Before write
ChiTuBox is a third-party slicing software for SLA-, DLP-, and LCD-based resin 3D printers. Version 1.0 was released in 2017 by CBD-Tech, located in Shenzhen of China. The relatively young tech company started its operations in 2013 with 3D printing hardware development, specifically controller boards marketed as the ChiTu series.
ChiTu Box Basic is free and you don't need to pay for it. If you want to get some advanced features then you can upgrade your plan to Chitu Box Pro($169 each year). Need to point out: If you are a user of the Elegoo Mars 3 then you will get a card of Chitu Box Pro(1 year time).
Supported printers list and files format
ChiTuBox offers official support for many resin printer models across 14 different manufacturers.
ChiTuBox supports a great number of file formats, including .stl, and .zip, the native formats of supported 3D printers as well as its own formats (*.chitubox and *.cbddlp) if one wants to keep a slicing project for later. One of the perks of ChiTuBox Pro is the ability to import CAD files, including .3ds, .step, and .fbx, among many others.
At the time of writing, ChiTuBox is available in 19 languages, and it has a massive community of users. While the official channels for tutorials and troubleshooting are comprehensive, it’s always great to have helpful tips and insights from fellow users.
Overview
User Interface
Chitubox interface is not complicated, even a new user can handle it quickly also. We’ll briefly describe in this section.
Main menu. From left to right are:
Open files | Save project | Screenshoots | Revoke | Redo | Copy | About layout | Hollow | Dig hole | Repair
Quick tools. From top to bottom are:
Move | Rotate | Scale | Mirror
Preview tools. You can preview your slice files with these tools and then adjust until you got the perfect
slice files.
Support settings. ChiTuBox is also known for its support structures control. An entire tab is dedicated to this feature, which allows for the automatic or manual placement of these structures.
Settings. You can edit the resin setting or the printer setting in these section.
Slice button. Last but not least, the “Slice” button will prepare the models for printing. It will show a preview, which displays the individual slices for all the layers.
QT incident of ChiTubox:
Some players widely know this matter, specifically users who have installed Cura and CHITUBOX at the same time, they cannot open Cura, and the moment he opens it, they will get the result of a program crash.
At first, players blamed compatibility issues with the new version of Cura.
But as more and more players find that it's not just Cura that has this problem, some other software that needs to use graphics will also encounter similar issues. You can imagine how crashes are for the players who installed the chitubox and CURA at the same time.
So a group of players familiar with the software used debugging and unpacking to install the software to find the source of the problem: the QT environment file installed with CHITUBOX caused this problem.
The graphics engine of CHITUBOX is developed based on QT, which means that CHITUBOX can't do anything about this problem. At that time, the version of Cura was 4.12, while the version of CHITUBOX was 1.8~.
Of course, this problem has been fixed in later versions. It's a minor incident.
Chitubox official website:
https://www.chitubox.com/en/index