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A consortium of companies agreed on 3MF as a uniform 3D printing format
In April 2015, 7 well-known companies from the 3D printing industry reached a long-awaited consensus by many private and industrial users of additive manufacturing: The 3MF standard – which already existed but was revised in this context – was thus adopted as a uniform standard for the industrial 3D printing usage set. At the same time, the company consortium made this file format available free of charge under an open source license.
In this case, “3MF” stands for “3D Manufacturing Format”, which means that the claim to create the 3D printing (manufacturing) format par excellence is already expressed in the name. The previous coexistence of many 3D printing file standards, of which even the widespread STL format does not offer a viable solution for processing important information (especially color and material settings), is now to be replaced step by step in order to make the work more numerous Making life easier for 3D printing users and designers.
3MF standard brings significant cost and time savings for many companies
After all, the data conversion that has been necessary in many cases so far usually meant a not inconsiderable amount of additional work, which also often resulted in conversion errors. Especially for product designers, development engineers, machine and software manufacturers, as well as manufacturing companies, the 3MF standard should result in significant time and cost savings when using 3D printing technology.
The PDF format of 3D printing is called 3MF
The scope of the standardization of data input associated with the establishment of the 3MF standard can be compared most clearly with the introduction and spread of the well-known PDF standard in paper printing (from 2005).
The fact that this XML-based format is included in Windows 10 by default is of decisive importance for the actual spread of 3MF. In addition, 3MF can also be easily integrated into Windows 8.1.
As much as we as a 3D printing service are happy about the introduction of this uniform data format for 3D printing, we of course process all common 3D formats or our experts are able to convert them accordingly if necessary. Visit our website for more detailed information on 3D printing formats at 3D Activation, as well as our services, printing processes and materials.
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