New: Slices from Object. Box B of the Pieces panel (Start from a 3D model) now has two ways in. Silhouettes from Object traces the outline a model shows from the front, the side or the top, as before. Slices from Object is new: it cuts real cross-sections through the model and slots them together with cross-laps, so a rounded body keeps its volume in the kit.

• Profile + ribs: a side profile with cross ribs threaded on it. Few pieces, quick to build.
• Sliceform grid: sections along X and along Y crossed in a grid. Keeps the whole shape.
• Ribs sets how many sections run along the longest side.
• Smooth edges (mm) levels the jagged, wavy edges a model leaves on a section. Outlines are traced to a fraction of a raster cell, so even 0 gives clean lines; higher values round off bumps and corners.

Printability is enforced, not hoped for. The model is first turned into one closed solid (open seams and overlapping parts are welded), and every section is cleaned to a printable minimum feature size. Every crossing is measured with the real plate thickness, so two sections can never print overlapping, even at a grazing corner. Slivers left beside a slot are trimmed away; if a slot would cut a section in two, the slot side is flipped when the kit can still be assembled in some order. A section is left out, with a message saying why, only if it cannot be repaired or nothing would hold it.

Fixed.

• Colour 3MF export: the Frame & sprues object is now manifold (it could be flagged non-manifold before), and a patterned part with a detailed outline exports manifold too.
• Fuse & Check: zero-thickness skins and pinholes that the final crop could leave on the card's top and bottom faces are removed, and the manifold verdict is now taken on the triangles an STL or 3MF actually contains.
• Fuse & Check on a patterned card: the pattern inlays used to break the fused card into loose pieces. They now stay on the single-colour card as engravings (the colour 3MF keeps them as inlays), and the card fuses into one manifold piece.
• Retention ridges are no longer placed on a wall too thin to carry them, where they could print as loose crumbs.
• Specks a slot can shave off a corner (a fraction of a square millimetre) are removed from the cut parts instead of ending up as debris on the card.
• Sprue arms: a frame arm no longer reaches its anchor through its own part, stray arm fragments left by the trim are removed, and a part-to-part link arm that gets cut is dropped whole instead of leaving a loose stub. Arms no longer cross each other where the layout leaves another way, and a part boxed in by others is gated to a neighbour instead of through it.
• A warning now tells you when the card grows larger than most print beds (about 250 mm).

Quick start guide. The PDF quick start guide is now part of the download, with a new page on Slices from Object.

Verified headless on Blender 4.5 LTS and 5.2 LTS: the three gallery examples, plain and patterned, and for slicing Suzanne (plain and subdivided, rotated), torus, tilted torus, sphere, cylinder, cone, an L bracket and two separate blocks, in both styles. Every result cut, built and fused: one island per part, 0.00 mm³ overlap between assembled parts, a manifold single-piece card, every object of the colour 3MF manifold. The zip also installs as an extension on both.

Version 1.4.0 and 1.3.0 remain available if you prefer the build you already know.

Fixed — joints that slid instead of gripping. The retention ridges were placed at the two ends of the recorded slot, and that record is deliberately oversized: a 64 mm piece can carry a 232 mm slot, clamped only when it is applied. So the ridges sat in mid-air, up to 200 mm from where the piece actually engages. Short joints held because their ends ARE the joint; long cross-laps like the wing did not. The engine now walks the slot centreline, finds the stretch that really runs through plate, and places the ridges there. Every joint in all three examples now has at least two ridges inside its engaged length.

The ridge was also too shallow to grip: 0.113 mm in a 2.000 mm slot holding a 1.800 mm plate merely reduced the play to 0.087 mm. Sized now at clearance + 0.06, the plate meets 0.060 mm of real interference and has to be pushed past it. Mortises had no ridges at all — they do now.

Fixed — pieces coming off the sprue in transport. Not too few gates: a wing already had six, all clustered where the frame ran nearest, so a long piece was a lever with nothing resisting the swing. The two ends of a piece are now anchored first, and gates that would land on top of each other are skipped. Every piece carries 3 to 6 gates spread across its whole length. Gate necks are unchanged, so breaking a piece out by hand is exactly as easy as before.

Fixed — Fuse & Check reporting a card that was fine. The faults were wire edges: segments carrying no face at all, left behind by the boolean. Nothing prints from them, but every manifold test counted them. The mesh cleanup removed orphan vertices and not orphan edges; it now removes both.

Fixed — sprue arms no longer share volume with the pieces. Every arm is cut by the pieces it reaches, so it meets a piece on one flush face instead of sinking into it: on a multi-material print the sprue colour can no longer bleed into a piece. Measured across the built-in examples: 0 mm³, down from up to 22.7 mm³.

New — Colours panel. Assign a colour to selected objects, a collection, or every visible mesh, with the scope shown explicitly. One Colour per Piece; and Reduce to Printer Slots clusters the palette down to however many filaments your machine holds, deterministically, so a re-export never comes back with the filaments shuffled.

New — Patterns, as a technology preview. 51 printable patterns on the top face, the bottom face, both, the side walls, or the whole object. A pattern here is geometry, not an image: each motif is sunk into the face by whole layers and kept as its own coloured body, so the 3MF hands your slicer one solid per filament and the outside dimensions never change. This part is a preview and may still change; if a pattern does not come out watertight on a piece, that piece is put back exactly as it was and the report says so. Feedback very welcome — message me here on Superhive.

Changed. The 3MF export now asks what to include: whole collection, selected only, or visible only.

Verified on Blender 4.5.12 LTS and 5.0.1, all three examples: every joint gripped, 0 mm³ arm-to-piece intersection, fused card manifold and in one piece.

Version 1.3.0 remains available if you prefer the build you already know.

The original release, kept available on purpose.

Everything 1.4.0 changes is a fix, but nothing is taken away here: if you prefer the build you already know, this version stays downloadable. Backdated to its original release date so 1.4.0 remains the current one.