GrabCAD Print Page 1

During the product development lifecycle, an industrial designer will create multiple versions of a product in various finishes, textures and colors. Using the new .3MF file format, we can apply a texture in a CAD program, such as SOLIDWORKS, and save the file in a format that retains that texture and can be used for 3D printing.

Have you ever sat and stared at your printer while it hums away making your part and thought to yourself “What if I could print my part at different resolutions based on the level of detail in a certain area of the part?” Well, good news, this is now a reality. If you didn’t think that, then I hope you are asking yourself “why didn’t I think of that?” Now, with the most recent update to GrabCAD Print, select Stratasys FDM machines have the option to utilize a new feature called Adaptive Slice.

In this Video Tech Tip, we go over some easy ways to add strength to your FDM parts in GrabCAD Print. GrabCAD allows users to effectively add strength to certain areas without using excess materials.

Working remotely is more common than it used to be. Many companies have implanted this policy throughout a couple of years and designers, engineers and manufacturers are some of the positions that have transitioned into this way of working. In this 3D printing Tech Tip, we go over GrabCAD Workbench and how to use it to coordinate and monitor your printing jobs remotely.

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.

Monitoring your print jobs remotely has gotten easier than ever before with GrabCAD Print. There are some amazing features within the software that can help you plan and check your projects from wherever you are. In this article, we go over some of those features that will help you easily monitor your GrabCAD 3D printing projects remotely.

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.