In this guide, we'll take a look at how slicers work, identify the most important features for us to replicate, and build a complete slicer that's capable of making real 3D printed parts. This inspired me to write this guide so that even novice or inexperienced coders can understand the code at the core of 3D printing. I had to struggle through the code of one of the open-source slicers, and it was slow, frustrating work. When I transitioned from a 3D printing user to a developer of 3D printing software, there was very little information available to understand how slicers work. All of these slicers have dozens of features for customizing the results, but many users don't understand the internal workings of the programs themselves. Many of the existing slicers (slic3r, Cura, MatterSlice, etc.) are open source, though a few closed-source slicers exist (e.g. This program takes in a 3D model and puts out the instructions for the printer itself.
At the core of 3D printing is a piece of software called the slicer.