This week: Bambu Lab threatens legal action against an OrcaSlicer fork developer, Games Workshop hides its previews to stop 3D sculptors, and the first true multi-material resin printer with an 8-vat carousel has landed. Let's dive in. 🔥
🔥 Featured
⚖️ Bambu Lab forces OrcaSlicer fork offline
Bambu Lab has sent a cease-and-desist to developer Paweł Jarczak, who maintained an OrcaSlicer fork that connected directly to Bambu printers, bypassing Bambu Connect (the cloud layer the company introduced in January 2025). Jarczak has taken down the repo. The official accusation: reverse engineering and "impersonation" of Bambu Studio by injecting identity metadata.
The key detail: the developer claims all the code came from Bambu Studio's own AGPL-3.0 repo. Louis Rossmann has already offered to cover the first $10,000 in legal defense costs. The community has started calling Bambu "the Nintendo of 3D printing." If you've been following along, in Weekly #006 we covered the X1 Carbon End of Life and in #005 the X2D launch — this platform lock-in strategy has been months in the making.
The bigger question: who actually owns your printer when you turn it on? If the answer starts with "it depends on a Chinese manufacturer's cloud," you've got some reading to do this summer. Read the full coverage on Tom's Hardware →
🎲 Miniatures
🎲 Games Workshop hides its minis to fight 3D printing
Spikey Bits has documented a clear pattern this week: Games Workshop is releasing previews of high-priced kits (the Defiler, Knight Destrier, and upcoming Armageddon releases) with limited angles, no 360° view, and almost no rear photography. The theory: it's a deliberate move against sculptors who use those images as reference to create alternative STL files. This won't surprise you if you remember that in Weekly #002 we covered the 40K 11th Edition announcement — and since then, the STL grey market has only kept growing.
Worth noting: Games Workshop itself has been 3D printing its painted master models for promotional use for years. It's the same dynamic we're seeing with Bambu Lab and OrcaSlicer: the platform owner decides what gets seen — and what gets copied.
The question everyone keeps asking: will Games Workshop ever open an official STL store? Recent moves suggest the answer is no — but the market is moving on without them. In the meantime, for painting what you already have, Vallejo Game Color and Artis Opus have everything you need. Read the full breakdown at Spikey Bits →
🎨 Hobby
🎨 SoulCrafted Slicer: MyMiniFactory is building an open-source resin slicer
The same week Bambu Lab shut down OrcaSlicer-BambuLab, MyMiniFactory went the opposite direction: a $500,000 crowdfunding campaign to build SoulCrafted Slicer, a fully open-source resin slicer licensed under AGPL-3.0. No telemetry, no mandatory cloud, no features locked behind a subscription. MyMiniFactory has already put in $100,000 of its own money. This is a natural continuation of the story we covered in #006, when MyMiniFactory acquired Thingiverse.
It's being positioned as a direct response to Lychee Gen (the AI generator Lychee Slicer is pushing hard) and to data harvesting practices in commercial slicers. The slicer will include advanced support generation and a shared profile marketplace. This ties directly into the arc of generative AI in slicers we covered in #003: the industry is splitting between "closed manufacturer AI" and "community-controlled open source."
Target release is Q1 2027 — this is a statement of intent, not a product you can use today. But for the resin world — which has been living under the Chitubox and Lychee duopoly for years — this is huge. While you're waiting for that future and dialing in your resin workflow, grab the Anycubic Resin Field Manual (48 pages, code MANUAL-GRATIS). Read the full coverage at 3D Printing Industry →
🔧 Hardware
🔧 Anycubic is already discounting the Kobra X — and the Kobra 4 just leaked
Just weeks after the first units of the Anycubic Kobra X started shipping — open CoreXY, integrated ACE Gen2, 4-color printing, and purge waste reduced by 81.25% according to Anycubic — the brand has already dropped the price by $100. And on top of that, a "coming soon" page for the Kobra 4 Combo has appeared on Anycubic's website.
The pace of releases has the community concerned: the Kobra S1 still has unresolved issues, and Anycubic is already pushing the next model. If you were about to pull the trigger on an S1 or were holding out for the Kobra 3, take a hard look at this pattern before you buy.
For our part, we are official Anycubic distributors in Spain. When official specs for the Kobra 4 drop, we'll cover them first — and we'll have stock across the entire new lineup. In the meantime, Anycubic resins and FDM filaments are already in our warehouse. Read the coverage on Creative Bloq →
🤖 WTF Science
🤖 Polysynth P1: The First Multi-Material Resin Printer with an 8-Vat Carousel
The multi-color revolution has finally reached the resin printing world. Polysynth, a startup founded in 2025 and backed by Founders Inc., has opened pre-orders for the P1 at $4,999 USD. The key innovation: instead of a single FEP vat, it features a carousel of up to 8 individual vats. Between dips, a patent-pending cleaning mechanism combined with a high-speed spin shake off excess resin to prevent cross-contamination between materials.
The demos are jaw-dropping: prints using conductive resins (multi-layer PCBs printed in one go), dental models with rigid gum tissue and translucent teeth in a single print, and fully multi-color dioramas with no post-print painting required. That said, these are manufacturer claims for now — no independent reviews with a unit in hand yet.
If Snapmaker kicked off multi-material FDM with 4 print heads and MOVA pushed it to 12, Polysynth is now bringing that same concept to resin printing. Give it 12–18 months and this technology will hit prosumer price points. Watch this space — in the meantime, standard SLA resins remain the practical choice for any desktop workshop. Read the full breakdown on Hackaday →
💬 Our Take This Week
This week crystallizes a pattern we've been tracking since March: platform owners are locking things down while communities are opening up. Bambu Lab shuts down an open-source fork. Games Workshop hides renders to slow down STL files. And yet, at the same time, MyMiniFactory launches SoulCrafted and Polysynth opens the door to a multi-material future with no hidden patents.
The market is splitting into two camps: high-performance closed ecosystems (Bambu Lab, Anycubic, Vortek) versus community-driven open ecosystems (Klipper, Orca, SoulCrafted). For resin makers, this is the year to decide which side you want to be on. As for us, we're staying in the trenches: resin, free tools, and the newsletter. 💪