A Snapmaker Orca fork by Neotko
Four filaments.
All of these colours.
A normal slicer prints the top of your part once, in one filament. Here it becomes a stack of passes you build yourself. The same idea then spreads out into walls, layer heights, supports, placement and the wipe tower.
- 24feature families
- 2.4.4current version
- 0changed at defaults
Every square is a real recipe, composited with the fork's own optics.
ColorStitch
Two filaments, any ratio
Every fill line gets its own tool, in a sequence chosen so that any small window holds the ratio you asked for. The printer does not alternate to do it: it prints every line of one tool, then every line of the other.
The Sandwich
Order is not decorative
The same two passes, swapped. Light is absorbed going down and again coming back up, so a translucent pass over an opaque one is a different colour from the other way round.
TD
Thickness is colour
One filament over one base, getting thicker left to right. How fast it stops letting the base through is its Transmission Density, and it is the number everything else rests on.
PathBlend
A gradient made of geometry
One filament climbs as a real ramp inside the layer, one print-height step per fill line, and a second caps the rest. Nothing is dithered and nothing is mixed.
All four run the slicer's own maths. The Playground has the full-size versions →
What this is
Snapmaker Orca with a lot of extra features, built by one person who designs in 3D and reads code, rather than the other way round. Most of them started as "why can no slicer do this?". There is no roadmap; things get built when they get interesting. Every page here says how finished its feature actually is, and for a few of them the honest answer is never printed, look but don't trust.
Everything is opt-in. Leave the new settings alone and the build slices like stock Snapmaker Orca. Every release gets checked against that.
The colour swatches, dither patterns and blend curves here are computed by JavaScript
ports of the slicer's own functions: ColorSci::blend_stacked for the optics,
build_dithered_tools_* for the patterns. Build a recipe on this site and you
get the same number the app would give you. Where a demo is only a diagram, it says so on
the demo.
New to all this? The seven-part video series is still the gentlest way in. It walks through one Sandwich from nothing to a printed part. Come back here afterwards for the reference.
Colour
The Sandwich, which is what most of this fork is about. Start at the top of the list.
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§1 · §3 — start here
The Sandwich
Your top surface becomes a stack of 1–3 passes, each with its own tool, angle and share of the layer height. Build one here and watch the printed colour come out.
no gate 2.3 -
§1 · §1e — in section
The stack, in section
The same Sandwich as a block you can turn round, cut open, with the composited colour on its top face. Then the question everyone gets to second: what the filament underneath does to every recipe you saved.
no gate reference -
§1b · §1d · §1f
ColorStitch
A pass that picks the filament for every single fill line: dithered blends, exact stripes, textile weaves, hand-typed patterns. The dither is Bresenham, so you get the same result every slice.
no gate 2.3 -
§1c
PathBlend
A gradient made out of geometry. One filament climbs as a physical ramp inside the layer, one print-height step per fill line, and a second one caps the rest. The fade you see is optical.
no gate fragile engine -
§1e · §1g
TD & the gamut
Why a stack of passes reads as one colour. Transmission Density, Beer–Lambert, the reachable gamut from your four filaments, and an inverse ΔE2000 search for a colour you name.
no gate -
§6
The ColorStitch Painter
Save Sandwiches as profiles and flood-fill them onto individual faces. Different steps of one object, each with its own recipe, and the weave drawn live on the model.
no gate 2.4.0 rework -
§6
SVG stickers
Load a vector drawing onto the top or bottom face and every colour becomes a recipe from your four filaments. Then turn any of them into a stripe, a weave or a ramp. HueForge, with vectors.
no gate 2.4.8
Seeing it
A striped G-code preview tells you very little about how a Sandwich will look. These pages close that gap.
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§20 · §21 · §22
RealColor & Photo Mode
Composite the G-code the way the eye will resolve it, then light it like a product shot and export a PNG whose shadow lives in the alpha. Plus the real prints, so you can judge the gap yourself.
no gate Libre for Prepare -
§9
NeoTower
A wipe tower planned after slicing, when every toolchange is known, including the sub-layer primes a Sandwich inserts inside a single layer. It is what makes adaptive height × multi-tool × Sandwich work at all.
auto for Sandwich -
§15 · §18 · §19
G-code & finishing
A layer-ranged, per-tool G-code post-processor you edit as a chart. Real font kerning for embossed text. And bridges that anchor on solid ground before they cross.
Libre (Reprocessor) edits real G-code
Placing things
What happens when two objects touch, which stock slicers quietly get wrong.
-
§4 · §5
Libre Mode
A two-key gate that unlocks the professional and experimental half of the fork: assemblies without a boolean union, per-volume compensation, full part settings, Simplify3D import, realistic shading.
the gate itself -
§7 · §17
Align & Construct · Gravity
Place one object precisely against another, extrude a face, run a boolean that keeps the painting. Then make the slicer believe it: a face resting on another object prints as solid contact instead of a false bridge over thin air. Drag and drop that lands on the real surface below.
True Objects -
§24
Support Zones
Point at the surface you want held up, then at where the column should land. The pillar is built between the two, its roof is the real patch with its curve on it, and the panel draws the section at true scale before you commit.
Libre Mode engine print-verified -
§12 · §16
Supports
Support that routes around the other objects on the plate instead of growing through them, which nothing else in this slicer family does. Plus a wave-front roof that diffracts around concavities, over a hollow pillar.
PerObject: no gate NeoWave: WIP
Structure & surface
Below the colour: how the walls are generated, how tall each layer is, what the surface feels like.
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§8 · §13 · §14
Walls
NeoArachne lets you pick which engine prints the outer wall, the inner walls and the gap fill, separately. Painter Pro Mode adds precision brushing and screen-space masks. NeoStitch interlocks layers without ever moving Z.
Libre (NeoArachne) NeoStitch untested -
§11
Precision layer height
Draw layer height as an exact curve with control points and per-segment tension, over the object's real layer bands. Colour-aware guidance shades the heights your filaments can actually hold.
Libre Mode -
§23
Height Adaptive Effects
The same curve pointed at any setting. The infill cell opens where nothing rests on it and closes under the top surface, at the same density and the same grams. Fuzzy skin is born, lives for a band, and dies again. No other slicer has it.
Libre Mode structural or cosmetic -
§10
Bump mapping & ZBump
A PNG becomes physical relief: displacing wall centrelines around the object, per painted zone, or modulating the Z of the top-surface fill point by point into a real height field.
Libre + env var expert only
The Playground
The same tools the feature pages use, with all the knobs left on. This is the fun part.
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simulator
The Colour Mixer
A filament library with real TD values, both Sandwich zones, every pass kind, and the printed colour resolving live. Park two recipes side by side and read the ΔE between them.
real opticsreal dither -
all of them
Every simulator
The mixer, the gamut explorer and its ΔE2000 matcher, the pattern lab, the PathBlend staircase and the TD explorer, in one place.
nothing leaves your browser
All of it, on one page
Which features need which gate, how finished each one is, and where the control lives.
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reference
The map
The gate matrix, the maturity table, the version history, the whole "where do I find this" index and the FAQ, on one scrollable page.
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beginners
The video series
Seven short animated walkthroughs, from "why fork Orca at all" to painting a Sandwich click by click. Still exactly where it always was.
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github
Downloads & release notes
Builds for macOS, Windows and Linux, plus the notes for every release since 2.3.