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Whether your gateway machine was a 1st-gen RepRap cobbled together with hardware store threaded rods (good luck finding hardware-store replacements for a printer today) or an Ender 3 kit that taught you the value of knowing the thickness of a sheet of paper, that first printer defined your entry into 3D printing.

The lines are arbitrary, but there are some attractive boundaries that seem logical – distinct generational waves in desktop printing hardware. So let's take a generational roll call: which is yours?

Launching with some 2,500 models and specifically structured around multicolor and multi-material printing, the site features a unique user-reward system that scales rewards based on qualifying print time. It's nothing if not different; a model repository built for the efficiencies of a toolchanger. You can check it out over at Snapmaker Space.

The printer uses a creative four-channel nozzle and switching extruder Creality calls QuarTeks to cut print waste on multi-filament prints. The printer circumvents the filament cut'n'purge other single-nozzle printers use by having each of the filaments primed inside the nozzle in its own discrete channel. Creality claims there's zero purge during printing. See for yourself over on Indiegogo, where a limited early-bird discount has the i8 available from $289.

Layerling, a new browser-based 3D modeling tool aimed squarely at people who want a printable part rather than a career in CAD. It requires no account or cloud service, keeps designs in the browser, and exports STL, OBJ, and STEP files. There’s also an MCP server that lets AI clients, such as Codex or Claude, work directly in the editor while you watch. So yes, apparently even dragging boxes around a build plate can now be delegated. It has already been updated dozens of times, so development does not appear to be lingering over coffee.

The global additive manufacturing market reached $4.48 billion in Q2 2026, notching a sixth straight quarter of growth, according to AM Research. Revenue across metal, polymer, and ceramic systems, materials, and services rose 12% year-over-year, with metal AM contributing $1.8B and polymer AM $2.7B. Services were the real workhorse, bringing in nearly $2.50B or more than half the market. AM Research's Scott Dunham called the first half of the year “robust growth,” though stubbornly high interest rates could still make manufacturers think twice before signing off on big capital purchases.

It's a use case we often see scanner manufacturers pushing as a core reason you should use their products, but when the results are often blotchy, fuzzy approximations of the object scanned, we've got to ask, who's actually printing that? Treating the scan as a starting point to reverse engineer, we get, but is anyone printing scans as they come?

LightBurn 2.1's Quick Nest feature gets an upgrade in 2.2.0. Rather than nesting objects based on their bounding boxes, 2.2.0's True Nest feature jostles objects efficiently together based on the actual contour, saving material with each batch. If you're not into laser cutting, that probably sounds pretty dull, but seeing it in action is infinitely more entertaining than reading about it. Read more about it on the LightBurn blog.

Stratasys alleges Bambu Lab infringed ten of its patents with the X1, P1, and A1 series 3D printers. For four of the patents, the subject of the first of two trials, a jury agreed, awarding $27.6-million in past damages to Stratasys for the infringements. It's worth noting that, so far, there's been no mention of injunction on sales of the machines, some of which are still available, or licensing going forward. Bambu Lab could, and almost certainly will, appeal the decision.