Professional Additive Manufacturing
By “professional additive manufacturing”, we intend all those categories of 3D printing adoption that relate to the creative and artistic spheres. These include applications in architecture, construction, design, arts & crafts as well as entertainment (movies and animation) and designer consumer products such as furniture and jewelry.
This category of adopters has grown enormously in recent years as the cost of professional level AM systems has decreased from over $100,000 to between $20,000 and $5,000. This enormous paradigm shift has opened up 3D printing to a wide demographic of users that have innovated and imagined new application possibilities for AM. The process is still very much ongoing as the abundance of news and articles in this section clearly indicate.
Several artists and creatives have embraced plastic and in many cases ceramics based technologies to explore new possibilities in both end-use products and their supply to the final user. 3D printing is seen as the key technology that will enable the production of mass customized items, produced on-demand, on location, by professionals in any part of the world.
Global professional and B2C additive manufacturing services such as Shapeways, iMaterialise and Sculpteo have also contributed to expanding this area of AM by making high-end 3D printing technologies easily accessible and affordable for more people all over the world.
Latest professional AM news:
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Always at the cutting edge, MIT’s Mediated Matter lab has developed a new, experimental additive manufacturing technique that uses a swarm of small robots to build up tubular structures. The process, called FIBERBOTS, can enable the digital fabrication of large-scale architectures with high spatial resolution. A video of the FIBERBOTS…
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Solidscape is one of the most focused and consolidated companies in the world of 3D printing, one which has remained more focused on its end products rather than the process. The company, specializing in wax 3D printing technologies, has found a significant niche in the AM sector, appealing to industries…
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German design firm Studio 7.5 recently teamed up with French concrete 3D printing company XTreeE to construct a series of 3D printed benches. The benches, notable for their woven textures, demonstrate how additive manufacturing can be employed to produce architectural concrete structures. More than just showcasing how 3D printing technology…
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Bridget Mongeon is a talented Texan artist who has been a pioneer in adopting 3D technologies in her workflow to produce amazing bonze-casted sculptures. In 2015 we covered what is possibly her greatest work to date (and definitely her largest), the Mad Hatter Tea Party, while she was still working on it.…
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Boston-based Rize Inc. has seen its Rize One 3D printer used for numerous applications, as customers find great promise in the professional desktop system. Famously requiring minimal post-processing, the system is proving itself on the market as customers such as New Hudson Façades (NHF) bring the Rize One into operations with a…
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3D pens such as the 3Doodler have carved out a niche in the broader 3D printing market. Though varied in its applications, the 3D drawing devices have primarily become a new artistic medium, enabling artists (both professional and amateur), hobbyists and designers to create objects and three dimensional creations like…
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Though 3D printed construction is gradually becoming more viable for building livable houses (there are even a handful of examples, already!), there are other ways that 3D printing is contributing to the construction and architecture field. At New Hudson Façades (NHF), a company specializing in the design and manufacturing of…
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Speaking as someone who had a brief stint dancing on ballet pointe shoes: they are not comfortable. Not in the slightest. The rigid shoes, comprised of a hard “box” in the toe and a stiff sole, do make ballerinas look amazingly ethereal when they dance, but anyone who has ever…
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So much of technology is about moving ahead, progressing and improving on the past. Sometimes though, technology is used to pay homage to the past, which is exactly what Ethan Moses, a maker and amateur photographer, has done with his 3D printed Cameradactyl. The 3D printed camera, currently being featured…
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For the past several weeks, 3D printing has been making headlines around the world, and primarily in the United States. To the frustration of most of the industry, this significant media attention has been grabbed by the ever-notorious 3D printed gun debate, re-ignited by the U.S. government’s recent decision to…
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