TL;DR: Creality Print is an OrcaSlicer fork, so it opens a Layerpaint Standard 3MF natively and maps your painted colors to CFS spools on the K2 Plus — no plugin, no repaint. Here's the drop-onto-a-plate workflow, why the first slot is your unpainted color, and what to check when colors land on one spool.
Can Creality Print open a Layerpaint 3MF?
Yes. Creality Print V6 is a fork of OrcaSlicer, which is itself a fork of Bambu Studio, so all three parse the Standard 3MF Materials Extension the same way. The colorgroup block Layerpaint writes is exactly what Creality Print reads to color your model — no plugin and no repainting on the slicer side. The only real differences are on the hardware side: the CFS and how the K2 Plus maps spools.
Creality Print V6 is a fork of OrcaSlicer, which is itself a fork of Bambu Studio. All three descend from the same import code, so they parse the Standard 3MF Materials Extension the same way. The <m:colorgroup> block Layerpaint writes into the file is the part Creality Print reads to color your model. No plugin, no re-painting on the slicer side.
That shared ancestry is why this workflow looks almost identical to opening a Layerpaint 3MF in OrcaSlicer. The differences that matter are on the hardware side: the CFS, how it maps spools, and the K2 Plus.
Paint and export from Layerpaint
Drop your STL, OBJ, or 3MF onto layerpaint.app/app. Color it with the Region tool (1), clean up edges with the Brush (2) and Wand (3), then build your palette in the order your CFS spools are loaded. Layerpaint has no drag-to-reorder for palette chips, so the order you add them is the slot order in the export. Get it right here and the mapping in Creality Print mostly takes care of itself.
When the paint job is done, hit Export 3MF. The file carries one color group plus a small settings block so the colors land on PLA presets instead of whatever you last had loaded.
Drop the 3MF onto a plate in Creality Print
Open Creality Print, pick your K2 Plus profile, and drag the exported .3mf onto an empty plate. The model comes in already colored. Orbit around it and confirm the colors match what you painted before you go near the filament setup.
Drag the file onto a fresh, empty plate rather than importing it into an open project. Merging it into an existing scene is where colors most often get dropped or merged into one group.
Map the colors to CFS spools
At slice time, Creality Print runs automatic mapping: it matches each color in the file to a spool in the CFS. When a color maps cleanly, the slot shows the spool it picked. When it can't decide, the slot shows -- and you set it by hand from the spool dropdown.
The CFS has to be enabled for any of this to apply. If CFS is switched off, Creality Print prints from the external rack spool and treats the multi-color file as a single-color print. So if your painted model comes out one solid color, the first thing to check is whether the CFS is actually turned on for that job.
The K2 Plus takes up to four spools per CFS unit, and you can chain units up to 16 spools. A Layerpaint palette comfortably covers a full 16-spool chain, so even a 16-color model maps one painted color per spool.
The first slot is your unpainted color
Here is the one thing that trips people up. Layerpaint reserves color-group index 0 for unpainted faces. Any triangle you never touched stays that background color, and it gets exported as the first entry in the file. Your painted chips start at the second slot.
So in Creality Print's mapping table, slot 1 is the unpainted color, not your first palette chip. Assign slot 1 to whatever you want bare faces to print as. If you painted every face, slot 1 still exists but no triangle uses it, so you can load anything there.
Slot order lives in Layerpaint, not the slicer
Creality Print's automatic mapping decides which spool covers which color, but the slot order itself comes from your Layerpaint palette. There is no reorder handle in the slicer that changes the file. If the order is wrong, the cleanest fix is back in Layerpaint: rebuild the palette in the right sequence and re-export. Removing a chip in Layerpaint 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. It counts total filament swaps and flush waste per layer. The CFS purges on every color change just like the AMS does, so a palette that swaps less prints faster and wastes less. Reading the swap bar before export saves you a round trip through the slicer.
Common questions
Does this work on other CFS-equipped Creality printers?
Yes. Any Creality printer that takes a CFS and runs Creality Print reads the same Standard 3MF. The K2 Plus is the flagship for multi-color, but the import path is identical on the other CFS-capable machines. Pick the matching printer profile and the rest of the steps are the same.
All my colors landed on one spool. What happened?
Two usual causes. Either the CFS was disabled for the job, so Creality Print collapsed the file to single-color and printed from the rack spool, or the file was merged into an existing project instead of dropped onto an empty plate. Re-import onto a clean plate with the CFS enabled and the color groups come back.
Do I have to use Creality Print, or can I use OrcaSlicer?
Both work. OrcaSlicer can drive a CFS-equipped Creality printer if you set up the profile, and it reads the same 3MF. Creality Print is the path of least setup because the K2 Plus and CFS profiles 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 CFS. 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.