I am just now noticing that Luban does not currently support the 3MF model file format. https://3mf.io/specification/
Even Simplify3D supports that format and it hasn’t had a new release in years.
While the STL file format will most likely never go away, the 3MF has many, many advantages.
Luban does currently support the OBJ format, which shares some of these advantages, 3MF is also open and supports several other data points that OBJ does not (multi part, multi color, multi material). It is true that the current iterations of Snapmaker printers do not support these options, the inclusion of this newer file format would only strengthen Luban’s usefulness.
That’s a great example of how luban juts isn’t keeping up. Fusion 360 has actually stopped exporting in stl at this point since 3mf has been around long enough to consider stl deprecated (although, they could have done better about advertising 3mf as the new format).
Honestly, instead of having their own custom software that isn’t keeping up with the latest and greatest of the other post processors of the various types (f360 is better at cnc, lightburn is better at laser, and superslicer/prusaslicer/simplify3d/cura are better at slicing) I’d really rather they just build plugins/APIs for the actually good software.
Note: I’m not poopooing at the devs of the software, luban has actually done some stuff that is pretty impressive software wise, I just think the leadership should rethink where they’re spending their energy.
They could even just throw their resources at grblgru and it’d be time better spent.
From what I can tell, luban works ok at being a remote interface to the machine, but not much else. Even then, building something closer to octopi that runs on the touch screen would be better, let me use top of the line software to prep jobs (everything is just gcode anyways), and SM just handles getting those jobs running on the machines firmware.
This is correct. Fusion 360 just replaced export to STL with export to mesh. Under that dialog you can select STL.
However it does show the direction that toolsets are moving.
Wasn’t me on fb, but I thought f360s “save as mesh” switched to 3mf by default (not saying you can’t change it back to stl, just that it stopped doing stl by default).
Yes, this is exactly what Autodesk has done. 3MF is now the default.
But what you wrote was
Fusion 360 has actually stopped exporting in stl at this point
That part is not true, there is just an extra step to use the older format.
And I agree with you, other software does a better job. Since I figured out how to export CNC controls from Fusion 360, I haven’t gone back to Luban for CNC control. The ‘pan-n-scan’ CNC control is just too slow and produces really rough results. I assume that Lightburn does a similar job with the laser portion, I haven’t tried it yet. But a CNC job in Luban was going to take 26 hours, the same design exported from Fusion 360 only took 2+ hours.
Fusion is light years ahead of Luban in control and most of the time in end result. SM should really take a look at Easel by Inventables if they want to see what a simple and user friendly interface looks like. The way they show previews of the outcome is unmatched.
I don’t use it much anymore but before I got the hang of Fusion I used it a lot. It used to have more features in the free version.
I haven’t used Lightburn more than the trial. For now Luban still accomplishes everything I need. I can’t comment on speed vs. luban, but the end result between the two will be identical.
-S
