3D printing innovations: 13 real advances from 2024 to 2026

The usual way to print in several colours is to feed different filaments through one nozzle and purge the old colour at every change. Toolchanger printers give each filament its own toolhead instead. The Snapmaker U1 has four independent toolheads that stay preheated, and Snapmaker says a swap takes about 5 seconds in its lab tests. Its build volume is 270 x 270 x 270 mm.

Bambu Lab launched the H2D on 25 March 2025. It prints with two nozzles and calibrates the offset between them automatically with an eddy-current sensor, a step that usually has to be done by hand on dual-nozzle machines. It has a 350 x 320 x 325 mm build volume, a 350 °C hotend and a 65 °C heated chamber for engineering filaments.

Optional 10 W and 40 W laser modules and a cutting module turn the same machine into a laser engraver and a vinyl cutter.

A printer that changes direction quickly shakes, and the shaking shows up as ripples (ringing or ghosting) next to sharp edges. Input shaping shapes the motion commands so they cancel the printer's own vibration. It is tuned to each machine, either with a test print or with an accelerometer.

The open-source Klipper firmware documents it in detail, and Prusa added Input Shaper in firmware 5.0.0 for the MK4. It now runs on the CORE One, MK4S, XL and MINI. Prusa announced the CORE One, its first CoreXY printer with a fully enclosed chamber, at Formnext on 19 November 2024.

Formlabs builds the Form 4 around what it calls Low Force Display: a backlight of 60 LEDs with collimating lenses cures each layer through a 50 µm pixel screen, and the build releases from the tank with lower peel forces. Formlabs says most prints finish in under 2 hours (a 53 mm tall part at 100 µm layers).

In June 2025 Tencent released Hunyuan3D 2.1 with full model weights and training code: a 3.3 billion parameter shape model and a 2 billion parameter texture model that paints physically based (PBR) materials. In December 2025 the TRELLIS.2 paper followed, with code and a 4 billion parameter model on Microsoft's GitHub under the MIT licence. It exports a GLB with PBR materials.

Almost every printer builds a part point by point or layer by layer. A Tsinghua University team instead projects a 3D holographic light field into a still container of resin and cures the whole shape at once. Their method, called DISH and published in Nature on 11 February 2026, printed millimetre-scale structures with a 0.6 second exposure and features as small as 12 µm across a 1 cm depth.

Thick printed tissue needs a blood supply. A Stanford team published a method in Science (June 2025) that designs organ-scale vessel networks and turns them into bioprinter instructions. It runs about 200 times faster than earlier methods: a vessel tree for a human heart, with roughly one million vessels, took about five hours. They printed a 500-branch model and a ring of living cells with 25 channels that kept many cells alive when nutrients were pumped through.

ICON and home builder Lennar have been printing the Wolf Ranch community in Georgetown, Texas. By August 2024 crews were close to their goal of 100 homes. ICON's Vulcan printer, about 45 feet wide, prints each house in about three weeks from a mix that includes concrete powder, water and sand.

Starbucks built its first 3D-printed store in Brownsville, Texas, with German firm Peri 3D Construction. The 1,400 sq ft drive-thru building has printed concrete wall panels with the layers left visible; the door and window frames sit in gaps between the panels.

ESA's Metal 3D Printer on the International Space Station, built by an Airbus-led team with Cranfield University working on the laser and melting process, finished the first metal part ever printed in space in August 2024. Earlier printers on the station only printed plastic. The first sample came back to Earth in February 2025, and ESA engineers are comparing it with parts printed on the ground to see what microgravity changes.

Rocket Lab has built its 1,000th Rutherford engine at its Long Beach, California factory. Every major part of the engine, from the combustion chamber and injectors to the pumps and propellant valves, is 3D printed, on metal printers from EOS, Nikon SLM Solutions and Renishaw. The pumps are driven by battery-powered electric motors instead of a gas turbine. Each Electron rocket uses nine on its first stage and one vacuum version on the second.

Binder jetting prints metal without a laser. On the HP Metal Jet S100, inkjet printheads place a liquid binder onto a bed of metal powder layer by layer; the "green" part is then cured and sintered in a furnace to reach its final strength. HP certifies 316L and 17-4PH stainless steel, and lists customer parts such as a gear for GKN, filters for Schneider Electric and a fuel bypass manifold for John Deere.

Prusa makes Prusament PETG Recycled entirely from its own shredded PETG filament that failed quality control, with no added pigments or additives, so every batch comes out a different colour. Prusa had the carbon footprint of its recycled filaments calculated with a life cycle assessment, and the spools use a recycled cardboard core with recycled polycarbonate sides.