TL;DR: Anycubic Slicer Next is an OrcaSlicer fork, so it opens a Layerpaint Standard 3MF natively and maps your painted colors to ACE 2 Pro slots, with no plugin and no repaint. Below: the drop-onto-a-plate flow, how the sync pulls your loaded spools so mapping starts from real colors, why slot 1 is your unpainted color, and what to do with filament the unit can't identify.
Can Anycubic Slicer Next open a Layerpaint 3MF?
Yes. Anycubic Slicer Next is built on OrcaSlicer, which is itself a fork of Bambu Studio, so all three read the Standard 3MF Materials Extension the same way. The colorgroup block Layerpaint writes into the file is exactly what the slicer reads to color your model, with no plugin and no repainting after import. What differs is downstream: how the ACE 2 Pro loads spools and how the slicer maps each painted color to a slot.
Two things to get straight first. This is Anycubic Slicer Next, the Orca-based build, not the older Prusa-based Anycubic Slicer. And the colorgroup data rides inside the 3MF itself, so there's no sidecar file to keep with it and nothing to re-paint once it imports. The <m:colorgroup> block is the slicer's whole source of truth for color.
That shared ancestry is why this looks almost identical to opening a Layerpaint 3MF in OrcaSlicer. The parts that differ are on the hardware side: how the ACE 2 Pro loads spools, and how the slicer maps your colors to them.
Paint and export from Layerpaint
Drop your STL, OBJ, or 3MF onto layerpaint.app/app. Color it with the Region tool, then clean up edges with the Brush and Wand. Switch tools from the toolbar on the left, or press p to cycle through them. The number keys 1–9 pick a palette color, not a tool, so reach for the toolbar when you want to change how you paint.
Build your palette in the order your ACE 2 Pro spools are loaded. Layerpaint has no drag-to-reorder for chips, so the order you add them is the slot order in the export. Get it right here and the mapping in the slicer mostly takes care of itself. New to the painter? The start-to-finish paint walkthrough covers tools and palette first. When the paint job is done, hit Export 3MF. The file carries one color group plus a small settings block, so colors land on PLA presets instead of whatever you last had loaded.
Drop the 3MF onto a fresh plate
Open Anycubic Slicer Next, pick your Kobra S1 or Kobra 3 profile, and drag the exported .3mf onto an empty plate. The model arrives already colored. Orbit around it and confirm the colors match what you painted before you go near filament setup.
Drag the file onto a fresh, empty plate instead of importing it into an open project. Merging it into an existing scene is where colors most often get dropped or collapsed into one group.
Sync the spools, then map the colors
Anycubic Slicer Next can sync the filament list straight from a connected ACE 2 Pro, so the mapping table starts from the spools you actually have loaded rather than generic placeholders. At slice time, or when you connect for a remote print, it runs automatic mapping: a matching algorithm pairs each color in the file with a slot. When a match isn't obvious, set it by hand from the object's color list.
The ACE 2 Pro holds four spools, and you can cascade up to four units for 16 colors on a Kobra S1 or Kobra 3. A Layerpaint palette also tops out at 16, so the file never asks for more colors than the hardware can load. One painted color, one spool.
Why is slot 1 your unpainted color?
Layerpaint reserves color-group index 0 for unpainted faces and writes it as the first entry in the 3MF. Your painted chips start at the second slot. So in the slicer's mapping table, slot 1 is the background color for any triangle you never touched, not your first palette chip. Assign slot 1 to whatever bare faces should print as. Anycubic Slicer Next leans the same way: its default base color is the spool in position 1, so once you know slot 1 is the unpainted sentinel, the two line up.
This is the one thing that trips people up. If you painted every face, slot 1 still exists but no triangle uses it, so you can load anything there. If you left some faces bare on purpose, slot 1 is where you choose their color.
Slot order lives in Layerpaint, not the slicer
The automatic mapping decides which spool covers which color, but the slot order itself comes from your Layerpaint palette. There's no reorder handle in Anycubic Slicer Next that rewrites the file. If the order is wrong, fix it back in Layerpaint: rebuild the palette in the right sequence and re-export. Removing a chip unpaints every face that used it, so reorder by adding, not by deleting and replacing.
Before you export, turn on Show swap bar in Layerpaint to count total filament swaps and flush waste per layer. The ACE 2 Pro purges on every color change, so a palette that swaps less prints faster and wastes less filament. Reading the swap bar first saves a round trip through the slicer. If the count looks high, reordering the palette is usually where the savings are.
Common questions
Does this work on the Kobra S1, Kobra 3, and other ACE 2 Pro printers?
Yes. Any Anycubic printer that runs the ACE 2 Pro and Anycubic Slicer Next reads the same Standard 3MF. The Kobra S1 is the headline machine for 16-color work, but the import path is identical across the Kobra 3 and the other ACE 2 Pro models. Pick the matching printer profile and the rest of the steps are the same.
My third-party spool mapped to the wrong color. What happened?
The ACE 2 Pro reads tagged Anycubic filament and fills in the material and color for you. Run an untagged or third-party spool and it can't, so the slicer is guessing. Set that slot's color and type by hand before slicing and the mapping holds.
All my colors landed on one spool. What went wrong?
Usually the ACE 2 Pro was switched off for the job, so the slicer collapsed the file to single-color, or the file was merged into an existing project instead of dropped onto an empty plate. Re-import onto a clean plate with the unit enabled and the color groups come back.
Do I have to use Anycubic Slicer Next, or can I use OrcaSlicer?
Both work. OrcaSlicer reads the same 3MF and can drive an ACE 2 Pro printer once you set up the profile. Anycubic Slicer Next is the path of least setup because the Kobra profiles and the sync ship with it. Use whichever you already have dialed in.
Try it now
Open layerpaint.app/app, paint an STL, and export a Standard 3MF for your ACE 2 Pro. Nothing uploads, nothing installs, and there's no account. When you're ready to export, a one-time payment of $19.97 unlocks 3MF export forever. No subscription.