This guide will show you how to use your Anycubic Photon or Photon S. I'll walk you through the process of slicing, preparing, printing, and cleaning.

How the Photon works

Whether or not you're new to 3D printing, printing on the Photon is different than most 3D printers on the market today. This is because the Photon is an SLA (Stereolithography Apparatus) printer, whereas most 3D printers are FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling).

SLA printers use a focused or UV light on a resin vat to "cure" each layer of your print.

SLA printers use a focused or UV light on a resin vat to "cure" each layer of your print, whereas FDM printers melt a spool of plastic filament to generate each layer. In other words, each layer is basically a "photo" projected using a projector. This fundamental difference means that you can't use "normal" slicing programs such as Cura to generate files for printing, nor can you use OctoPrint.