With the many improvements to GrabCAD Print over the last year, one of the most notable is the addition of Manufacturing Notes. This add-in allows the user to add notes to the faces of parts to be 3D printed. These notes can then be printed off on paper and follow the 3D printed part from initial printing through post-processing. High-volume 3D printing labs, universities and manufacturing may benefit the most from this feature, where multiple engineers and departments are utilizing their printers daily.

In October, we 3D printed some cool-looking lollipops on our Stratasys J-series PolyJet 3D printer to showcase the life-like quality that can be achieved with Vero and Agilus30 materials. Keeping up with the candy theme for the holidays, I thought it would be fun to create an incredibly life-like jawbreaker on the J750, which also provides an exciting opportunity to go over the Part Priority feature in GrabCAD Print. This feature helps novice modelers and users of CAD software that don’t make great watertight models create amazing 3D printed parts, exactly how they want them to be without needing to go back and fix their models.

Stratasys GrabCAD Print is a sophisticated 3D printing app that allows designers and engineers to prepare, schedule and monitor 3D printing jobs. Since its release, GrabCAD has continued to make exciting updates to this software; and we will be updating you every other month on its new features – in this set of release notes we will be looking at versions 1.32, 1.33, and the just-released 1.34.

The Stratasys J750 is capable of all sorts of amazing things, as we’ve seen recently with our articles involving the application of real-to-life textures and eyewear prototyping. An amazing new application for the Stratasys J series of printers that I’ve been running into quite a bit is the creation of full-color topographical maps that display visual data on top of satellite imagery, similar to how GIS software overlays data onto a two-dimensional map, but with the bonus of being able to quickly display elevation as well! What we’ve found in our initial studies of this application is that these three-dimensional maps are great at displaying data in a way that can’t quickly be understood when looking at a two-dimensional variant, such as census data regarding population density in relation to mountains and valleys. To get a good idea of what goes into this process, we’re going to overlay street data for the area surrounding Boston onto a topographical map of Eastern Massachusetts. 

Stratasys GrabCAD Print is a sophisticated 3D printing app that allows designers and engineers to prepare, schedule and monitor 3D printing jobs. Since its release, GrabCAD has continued to make exciting updates to this software and we will be updating you every other month on its new features. In this set of release notes, we will be looking at versions 1.29, 1.30 and the just-released 1.31.

Stratasys 3D printers offer two main technologies through which multi-color printing can be accomplished. PolyJet technology is the most widely known that allows you to 3D print multi-color, multi-material parts and is known for its detailed and realistic results. Surprisingly, many people do not know that single-print, multi-colored prints are also possible when using Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technology. Using Stratasys 3D printers and GrabCAD Print software, the process is actually very simple.

The VeroFlex and VeroFlexVivid family of materials are an unbelievably unique set of new materials available on Stratasys J Series 3D printers, which are capable of producing parts that have improved strength and flexibility while retaining great shape memory. Similar to how our simulated rubber-like Agilus material works, parts produced in either VeroFlex or VeroFlexVivid do not need to be handled as gently as other material parts and will hold up with little fear of them breaking. However, unlike Agilus, this material produces parts that are rigid and will snap right back to their original shape after being flexed in any direction. This makes them a great material to print high-quality full-color parts that are thin, like eyewear and small action figures, so today we’re going to show these new materials in action as we make some incredible Fourth of July sunglasses!

When 3D printing, you can sometimes run into issues trying to work with extremely thin features. Most of the time, good design practices can help to fix these issues. Two GrabCAD tools, the Thick and Thin Wall Command and the Variable Width Fill Command aid in resolving these issues more efficiently, leaving you with a sturdy, high-quality design.
In this video, Application Engineer Ricky Shannon demonstrates just how to utilize these built-in tools on a multi-bodied SOLIDWORKS part using a straight 3D CAD file.

Stratasys' GrabCAD Print is a sophisticated 3D printing app that allows designers and engineers to prepare, schedule and monitor 3D printing jobs. Since its release, GrabCAD has continued to make exciting updates to this software; and we will be updating you every other month on its new features. In this set of release notes, we will be looking at versions 1.26, 1.27, and the just released 1.28.

The ultimate goal of 3D printing prototype models is to create a part as close to the final product or part as possible. Ideally, you would be able to test the part for functionality and/or appearance to determine if your design is the correct one. That said, most of the time designers create their prototypes with overall part dimensions in mind and ignore the final physical surface textures and aesthetics because they are either too difficult to design or dismissed as just a “nice-to-have” but non-essential feature for this early phase of the project cycle. But what if you could include that level of detail?

Now, with the new software tools in SOLIDWORKS 2019 update and Adobe Photoshop CC, along with the new Agilus30 White material on the Stratasys J750, it’s easy to create these textures in full color that mimic what your final production material will be.

Have you ever 3D printed a part and it wasn't as strong as you'd hoped? Maybe before printing, you decide your part needs additional strength in one area and not another. Maybe you're going to drill a hole or put a threaded insert inside of a part and you just wanted to add strength just to those key areas. Well, now there's a tool that can do that without having to send the design back into your 3D CAD software. In this video blog, TriMech Application Engineer Ricky Shannon will walk through the new GrabCAD Print Advanced FDM toolset.

Stratasys' GrabCAD Print is a sophisticated 3D printing app that allows designers and engineers to prepare, schedule and monitor 3D printing jobs. Since its release, GrabCAD has continued to make exciting updates to this software; and we will be updating you every other month on its new features – as we transition into 2019 there have been several major updates in GrabCAD Print with the release of versions 1.24 and 1.25 which we will highlight here.