot more of the manufacturing specific tasks. With the improved geometry recognition/handling in 2.6, I could see a future version that, for instance, recognizes 4mm holes and lets you add a modifier to fit your M4 heat insert of choice, along with increasing the wall count around the hole. Also automatically date/rev stamping prints, etc. The improvements they've added to profile management (like template filaments separate from a specific printer profile) are a good direction for printing across different printer models more transparently.

That cut and pin feature is a gamechanger! I have a small print bed and having to modify big STLs externally is frustrating, very nice to have it integrated into the slicer!

One thing they added that I haven't seen a lot of attention on is dynamic speed for overhangs. You can have speed k factors based upon the angle of the overhang which really does result in better print quality and even being able to skip support on some steeper angles without slowing down the entire print. I've enjoyed this feature in ideamaker for a long time and so glad to see it added.

That cut and pin tool alone is making me consider swapping to PrusaSlicer from Cura. I still consider myself a massive 3D printing amateur, but being able to add pins or dowel holes to cosplay parts is a huge plus. Trying to align things by hand alone is always a headache.

The moment PrusaSlicer started supporting STP files I never created another STL from a CAD model. I also really love the new automatic pins thingy

The measuring tool is exactly what I've been waiting for. It's going to make it so much easier to scale R/C car bodies to suit an existing wheelbase.

I hope they make a feature, that automatically avoids placing seams at thin features.

thumbs up for a PrusaCAD 😀

The auto location pins on the cut tool is one of the most useful features yet. Glad they have introduce tree supports at last. Fast becoming my favorite slicer.

That last observation about features in Slicer or CAD tool - ideally (and of course nothing is ever this simple) it's good to have features in the slicer that focus on the specific printing technology in use (FDM in this case). Then as mentioned, the CAD design itself can be focused on the object design, less on the manufacturing constraints - so one CAD model would (ultimately) be used in different manufacturing technologies (FDM, SLA, and beyond printing) with manufacturing-specific tweaks managed by the printing tool. Same extends to assembly - that cut-n-peg feature makes sense to get around FDM limitations, but would be different for SLA resin and different again for (e.g.) SLS powder.

PrusaCAD would be a really interesting direction to move in. Traditional CAD software has issues doing FEA and other more advanced analysis on printed parts, because it doesn't take in to account things like wall thickness, print orientation, and infill density. It would be awesome to see a CAD+slicer combo built from the ground up with these ideas in mind, and have optimisation to allow them to dynamically determine these parameters. Like, if you have a section of a part that your FEA determines will handle a lot of stress, then it can automatically slice your part with a higher infill density in that region.

10/10 on the new approach! Rapid Prototypin really shouldn't need a separate CAD file from your final design that you have manufactured. This might not be necessary for hobbyists, but is definitely a godsend for anyone in prototyping

It's an honour to see my model in this video, thank you very much!!!! ❤❤

PrusaCAD 🔥

I love this. Even though I can design however I need or want to. Anything to make the workflow faster is a win in my book. I also love how this new "suite" of tools is making 3D printing more accessible to people just entering the market. It's a market that has continued to grow as printers become more accessible, and software like this become easier to use for beginners and more feature rich for people who have been in the game for a while so to speak. Thank you all in the community: From the content creators (like you Mr. Sanladerer), to the creators and the people behind the scenes solving complex problems (and making it look easy) to make our lives just a little easier. Let's all keep up the good work!

I can't wait to use the auto pin feature!!! I do that manually ALL THE TIME. 1/16" precision pins can be bought by the pound and work amazingly well. I think it's the best way to take a print needing tons of support into 2 or more prints needing no support at all. SO EXCITED!

much box! And don't worry about CAD vs Slicer. I love all the new features, as I had to suffer through lots of CAD/workarounds for printability.

As a 3D printing newbie I appreciate all of the tools that were added. Most of the ways I want modify an existing STL is covered there and now I don’t have to muck around with something that is either too basic and does a part of what I need or too advance that I need to take courses to make it happen. I think the features (and probably roadmap) is solidly aimed at people like me to make 3D printing much more accessible.

I've been using 2.6 alpha 3 for macOS for a few days. I love the organic supports and the auto painting of supports. I have used the measuring and cut tools and find them quite useful. Thanks for your insights.

The tree supports are such a life saver, not only for minimizing filament wastage, but also electricity consumption. Very nice video as always. Thanks Thomas :)

Personally for some who doesnt use CAD, these new features are just awesome. Not everyone has time or skill to learn to model, but still enyojs printing these features are a game changer. Good job prusa slicer team, keep comming out with more features like this.

Great video Tom ! This is why I love your content, not only showcasing new and interesting 3D printing tech but also thinking about how it shifts the use and workflow as a whole

Loving the new type of support in this version.

I'm an old school unix type who really values the design philosophy of small, simple tools that each do one thing well and which are easy to compose to solve a particular use case (think text pipeline filters ala grep, sed, awk, etc.). But even with that bias, I'm really keen on the idea of expanding PrusaSlicer into the CAD space, all the way if possible. I think the difference here is that there are benefits to having process information flow "backwards": I often find myself having to incorporate slicer process variables (recommended wall thickness for two perimeters, layer height, build volume dimensions, etc) into the CAD design phase. A concrete example would be explicitly modelled support which needs to know these things to leave the appropriate air gap, something essentially impossible if the slicer does variable layer height tricks. Also, the scope for improved UX with tight integration with Printables makes the sum of CAD + slicer more than the sum of its parts. Thirdly, I use (and love) Onshape for most of my CAD needs, but I'm fully aware that they can take away my toy at any time. Having a solid opensource option would be much better (yes, I know FreeCAD, no, it's not a real option). Even a very basic CAD incorporated into PrusaSlicer would likely nucleate the development of a solid cross platform opensource CAD, which gives me hope that it might be achievable (it's a much bigger project than in-house Prusa developers could reasonably hope to address on their own).

Good update briefing! Thanks, Tom.

Thank you for (re)introducing me to Prusa Slicer. It has come a long way and 2.6 alpha is really an impressive package. I dare say this will be my new go-to slicer. Thanks again!

Great overview Tom! Thanks for hitting all the highlights in a detailed and well illustrated way. 💪🏼

Thank you for your channel. I always enjoy watching your demonstrations of new 3D printing techniques.

Thank you ! Tom for answering my questions on this subject on Twitter and getting this video out so quickly you rock!

Good update! Thanks for sharing

Outstandingly informative, and the visual aids were always on point. Thanks!

I literally just printed my first model and had to twist and juggle it to cut it into 4 parts. When I glued it together I realized I should have pins next time. Now I see this…. 🤯 Going to download 2.6 this week and reprint the model again. A 36 hour re-print will be worth the reduced post-processing work I still have. 👏

I think that a lot of these features really help when you need to 3D print a prototype or replica of a part not designed for 3D printing. This is also a massive aid to technicians and teachers at schools where kids have no idea how their CAD designs will translate into 3D printing. On the other hand, it probably slices files normally and simply perfectly fine anyway so the new features are just there when you need them. Thanks for the great video Tom, I’m definitely going to start using this! 🧡

Looks lovely. Thank you Prusa Slicer team.

This is the reason I buy a Prusa printer. The printer and the software are awesome. So exited for the new big printer. Made an Preorder ❤

Thanks for this video. The organic support was a real find for me and I appreciate you making this video. It has been a great help

That slicing tool is SUPERB for taking a big model and slicing it up into small chunks to print at massive scale, too!

I can see the questions about the text and cutting being a bit of a layer violation, but I can also see them as being reasonable as printer prep or dressing. When the cad is done, it may be intended for a larger printer, or for various sized printers, so it makes some sense to deal with that at the same time you determine appropriate temperature, orientation, and so forth. The lettering may be regarded similarly to custom engraving. I suppose it's an evolving field. CAD used to consider cutting threads as dressing until 3D printing came along where it's better to design them in.

Great content! I'm brand new to the 3D printing world, but this video really helped me understand more about the slicer in general. I'll definitely be giving PrusaSlicer a try!

Thanks for pointing these out Thomas

As someone who has had to make super-complex models in CAD (to the point where FreeCAD can't handle them, so I had to use Fusion360), then cut them apart, plot and cut pins, then figure out the optimum angles for printing so that the supports do not ruin features on the final printed piece, I am absolutely ECSTATIC about these new features. I have actually been putting off a couple projects because I simply didn't want to deal with the hours required to make them functional as prints (instead of milled from stock, which is its own headache). I can't believe how far the Prusa team has come in their slicer. I used to stick with KISSlicer for a long time, trading ease of use for precision, but Prusa Slicer beats it by several miles now. I'm planning a trip to Eastern Europe in a few years, and I really need to make a stop by the Prusa HQ to simply give them all my thanks.

Measuring and scaling looks great. Great video very informative. Thanks

Tree supports are exciting - I've been making them manually as part of the models when necessary, so this should hopefully save some time. I grew up with slic3r and love it, so should be at home with this!

The Text Projection is Amazing, I hate having to do that in Fusion.

Thanks for the great overview. 2.6 is so full of amazing features - thank you Prusa!

Thank you for all your efforts Thomas! You have done a masterful job for the 3d printing community & I just want to express my heartfelt thanks & appreciation sir. Keep doing what you're doing!

Have been doing some of that text, scale and cut/pin work with MS 3D Builder. It's quite a powerful tool and overlooked for some quick work. Look forward to the 2.6 upgrade.

Great walk-through Thanks for sharing your experiences with all of us :-)

I am soo happy for this text generation tool!!! I am the 3D printing specialist in a tech startup, my job is basically to be middle man between engineering and production/RnD. That means that I have dozens of gcode to create and optimize. To make sure I can track the print quality changes of every slicer modifications I give a specific code to each Gcode engraved on the part. I often get 10 to 30 gcode iterations of the same exact STL soo going back in Fusion changing the engraving, exporting the file and switching up the .3mf projects is a very time consuming process and it honestly sucks haha. Being able to to this modification in 1 click saves me hours of boredom and thousands of dollars to the business.

I think having a tool oriented to 3d printer pre-processing and taking them out of the CAD is a good thing. Those are optimization that in the end do not help the cad process, just make it more difficult. If we can design freely without worrying about it too much and then use a dedicated tool where those optimization are easy, overall quality is going to improve.

I really like the added features. Lots of those things I wanted to be able to do easily and I don't mind at all that I can do it from within the slicer.

Dear Thomas, You are the reason I found out that my Ender 3 Pros and V2s where compatible with this Masterpiece-Slicer close to 2 years ago. This 2.6 Release will help my Bussiness a ton. Keep up with this great work of yours!!!

I think these features make a lot of sense for PrusaSlicer and aren’t overstepping into CAD. To me they appear more like advanced CAM features. I just can’t wait for them to be added to Bambu Studio.

Love the new 2.6.0 Prusa Slicer. I have used the organic supports dozens of times and can't believe how successful it works for me. Thank you for calling out some of the details about the Highlight overhang by angle, which help me not to miss a beat!

That infill lettering was a cool idea. Text tool is quite handy. I hate doing that in CAD. Would be nice if it could do a true surface projection. Slice tool improvements are cool too.

great new information Thomas, as usual. Thanks for sharing.

Awesome! I’ve wanted tree supports for ages, but didn’t want to mess with other slicers.

Really good reviews. Thanks a lot

Keeping me up with changes, thanks!

Thanks for the overview. For me tree support is the most interesting new feature.The other ones not so much. And thanks for having no background music, that makes it much easier for me to understand what you say. 👍

I'm like the new organic support and am now printing things that I was not looking forward to printing because of the support, I have been using it for about a week and had missed the auto generate button so thanks for that, was an S3D user but once I made the move I have been happy with it and it only seem to be getting better, keep up the good work

Excellent overview!

I love my Mk3 printer, and I like Prusa slicer 2.5. The features of 2.6 seem very handy. I appreciate what they've done/and are doing for the industry as a whole. Their filament is very good as well. They got my continued support!

Love that intro, your new place with nice wall.. Awesome

Always exciting to see new features added. I hope to see their hardware get the same love, to help compete with what Bamboo Lab is doing.

Another awesome and very informative video,,, thank you 👍👍

Awesome info … would love to see more on the software side. The fusion text emboss failures u showed were great. And the comparison against prusa doing same successfully. The pins and scaling are awesome too. Pushing the functionality of a slicer, especially open source slicer is what open source is all about. Looking forward to seeing more features to blur the lines on that last comment you made(what should a slicer do).

Wow, looks awesome, downloading now

As the URL handler goes, a Universal Profile Repository, for profile sharing, would be fantastic, I have struggled with finding Cura/Sapphire Pro profiles for a while now, and usually have to print and edit until I get something workable. As with all such open source efforts , organization and management & verification is time consuming, but the essential key to success.

Super et merci pour cette autre vidéo tres instructif. Un merci du Québec

Loving the new tools in 2.6. Just last night I broke the spanner wrench for my water filtration system. No worries, grab a similar file off the web, measure/rescale it and print. Sure I could have spent another half hour to hour drawing one, but way faster not reinventing the wheel. The cut and pin features are nice as well allowing me to draw larger objects without having to hassle with cutting it up and worrying if I placed the alignment pins correctly. No issues so far, just most efficiency with my time which allows me to get more done.

Great :) Only thing is missing now is hole horizontal expansion

awesomeee . i need that shortcut and measure tool!

Great video Thomas!

One thing you didn't mention about 3MF and PrusaSlicer - PrusaSlicer can already load STEP files. If 3MF contained STEP formatted models instead of STL triangles it would be a great distribution format for all the 3D print models repo sites. Modifying STL files to make changes is such a pain.

These updates look AWESOME!! Prusaslicer is getting so good!!

I mainly print existing STL files so having the ability break larger parts into peices will be great. Some pre exisiting models have issues with previous generations support materials due to funny curves etc. I have downloaded an will definitely be giving a whirl to see if the tentacles improve print quality :)

I think that the features that you are concerned about, are more about iterative development than they are about becoming a CAD system. There are 2 cases that I see: 1) While working on a new model it is not uncommon to want to make very simple changes while printing test prints, where you don't really want to make the changes in CAD and then export them, as there could be a huge number of small tweaks. This allows you to make certain types of small tweaks within the slicer and then only transfer the changes that work to CAD. 2) Models where you only have the STL (like from Printables) that you need to make very small changes to, it is much easier to make those changes in the slicer than it is to import the STL into CAD and making changes. This is probably the biggest use case, as there are way more people who just print things, than there are who design their own parts in CAD. Only Prusa knows in which directions it will take the slicer, and I do have confidence in their decisions. When they make mistakes, they own it, and do their best to correct those mistakes. It is very possible that they may stumble a few times while working on these new features, but everyone has the option of rolling back to a previous version, or not upgrading in the first place. As you said though, ASKING what we want to do on import is something that has been needed for a long time, and it is great to see that it is finally there.

This is huge! While each item may sound small, I think many of this by the selves are huge, and then like you said, add them all up and this is a big release. Being able to cut and add dowels, is something I never thought would be possible in the slicer. I thought I would always have to do that in cad.

Is that the prompter reflected in the filament spool at 14:07? If you don't mind me asking, do you have someone assisting, or are you somehow controlling it off-screen? I've been looking for a good way to do this without holding a remote in my hand.

Love that hinting feature Bambu studio has it and I love it.

Great review. Thanks. I'm of the thought that in an ideal world I should not have to take into account 3D printing - or other fabrication tools - at all during the design phase of my parts so the more the slicer takes care of 3D printing limitations the better. Some of this additions are a great step in that direction.

Oh wow time to download! Lots of great features, hard to use just one slicer these days. I really like the project management aspect with the additional plates and BOM, reference photos/docs, etc, that the Bambu Studio / SoftFever suite bring. But love the calibration plugins from Cura. And ofc all the fine tuning in PrusaSlicer coming in clutch.

That intro shot is impressive! Well done!

I welcome all these features. The Text tool is perfect for personalizing objects so I don't have to constantly go into my design and modify it. The Cut tool with the pegs is great because now I can design the object as a single piece and I don't have to worry about designing with the print size available to me. That saves me a lot of work. Tree supports allows me to design with less 3D printing in mind and more of what I want.

Oh man exciting progress... there is so much more scope for improved modifiers... stuff like advanced boolean operators etc are just so much easier to implement in in raster space than in CAD space :)

I have had some challenges with the organic support feature. One, the print did not print the upper part (extended hand with sword.) and one had massive supports that were difficult (almost impossible) to remove (HO picnic table in Printables.) I even split the print at the roof line. The roof did great, but the table and seat had excessive supports. Maybe I haven't mastered the setting. The first time I saw the warnings, they gave me a cause for concern. I finally ignored, and it printed fine. Especially confusing was the knight (Chess pieces by Philz of Printables)where it said it wasn't on the bed. I repositioned both in PS and NetFabb, but the warning was still there. Finally, I ignored and it printed fine. I appreciated this video as I picked up a couple to new points. Well prepared and presented.

Been watching your channel for 3 or 4 years now - i always learn something, even though I worked as a FSE for an industrial printer manufacturer, your videos are still more informative than what we were given as "professionals" lmao

2.6 is another game changer, especially the tree support and text

I definitely am looking forward to these changes making it to the stable release. Being able to make some of those adjustments will be awesome. Also as someone who hasn't ventured into learning cad yet, it's nice to gain some of that functionality.

Wow this is really awesome to see. Changes some of my thoughts about what should be taught in CAD for 3D printing in general because as smarter the slicer becomes, the less you have to worry about designing specifically for printing 😮

Danke für Deine immer wertvollen Inhalte! Auch sehr spannend, was PrusaSlicer 2.6 bringt! 🙏

HA! Prusa CAD. It's heading that way and I'm not sure how to feel about it yet. But the new slice and peg-n-hole is awesome. That is so tedious in CAD. Also love that measure and scale tool! If I were motivated to do it (had a need for it) I could probably port these features into a Fusion plugin. Because open source is great 😃👍

Text and cut/pin - awesome!

So far so good. I love it.

Everything they are adding solves issues I’ve already had with my Prusa Mini, pretty awesome! You’re the best @MadeWithLayers

I’m a fan of the text tool to drop the revision on the part. it’s easier to remember while I’m reviewing the set up. I generally forget to grab a marker when a print is done and I want to check and use the part. A hot upgrade to the tool would be the use of template variables that takes the STL file name and or some print settings and puts them on the model automatically for your updated part revisions. Imagine automatic embossing of values on dynamic temperature towers and other calibration prints.

My favourite thing in this release for my current printer is overhang settings for speed and etc. My favourite thing for imagining what it could expand to in the future is the angled print splitting feature. Imagine splitting a print, but instead of orienting it all on the bed, this could be used for 4 and 5 axis printing, by slicing each section on an angle, ordering the segments by printability, and then orienting the hotend based on the angle of the cut.

I think those are the most essential editing tools you need. Making them accessible directly in the slicer in a easy to use form enables a lot more people to customize their prints. As printers become more wide spread to the point where they just a tool to churn out fun parts downloaded somewhere this is the way to go. CAD software isn't for the faint of heart and requires a considerable amount of time investment additionally to the slicer. "Occasional" users won't put up with that.