2026 Will Change 3D Printing (Formnext Innovations)

Something shifted at Formnext 2025. Not the loud, marketing-hype kind of shift... the quiet kind. The kind where you walk a trade show floor and realize the tools that once belonged to factories are sneaking onto desktops. And the people building them? They're not just engineers. They're dreamers who refuse to accept that "good enough" is good enough.

The Toolchanger That Changes Everything

Prusa Research dropped the INDX toolchanging system for the Core One, and it's the kind of elegant problem-solving that makes my nerdy heart sing 🚀

Up to 8 inductively heated nozzles. No cables on the individual tools. Passive toolchanging... meaning the brains stay in the toolhead while the nozzles swap in and out. Change time? Fifteen seconds now, with a target of ten.

Price point: €499 for 4 tools, €699 for 8. Not final, but accessible.

Here's what matters. Multi-material 3D printing has been the "next big thing" for years. It's always been possible if you had deep pockets or infinite patience. Prusa Research is doing what they've always done best... taking the complicated and making it reachable. The Core One L variant could eventually support up to 10 tools. And Sander from Voxel3D already designed the INBXX storage system to keep your spool situation from looking like a yarn explosion.

This isn't revolutionary in concept. It's revolutionary in access. And access is where real change lives.

Desktop Metal Casting... Wait, What?

This one stopped me cold.

Aumatis, a spin-off from the Technical University of Munich, showed a desktop vacuum investment casting machine. The workflow is almost absurdly simple: 3D print your part in PLA. Attach a sprue. Pour their investment material around it. Wait 45 minutes for it to set. Toss in whatever metal you have... scraps, bars, whatever's lying around... press start.

The machine burns out the plastic, melts the metal, casts under vacuum, and even treats the exhaust.

CAD to metal part. Under 24 hours. Thirty to forty-five minutes of actual hands-on work.

The sample parts at the booth included tiny precision pieces and... actual broccoli turned into metal. I'm not making that up. Real broccoli. Cast in metal. The universe is a playground, friends ✨

Part size is limited to roughly 110mm diameter by 100mm height. And they're exploring a DIY/maker version to push accessibility even further. For most hobbyists, it's still overkill. But the fact that this technology fits on a desk? That's the signal. The walls between "professional manufacturing" and "garage creator" are getting thinner every year.

The $500 Filament That's Actually Worth $5

Z-Polymers brought their Tullomer filament to Formnext, claiming tensile strength of 250 megapascals and 25 gigapascals of stiffness. They're calling it a replacement for aluminum, steel, and PEEK.

A kilo costs $500.

Before you close the tab... here's the clever part. You don't print entire parts from it. You combine it with cheaper filament and reinforce only the critical stress areas. Ten grams of Tullomer in the right spots on a quadcopter frame? About five bucks.

This is the thinking that separates good makers from great ones. It's not about having the most expensive material. It's about knowing exactly where strength matters and applying resources with surgical precision. Time × Focus = Attention... and that applies to material usage too 🎯

2.2 Millimeters of Genius

Recreus, the Spanish TPU specialists, solved a problem that's frustrated flexible-filament users for years. TPU prints slow because the soft filament buckles in the extruder path. The standard fix? Better extruder design. Tighter tolerances.

Ignacio, Recreus' CEO, took a different road. He just made the filament thicker.

Their new 2.2mm TPU filament is thick enough to resist buckling but still fits through 1.75mm extruder hardware. You swap the hotend or nozzle... affordable options exist for most printers... and you can still run standard 1.75mm filament through the same setup.

Thousands of hours of test printing. Lots of material swaps. No clogs.

Sometimes the breakthrough isn't a complex algorithm or a new polymer chemistry. Sometimes it's someone stepping back and asking, "What if we just made it a little bigger?" The simplest solutions often hide in plain sight because we're too busy looking for complicated ones.

Bringing Injection Molding Logic to Your Desktop

AIM3D showcased Voxelfill... a technique that creates hollow chambers inside FDM prints and fills them during the print process. Think injection molding meets layer-by-layer printing.

The problem it targets is real. FDM parts are inherently anisotropic... strong in X and Y, weak in Z. Voxelfill aims to change that by flowing material into internal cavities rather than just stacking lines.

The demo ran on a Prusa XL with a standard nozzle, which limits the effect. Without proper flow into those chambers, you've basically got fancy infill. But with the right nozzle geometry, pressure, and temperature? This could fundamentally change how strong desktop FDM parts can be.

And E3D showed up with Fuge, their new high-flow nozzle that flattens filament instead of splitting it like Bondtech's CHT design. Different physics, same goal... get heat to the center of the filament faster so you can push more material through. Two companies, two completely different approaches to the same bottleneck. That's healthy competition doing exactly what it should 💪

The Quiet Signal Underneath It All

Formnext 2025 had fewer booths. Some big names didn't show. But new companies filled the gaps... LDO Motors, Eibos with their smart dry boxes, startups with strange ideas that might change everything.

The signal isn't in any single product. It's in the pattern. Desktop machines doing what factories did five years ago. Materials getting stronger. Software getting smarter. Access expanding.

Every one of these innovations shares a common thread... someone looked at a barrier and refused to accept it as permanent. That's the maker spirit. That's the 3D printing community at its best.

We're watching the tools of creation become democratized in real time. Not with fanfare and hype... but with incremental, stubborn, beautiful progress. A thicker filament. A smarter nozzle. A casting machine that fits on a desk.

Light doesn't fight darkness... it just shows up. And these creators? They keep showing up. Every year. A little better. A little more accessible. A little closer to putting real manufacturing power in the hands of anyone willing to learn.

What barrier are you refusing to accept as permanent? 🛠️

--- Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mpPjOtq5wM