"We're doing what aerospace engineers are doing on a rocket, but on a dress."

In 2019, fashion designer Zac Posen teamed up with GE Additive and Protolabs to harness 3D printing technology in the development of several garments that would be worn by Jourdan Dunn, Nina Dobrev, Katie Holmes, Julia Garner and Deepika Padukone at that year's Met Gala.

Two and a half years on, GE Additive Operations Leader Stephanie DePalma [SDP] and Protolabs Applications Engineer Eric Utley [EU] became the latest participants on the Additive Insight Innovators on Innovators podcast to recount the six months and 1,500 manufacturing hours it took to develop the fashion pieces. 

Throughout their conversation, DePalma and Utley detail their experiences of working with Posen and his team; recall the challenges of putting together the Met Gala garments; and ponder the future application opportunities for additive manufacturing. 

Below, we have the full transcript of the pair's exchange. 

SDP: So, Eric, it's been about two and a half years since the Met Gala project. And I don't think I've actually really spoken or talked to you much during that timeframe. Now that things are much different in the state of the world, I find myself looking back at some of those exciting times in 2019 and just thinking about how things are different now, what are some things that you maybe in reflection have taken away from the Met Gala project, things that were challenging or great memories of the experience?

EU: Yeah, what was really fun with that, one was that I'm typically dealing with engineers and design people, manufacturing people, day to day, and Zac and his team were just a completely different breed of people, just very artistic. And what I really liked, you know, what I felt like our common ground was that all of us visualise things in three-dimensional space. And that was really fun. Watching his team and Zac kind of come up with these ideas in three-dimensional space and then they had this additional dimension where they not only had to consider how it looked standing still, but they had to consider how it looked when a person was moving, as well. And that was all very insightful. For me, as a guy, mid 30s, engineer, fashion is fashion. And I didn't really have much exposure to that. It was just fun, really seeing another world like that and really finding the common ground working together. That was my favourite part.

SDP: I have to say, that was my favourite part as well, and especially thinking about how different communication is today, from what it was in 2019, I think a lot of the things we learned of communicating with Zac and just the language barrier, so to speak, between engineering and manufacturing, compared to fashion, really gave me some good tools in how we communicate in today's world, what types of changes have you had in how you're interacting with customers and still talking about 3D printing and what Protolabs has to offer?

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EU: Yeah, so since that project, I've been working with our internal processing, and we really overhauled how parts flow through our system and also our customer facing website changed drastically. So, that's really changed how we interact with our customers is that we have a online interface that basically, you can upload a file and get an instant quote, and that's usually how I'm personally dialoguing with customers and also screen sharing, pulling up, looking at parts with customers, and trying to find the right fit for their application. But yeah, that's changed really quite a bit in the last two and a half years. So, what were you doing before the Met Gala project?

SDP: So, before the Met Gala project, I was involved in the engineering consulting business branded AdWorks within GE Additive. And that was really the whole premise of how we started this collaboration with Zac of teaching customers about the technology of 3D printing, about engineering design and how to take a vision that you have in your head and create it into 3D digital space and then make it a physical reality with the machine. That was really what I was doing before. Since the Met Gala, one of the things that we found that's been tremendously helpful was the entire story that we went through with Zac of taking somebody who knew the premise of the technology but wasn't obviously super technical, and then how we communicated what the technology was capable of doing, the design journey that we went on of taking those things that were in Zac's head and making them a reality and then being able to show the physical end result of what we had at the Met Gala. And what that's done for us is it gives us not only that whole design story, but to also talk about the manufacturing process of how during that project, you were so great Eric, of printing all these coupons in different finishes, because that was important to Zac to see and touch and feel, what was in his head and how it could possibly be in real life. And just the whole value of the manufacturing process and then the options that you have to change your design, from what is in a 3D CAD model to what would actually come out of the printer and after post processing.

What kind of takeaways has Protolabs had or been able to use this engagement in relating to their process or their customers?

EU: Yeah, so it was a different sort of project for us. And really, I learned a lot about juggling three parties, you had us and GE and Zac Posen, and then us really finding a path forward on that project that all of us could fulfil, and like, like you said, learning from that project, maintaining the timeline was a struggle for that. And good planning really paid off on that project. And leveraging risk mitigation, as well, and it was kind of fun, because I felt like I was on the opposite side of the fence for once. Usually, I'm the one servicing the product developers and the people trying to push these products out. And now I'm in that seat, feeling that pressure, feeling that heat of 'oh my god, we got to get this in the next week or two, or the project sank or our timelines going to get pushed, we're gonna have to make sacrifices somewhere else.' And so, rapid prototyping for risk mitigation. So it's like, we want option A, B, C, or D. And it's like, let's just print A through Z, and see what comes out on the other side. And that was fun.

You mentioned the petals. I remember, I was working with Sarah from GE, and Zac and we were like, how thick do we want these pedals to be? Because you go too thick, and it's too heavy, and it's clunky, and you go too thin, and it's too delicate, and it's just going to break. And we ran prototypes to test it and I remember our first pieces were about eight inch thick, like right at 0.125 inches, and we felt it and we said, alright we can go a little lighter than this and we shaved it down, shaved it down. And we looked at the math, basically, if you send those petals out by the width of a sheet of paper, it was gonna take a pound off the whole dress. So even just shaving that tiny little extra bit would make a significant difference and how comfortable and, how well the model can move in it. And I felt like we dialled that in really close to the edge in the end. And it was just funny, we're doing the same thing aerospace engineers are doing on a rocket but doing it on a dress.

SDP: I don't know Eric, if we ever shared with you, during the process, as we were going through that light weighting and iteration of how the petals would fit. So, Sarah and Shannon, who both worked on the project from GE, they tried to the gowns on themselves to a certain extent, and we would put we put the petals around us and think, how does this feel? How could we move in this? And then we'd come back, and they would make some adjustments to the model and send it to you and say, well, we tried to take some weight out in these couple of areas, or we change the overall shape, because we just don't think it's gonna fit and we'll be able to move quite like we thought. So that was one of our behind-the-scenes moments, if you will, of everybody trying on the different items just to get a real-life experience of how somebody could possibly move in these in these clothes.

EU: Yeah, I was gonna ask you about the cage, or the chest piece, for the rose gown, because I wasn't involved that much with that particular component. Was that one printed with E-Beam, electron beam, if I remember?

SDP: Oh, the under cage. Yeah, so that was printed with the e-beam technology. So I believe we printed it in the Q 20 Plus machine with titanium. And we went like round and round of the best way to design that because even though titanium is lightweight, it was still really like a big thing of weight to have to carry. And so we went round and round on the different attachment methods of the petals. The best way to give Zac a little bit of modularity because we knew he would be very used to being able to shift and move fabric in a way to get the exact aesthetic that he wanted. But he wouldn't be able to do that with a 3D printed petal so much. So those are really the critical requirements of what went into that cage from a design perspective. How can we get somebody modularity and the placement of the petals, and then take as much weight out of it as absolutely possible, which was why we went with that really organic looking shape, almost camo style, with those big chunks of pieces missing. But even with the cage, size of the machines became a limitation. So, we didn't have the machine large enough to print the entire cage as a single piece or two pieces we would have needed. So, we had to really print them in very small sections, and then bolt them together.

EU: Yeah, I remember seeing online, someone mentioned, kind of an armchair engineer, he said, 'Oh, I think those petals are held on with neodymium magnets'. He's like, 'I can tell just by looking at it', and I loved seeing that, that was hilarious.

SDP: We thought about magnets at one point, that just didn’t seem quite as fool proof as the bolts did.

EU: Right, right. I remember Zac, like I said, he thinks of things in movement, you know, in a way that we typically don't in 3D printing. And so, he wanted initially for the petals to kind of have a flutter to them or to move a little bit. And we knocked around ideas of printing in like a TPU lattice or something to kind of act as a cushion, and things like that to get that movement. But it was just going to be such an engineering challenge, I think, and we were really concerned with the petals clinking and clacking together to eventually do that. But it was still really impressive that it came together the way it did.

SDP: So, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but what was your favourite piece that we printed?

EU: The rose gown, I think was my favourite. The initial idea was to make it white. And then Zac thought it was going to look to bridal and that makes sense to me. And then the decision was to make it red. And Zac had this idea of like a mylar balloon, like a metallic red paint. And there's some sculptures out there done that way where they're made to look like balloon animals. And the way those are done is highly polished metal with a candy clear coat over it just like you would a hot rod car. But then it comes in as polished again, because you got to really lay that on and then polish it back down. And we explored that and tried making that work. And it just wasn't working the way we wanted to. So, we looked at like a colour shifting paint. I talked to our custom finisher guy, I'm like, 'what's the craziest paints we got access to?' And he found this book that he had given us a long time ago of all these like colour shifting paints. And they're super expensive, like $1,600 for a little pint of it, we end up using it at least two pints on the rose gown dress. And it had this really stark look that I feel like just isn't captured in the pictures like you really got to see it once again in movement to really get a feel for it, because they would just capture the red and it would almost look like chocolate brown in some light or like a fiery orange. And Zac really ended up liking that. And I think it was kind of like if he knew that was an option on the table at first, that would have done it but yeah, that was that was a great example of someone from an artistic side saying I want it to look like a metallic rose.

I thought it was so funny that if someone told me I was gonna be printing a human sized metallic rose. I wouldn't have thought that would happen, but yeah, that was fun. Zac would tell us, I want something to look... initially he was knocking around ideas of a slime green -

SDP: I remember the lime green.

EU: - to look like 1990s Nickelodeon lime green, he wanted it to look like splashed or something.

SDP: That was for the palm leaves, right, the slime green colour he was thinking of?

EU: Yeah, and I mean, we had some good ideas for it, we were gonna make it look just like Nickelodeon green, lime green, you know. But we ended up changing that idea right at the last minute I'm sure to match the colour on the dress better. But I miss that part of the project, honestly, that was fun doing that really hardcore problem solving of trying to use the tools in your toolkit to get what they're looking for.

SDP: Part of the project that I really miss is how we were trying to capture Zac's vision and take that and make it a reality. But that also gave us the experience to live out beauty in a completely different way, which, as an engineer, you don't ever think about that really in relation to your job. But the experience of using our engineering skill sets and CAD tools and analysis and manufacturing methods and how that related to translating Zac's vision into something that was beautiful, that was a really cool part of the experience, at least for me, that I don't know that we'll get to experience again, unless we have another fashion project.

I remember the first time that we dressed Nina [Dobrev] in that bustier and I think Sarah and I were holding our breath like 'oh my gosh, is this gonna work because we have no other choice?' It's May 4th at this point and Met Gala is May 6th.

EU: Yeah, and I'd say, in a good year and a half after that project, a lot of fashion stuff crossed my desk. They would come across and they just weren't a good fit. We've done fashion stuff before the Zac Posen project, smaller items and things, and then some of it came across afterwards. Yeah, I'm looking for that fun marketing project like that, that leverages the artistic side of things. It feels very gloves off when you do projects like that. I was gonna say, like, working in 3D printing in our industry, is fun because it's like, we see trends, like, I mean, I've been in it for 13 years, how long have you been in it now?

SDP: Since 2014, so seven years in 3D printing.

EU: Okay, yeah. It's just fun seeing the trends come and go, I don't know, if you've noticed that, like you come and see like, unmanned drones, in industry, and then like, back when smartphones started to become popular, we start smartphone accessories, and things like that. And now you mentioned you like working on stuff with artistic sides of things. And something I've seen a lot lately, in the last few years, a lot of like green technology stuff kind of coming across now.

SDP: Oh interesting.

EU: So, there’s been a lot of 3D printing projects around, clean energy, electrification of cars. It’s just exciting to see 3D printing’s influence on that now, really starting to pick up here in the last year.

SDP: Yeah. So in terms of like trends of what I've maybe been seeing on the metal additive side, we've seen a much larger shift in our customers from using 3D printing as rapid prototyping or in the development space to going to some type more of a scaled production. So, in aviation, we're seeing more and more applications that can be 3D printed on jet engines, we have medical customers who are taking different Orthopaedics into some type of a full rate production, automotive industry is gaining more and more traction with some type of a scaled production solution for 3D printing. Is any of that type of work impacting Protolabs in any way? I know that you have a lot of different machines and serve customers in different industries with different needs, has there been any trends in just your business model?

EU: I'd say in the last three or four years, the production activity has picked up in Selective laser sintering technology for like, seven years now. And I remember about five years ago, our CTO at the time, he called it a technology that's a hammer looking for a nail. He said you had this really versatile technology, but there just wasn't many engineers out there who really knew how to leverage it and knew the benefits of it. That's something that GE really pioneered, honestly, was adopting the technology, but also kind of promoting knowledge of how to leverage the technology. And in the last couple years, you're right, I've seen a big uptake, medical and aerospace, particularly, are adopting 3D printing really heavily. And you're right, I feel like it's trickling into the automotive space now, as well, we also print in plastic and Multi Jet Fusion, and that's been really successful with printing low volume production plastic parts.

I did a podcast a while back with one of the owners of a company called OVR. And they actually have a product that's like an add on to VR, that actually adds a scent component to it. So, you can be like walking through a forest in VR and like smell the pine on a tree or something like that. And that's a cool project two because it's just such a great intersection of... once again, we were like we're intersecting art and engineering, right? They're intersecting like your scent, and all your experiences and everything associated with scent, and technology. And that's just such a neat idea. What sort of projects are you working on nowadays?

SDP: So again, the big projects that GE additive has been working on is really that maturation of customers from finding their application to taking it into some type of scaled production. From a machine standpoint, we're really matching the technology of the machine with the needs of the customers. So, we have our M line that we're getting ready to release in 2022, which is a larger format quad laser machine that gives you the capability of the M two in terms of fidelity and the properties out of it, but at a much higher speed, obviously, in a quad laser system and with much larger size - four X the size of an m two. Similarly, on our EBM side, we are getting ready to release what we call the spectra L, which is one of the next generations of the EBM machines, again geared at being able to go to higher temperatures to allow different material offerings and to be able to get better productivity out of those materials as well. So, I think those are a lot of the things that we've been working on. And then obviously, binder jet, which is the big latch into the automotive industry, just with the speed and the automation that can be put into that machine. So that's where we've really been focused on, and we've taken the approach of letting the applications and the needs of the customers help us align our product roadmap and technology to those types of needs.

EU: I see. Yeah, binder jet's really interesting. I think that's gonna be a really popular technology that's got a lot of area for growth on it. Is your opinion. - from what I've heard that it's primarily for production and not really for prototyping, because you have these trade-offs with DMLS technology that it seems that DMLS is more accurate and has better mechanical properties, but binder jetting can make parts much faster and at higher volume - Is that your sense of it as well?

SDP: So, we have several customers that we have these early on engagements for the technology with and we spend a lot of time developing the application in the process. But in that journey, there was never really a question about using the technology to find which application. The applications I think we'd already been able to identify really well for the capability of the technology. Whereas on laser, it might be a little bit different of a story and people still want to see, 'oh, could you print this for me and then let's do a business case analysis'. In binder jet, it's much less of that prototyping, and we're going straight into developing the process around this application.

Maybe back to the topic of the Met Gala. Obviously, we worked behind the scenes a lot together and we were both there on the day of the event as well and then some of the events that happened after the gala with the different panels and interviews. What was maybe one behind the scenes moment, from your experience with the Met Gala, that you remember?

EU: I remember being in with Zac's team, developing things and me and Sarah, were there, from GE. And I remember Simon, he was the Head of VP of Development for Zac and his team were there. And I remember they were working on the... so the earliest iterations of the rose gown or pieces of construction paper, they were cutting construction paper and putting it on, and it was just like putting feathers in a hat, they were just slotting in the feathers and moving them and getting this rough idea. And they were blasting Bette Middler showtunes as they were doing it. And I just felt like a fish out of water in that moment. But it was fun. They were just joking and everything and I was like, here I am, you know, right off at Fifth Avenue with some fashion designers putting together a dress, listening to Bette Midler belted out. And that was probably the one thing in my mind that I remember most.

SDP: That’s awesome.

EU: So, you dealt a lot with Zac and his team too, is there something memorable that you can think of?

SDP: Yeah, one of my most memorable experiences was the first time we dressed Nina. So, Nina Dobrev, she wore that clear bustier and that was so challenging from a design standpoint, not that the rose gown wasn't challenging, that was challenging too, but because this was going to fit directly to her body and we had to get it right. I remember Sarah just agonising over the photogrammetry results and shaping that bustier around the form and was it going to fit and what were we going to do if it didn't fit and what kind of risk abatement plans could we have. So, I remember the first time that we dressed Nina in that bustier and I think Sarah and I were holding our breath like 'oh my gosh, is this gonna work because we have no other choice?' It's May 4th at this point, I think, and Met Gala is May 6th, and then Zac and his team, I was so impressed with when we were doing the fitting of how they adapted that little dress. I don't know if you remember she had like a little dress under the bustier, kind of like a shimmery-ish colour. And they kept adapting the size and the shape of that dress to fill out every little nook and cranny, especially in the skirt area, and created that beautiful glowing, flowing look.

That was a memorable experience. And then Nina's reaction after we got the dress on her, and she saw herself in the mirror for the first time and just how great she looked. And she could tell that she felt great wearing that. That was really cool. And then she actually started this thing of singing Barbie Girl over and over. She's like, 'I feel like a Barbie Girl.’ And then she kept doing that over and over and dancing around in that bustier and that was just so fun. And also, just a huge sigh of relief that it all actually worked.

EU: Yeah, you reminded me when you were talking about that, like one challenge of that project was we're trying to interpret these real-world 3D shapes, a person's body or once again, Zac would make these forms and say... because that clear dress, he made that dress in cloth first and said, 'this is what I want.' And so now GE had this really challenging project of, you've got to take that physical dress and make a 3D printable CAD model out of it.

SDP: Yeah.

EU: Can you talk through that one a little more because I’m trying to remember all the routes, we went through to get to that 3D design and ultimately getting it to a 3D CAD.

SDP: So, I actually drove that fabric that he had. So he draped over a mannequin, and came up with the shape of what he wanted that bustier to look like, particularly about the folds in the skirt. And so when we were in New York, going over that concept with him, I drove that mannequin with that dress on it to our facility in Niskayuna, where our Global Research Centre is, and we use their blue light scanner to try and recreate a 3D image of that dress exactly as how Zac had draped it. And I had to FaceTime with Simon and Thomas and they were like, you kind of fluff the skirt up a little bit and the fold kind of came in and they are showing me over FaceTime how to make sure the folds in that skirt were just perfect, so that we could do that blue light scan because that was very important to Zac of just how those folds were creating motion in that garment.

EU: Yeah, I remember the headpiece we did for Julia Garner. Once again, they prototype that with some wire and some drawings and things and we got the CAD file for it. And Zac wanted it to look like gold which was challenging too. It's like, 'okay, how do we make this thing look like gold?' And we ended up printing it in plastic in Multi Jet Fusion and then we tried gold plating and then also brass plating and we ended up going with brass plating because I think it just matched the colouration he was looking for a little more but I was kind of patting myself on the back there because I was like I'm pretty sure this is a world first like no one's brass plated a Multi Jet Fusion parts before.

SDP: [Laughs] It turned out really well.

EU: Yeah, it was polished and everything, it looked pretty good. But I was like, 'alright, I got that one world's first under my belt there because no one's brass plating things like that.

Read more on the Met Gala project: 

SDP: I remember one of the challenges that we had to work on together was the overall size of the files, we kept having to talk about light weighting of the design and not just the physical weight but also the file size of the weight and just making sure that the designs were watertight and so that they'd print correctly. And all the fixing that we had to do of the STLs and I remember it being very late some nights and we'd be sending files to you and you'd give us a call like, ‘we gotta make some changes here or the file size is just too large, what else can we do?’ Do you remember any of that?

EU: Yeah, absolutely. And luckily, I've got a pretty good skill set in cleaning up files, getting them printable in that sense. I remember the first few times, I would kick it back to GE because, once again, you're just dealing with such organic designs and the CAD files are big and so that kind of comes with the course when you're working on files like that. But after, we did get into a rhythm there, after a while, I'd be like 'okay, I got artistic liberty too, I'm gonna clean these up and get these printable for that' and you're right that, we were just running into file size limitations, which is the Achilles heel of 3D printing with those STL files that they define these really organic shapes with a series of triangles and it just blows up the file size for those, and it gets to the point where it doesn't really matter the amount of processor or memory you have, it just can't slice it. And then even just trying to manipulate those files and look at them. It really drags things down. So yeah, that was kind of a learning experience, too. I've dealt with other kind of large file projects before, but I mean, you're talking about each petal of the dress is a large file in of itself, much less the whole dress itself.

SDP: I remember how near the end of the project when we had firm deadlines of when things needed to be printed, because they physically wouldn't have enough time to get to Zac's office before the Met Gala. And I felt like we got very good in the weeks leading up to that really critical timeframe of the designers of GE knew very well, exactly how good you were at STLs. And we use that to our advantage of sending you a file that you then were able to kind of clean up and make into something that was manufacturable so that we could try and get as much of this out the door. And Zac at that time was still asking for samples because he hadn't made his final decision about slime green or purple for the palm leaf.

EU: Yeah, I definitely got pretty familiar with Gantt charts there toward the end, because we really had to schedule it out and hit these timelines across the board. And then you always had to have some sort of fallback back plan, like on the rose gown, it's like, 'well, we could go back to it being white, I guess, if we don't have time to paint it,' you know. That was impressive with that one was that it went so well. I mean, we were cutting it close, but there wasn't ever really a moment where we had to sacrifice. I mean, I mentioned we didn't have the petals move. But beyond that, I mean, we did basically what Zac wanted with these, we didn't make really any sacrifices and we cut it right to the wire.

SDP: I remember one of the heart-stopping moments for me was, this is the week before the Met Gala, we were packing everything up at the GE site. It was over the weekend, we came in to pack up all the pieces that we'd received, and we were driving them up to New York, we were leaving Monday and we were driving them up to Zac's studio in New York. And there was a mishap with the bust of the rose gown and somehow the back petal got sheared off and it broke. And we sent it - I think Sarah called you Eric, it was in a panic of 'this broke, we can't get it to come back together. This is the whole bust and she's supposed to actually wear that during the dinner event. Like what are we going to do?' And you were like, 'just send it back to us. We'll take care of it.' And so, I remember taking it to UPS or FedEx or something and getting it back into Protolabs, and then you expedited shipped it to Zac, because we didn't want to tell Zac what had happened because we thought he might freak out a little bit. And then you had it there and ready and waiting at Tuesday morning when we were starting to put all the pieces together. And it looked completely repaired.

EU: Yeah, I remember getting that phone call. It was like on a Saturday and I'm like, 'uh oh, GE is calling me on a Saturday. What is this?' And yeah, Sarah was very upset. And I honestly started laughing because, like I said, this thing had gone swimmingly up to this point. We didn't have a single build crash. We didn't have anything break in shipping, any of the things that could have gone wrong didn't go wrong, right up to the last minute. And I'm like, 'Oh, of course that would happen.' But luckily, we had just enough slack time there to get it sent back and repaired. So, it was down to the wire. But that one was really close.

SDP: So, Eric, we were talking a little bit about some of the new things in terms of technology coming out of additive and trends that we've been seeing in our customers. We also know that Protolabs recently purchased an X line from GE additive, really around this premise of we're seeing the customers need larger parts that are 3D printed. How have you been seeing those trends at Protolabs with this need for larger parts?

EU: Yeah, we actually have 2 X Lines now, which is really exciting. We have one running Inconel, which is a super alloy for high temp applications. And then aluminium for more general-purpose lightweight parts. And it's been very successful and very exciting. It feels like we're very much on the cutting edge of manufacturing, you're building these - I mean, you throw around the words, and it just sounds ridiculous, right? You know, we're metal sintering a nickel super alloy to make a rocket booster. And then heat treating it and secondary machining it. And there's really a lot of complex process that goes into them. And then you get this really high value, sophisticated piece of metal at the end of it for that, and that's fun to see that process, but the X Lines are huge. It's fun, because in pictures, at first, I'd see it in pictures, and I'd say, 'okay, this thing is about the size of like a 13-passenger van,' and then I see it in person and I'm like, 'okay, no this is more like U-Haul truck,' right? This thing is a huge machine. And the chamber is huge, it's 800 millimetres long, it looks like you could fit like a... I picture like the inline-4 engine block from a car could fit in that build frame. So, it's really fun to see just really large metal parts and just pushing the envelope of that technology.

You know, earlier I mentioned green technology, we're seeing a lot of kind of renewable energy projects and things coming up on it and then aerospace projects, rocketry, DMLS, in general seems very popular with like unmanned drones and so, we're seeing a lot of that activity, but the large frame, you're really leveraging that reduction of assemblies, I think, too. And something I've thought about before that applies to 3D printing in general, but say you have a machine like the M2, that's about 10 inches square footprint, right? And you kind of say, 'okay, we can build a part that's 10 inches now', right, but you can only build one at a time. So, if you want economy of scale, really, the largest part would be more like 5x5 inches, or five inches or less than one dimension, so you can least print two at a time, right, and get some sort of economy of scale of something like that, because the gains are just so great. So, you look at the X Line, that's like an 800-millimetre machine it's like 'yes, we can make one single part that's 800 millimetres long, but it really increases the cost effectiveness of things more like in the 10 inch frame that would typically be made on the M2 one at a time. And it doesn't take much, maybe five or six copies, for it to start becoming more economical to print it on the X Line. So, it's just great seeing the technology evolving and then pushing that cost down, that's once again going to open up new applications for the technology.

SDP: What have you guys been seeing in terms of material trends? Have you noticed any sort of shift of maybe aluminium F357 was really popular and now there's a switch to a different aluminium or to 718, customers are coming with more 718 needs or cobalt chrome? Have you seen any changes in material needs over the past few years?

EU: Yeah, it's been very industry specific right? So, Inconel is, I wouldn't say exclusively, but very much used by aerospace and rocketry because of its high heat temperature tolerance, and there's been some knocking around of different alloys within Inconel and then I have seen cobalt chrome used for more rocket engines as well just interchangeably with Inconel, something like 316 steel is a very common material that we run. It's just a very good workhorse steel you can use in a lot of applications for things like that. We do run the aluminium which is AlSi10mg, most people if you know it at all, you know it from casting and I have seen interest in 6061 aluminium, aerospace industry is just so familiar with 6061 aluminium that they want to print out of that and in the last couple years, I've seen some powder suppliers offering 6061 coming up from that, and it's fun seeing the more niche applications, people coming up saying, 'hey, we really want this custom alloy for this custom application', and it's cool that DMLS can support that.

On the plastic side, once again, Multi Jet Fusion is really popular with low volume production plastic. And we see a lot of people wanting like ESD safe materials, fire retardant materials, things like that that would really push the envelope for production. So, I think that's probably right around the corner for the industry that there's plastics to become more available on those powder sintering processes that you'll see more and more applications grow there as well. What sort of applications do you see on your side? Is it still primarily medical and aerospace? Or do you see other industries growing and taking up more of the additive space?

SDP: So, I would say that automotive, aviation/ aerospace and medical are definitely the three industries that have been fastest to adopt 3D printing and use it, again, as a more of a manufacturing method and not so much as just R&D or for development work. I will say that we've just seen an explosion, I feel like, in the past couple years of universities investing in the technology, and they started off with like an M lab, because it's small, and it's compact, and relatively inexpensive. And I feel like universities now are really turning into these research hubs that industries are leaning on, to help develop either some parameters for them or their applications for them. So, we see more and more universities buying M Twos, buying our EDM machines, and really kind of building out a full suite of additive technology into that university. So that's something I've definitely noticed over the past few years.

In terms of the applications that our customers are using, again, the general trend that people are more and more comfortable with the technology, I feel like we've really gotten past that phase of 'what is 3D printing?' with most customers and with the industry in general, and are now talking more about 'what else can I do with 3D printing?' And so, customers are finding more and more applications that are a little bit tighter tolerances - or that's the wrong word to use - but are a little bit more stringent requirements than what they were maybe first comfortable with the technology.

EU: Yeah, it's definitely interesting seeing the trend of that, like you said, it used to be 10 years ago, I had to explain what 3D printing was, period, and now you see engineers coming out of college, and they have a bias towards 3D printing. 3D printing is actually going to be their first go to, and they're really only going to explore other processes, if they can't 3D print it, which is great for us in the industry, because we're the first stop and the first look at it, but you're right, like it used to be really just prototyping.

And really that consolidation of assemblies is really strong, especially on really complex equipment, like aircraft and surgical devices and things where you just have to source a bunch of pieces from all sorts of different vendors, and then assemble it together, that you're really reducing that overhead and that paper trail for all that. We had an aerospace customer who was making a part and this thing was small, about the size of a golf ball or so, and it was originally something like 17 pieces that had a spring in it and all these things, and they were able to print it as just a single piece. And for them, I think like the per part cost was about the same, honestly, between printing it and versus injection moulding and a whole bunch of things but then having someone put it together, but they said, 'this is a no brainer, because I only got to write one PO and order the thing whereas before I'd had the order from five different people, and then they'd all come together and assemble and then they got to buy from that guy,' and things like that. So they said, 'we want everything to go this way. We want everything to be these as printed sub-assemblies as much as they can' because it just makes their life much easier in that supply chain.

SDP: Yeah, one of the things that I always teach customers is additive is good at a lot of things, but if I had to bucketize it into four main categories, it would be weight reduction, part consolidation, thermal management, and supply chain efficiencies. And I would say that over the past few years, I've really seen applications from customers going back to those fundamentals of what is additive good at and selecting very good and intentional products to be able to be 3D printed. We've seen some customers come back and say, 'I don't care about my weight, I don't care about my thermals, I care that I can no longer source this component anymore and I can't deliver things because I can't source them,' whether it's on some piece of aircraft that's incredibly old and the supply chain just doesn't exist anymore. So I love that customers are using the technology in that type of a manufacturing efficiency sense.

And then also just on the application side there's a lot more systems thinking and really, in the designs themselves, you see people embracing simple things like diamond shaped cut-outs to take weight out, or integrating tubes into walls, so that you don't have support structure that you're removing and it's still very lightweight. I'm seeing applications where you really use additive for thermal management, because it's one of the things that it's so great at just with the surface area alone. I've been very encouraged about the overall knowledge of the broad industry and the consumer base and how to use 3D printing.

EU: Yeah, so what excites you about the 3D printing industry that you think is probably around the corner in the next two or three years?

SDP: Yeah, I think that as we're going into the larger and larger format of additive technology, and we've seen that from multiple different companies, so we know that SLM introduced their 12 laser machine, we're getting ready to release our quad laser machine, we have binder jet coming, I think as the technology is really growing, and demonstrating that it's capable of more than just R&D, that's what's really exciting to me, because I think that opens up a whole host of new applications, that when we went from a fuel nozzle that was just super cool that we were 3D printing a fuel nozzle to thinking of larger components on an aircraft engine that you can print to thinking outside of just even aviation, what else can be printed? I think it really opens up the doors and opportunities, and that's exciting of what are people gonna come up with next that can be 3D printed?

EU: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I definitely see the technology, I mean, it just marches so steadily, year to year, and you can really see the trend of once again, there's more materials available, and the printing times getting faster and faster. And I agree that low volume production is the next frontier for 3D printing, and we're already there in some industries, and some are getting there for that, but that's what's exciting is the adoption of the technology. So, at first, it's just an awareness. People know what 3D printing is, and the core concepts, but we're starting to see engineers really go beyond that like, I mean, that's a, that's a powerful skill set as a design engineer, if you can take a part, let's say an 80-part assembly and reduce it to one and understand printing to make it printable. That's a skill set that was very rare just a few years ago, that now we're starting to see more and more engineers across industries really getting the most out of 3D printing.

SDP: Like you said, the fact that we have students coming out of university that are already trained about the technology, already know some of the fundamentals of how to design for the technology, that's really critical of getting the next wave of applications into 3D printing, and it's really exciting to see what they're going to be able to come up with.