The Form Studio 1 supports open materials, which means you can print with third-party resins in addition to Formlabs materials. If you're coming from Chitubox or Lychee Slicer, this is where your experience tuning exposure and print settings is useful. Instead of applying a validated Formlabs material setting, you create your own custom print setting in PreForm's Print Settings Editor and tune it for your resin. This guide explains that workflow and how it maps to the slicer you already know.

For validated Formlabs materials, you don't need any of this, as PreForm applies tested settings automatically.

Third-party resins can contain chemicals that are not tested or approved by Formlabs and may be harmful or may damage your printer. Proceed carefully and at your own risk.

The Print Settings Editor is intended for advanced users who are comfortable modifying print parameters and troubleshooting the results. If you run into problems while printing with a custom setting, Formlabs Support will ask you to revert to a default Formlabs print setting, and cannot assist with developing or fine-tuning custom settings.

The Print Settings Editor is where you create and manage the custom print settings used for open materials.

To open the Print Settings Editor in PreForm, click Edit > Print Settings Editor. The Print Settings Editor window appears. Here, you can create, edit, export, import, and delete custom print settings. You can also browse Formlabs' built-in settings under the Formlabs Settings tab. Use the dropdown filters and search box to find a setting by printer, material, or layer thickness.

To create a new print setting for a third-party material, click New Print Setting > Open Material > Copy & Edit Selected.

The print parameters you tune are conceptually similar to those in Chitubox and Lychee, but PreForm names and measures several of them differently. The most important difference is how exposure is expressed.

Because PreForm uses energy dose instead of time, the same exposure value behaves consistently regardless of the printer's light power. If you need to think about exposure time, the relationship is exposure (mJ/cm²) = irradiance (mW/cm²) × time (s).

A custom print setting exposes a range of parameters. At a high level, they fall into a few groups:

• Exposure: how much energy is delivered to the model, plus Early Layer Exposure for build-platform adhesion.
• Layer thickness: thickness of each printed layer, which most other parameters are tuned around
• Dimensional accuracy: X/Y/Z correction factors and Outer Boundary Offset
• Heater: whether the heater is enabled and temperature is set to 28 oC
• Motion: peel and squish behavior
• Detection and safety routines: debris detection and related protections
• Resin management: resin level in the tank and resin viscosity 

To make a new custom material profile to print a third-party resin, copy an existing 30, 50, or 100 micron Open Material setting, then adjust it accordingly.

To create a custom print setting:

1. Click Edit Job Setup > Create or Import Custom Print Setting.
2. Click New Print Setting to see the list of Formlabs or Open Material settings. Use the filters or search to find the Open Material settings and choose the layer thickness most appropriate to your application.
3. Select it and click Copy & Edit Selected. A new editable print setting appears.
4. Rename the setting accordingly, add the description (optional), and input the resin name (required) and resin manufacturer name (required).
5. Edit the parameters for your resin.
6. Click Save. Your setting appears under My Settings.

You can also share settings between machines: click the Export Print Setting icon to save a setting as an FPS file. Click Import FPS File to load a shared print setting.

Your experience calibrating, testing, and adjusting print settings from Chitubox and Lychee applies directly here. The goal is to find exposure and motion settings that produce reliable, dimensionally accurate prints for your specific resin.

Formlabs recommends the following approach:

1. Start from a close base setting.
   • Reference the Chitubox or Lychee setting, if you have one. Take note of the machine UV power/light intensity and exposure time and apply that to PreForm’s irradiance and exposure (as energy).
   • Use the same motion profile as a starting point before adjusting.
2. Set a starting exposure.
   • Begin from the resin manufacturer's recommended exposure. Because PreForm uses energy dose (mJ/cm²) rather than time, convert using the irradiance relationship above if the manufacturer specifies seconds.
3. Run a test print.
4. Adjust the highest-impact parameters first.
   • Irradiance is one of the most powerful levers: lowering it often resolves issues like gelling or parts fusing together, at the cost of print time. Use exposure parameters  to change green state strength, and Early Layer Exposure to tune build platform adhesion and reduce flashing (also known as "elephant’s foot").
5. Iterate and validate across geometries.
   • A setting tuned for one model may not work for another, so test with a range of parts before relying on it.

Once your custom setting is saved, starting a print works much like a standard job.

To print with an open material profile:

1. Import, orient, and support your model as usual.
2. Click Edit Job Setup. The Job Setup screen appears.
3. Select Open Material, then select your custom print setting.
4. Click Apply.
5. Click Upload to Queue to send the job to the Form Studio 1.

When printing with an open material, the printer behaves differently than when printing with a Formlabs resin. Here are some things to keep in mind:

1. The printer will not automatically dispense resin from the cartridge. Manually pour resin into the tank before starting a print. Pour at least enough resin to cover the tank film. For best results, pour roughly 500 ml of resin into the tank.
2. Normally, Formlabs SLA printers warn you about resin tank and resin cartridge mismatches to avoid dispensing incorrect resin. For jobs set up with Open Material Mode, this check is disabled. If you’re printing with different resins in different tanks, mark them appropriately to avoid mixing resins.