My 3D Printing Predictions for 2024

3D printing in 2023 has been a wild ride to say the least after years of stagnation with 3D printers barely changing and just being competitive on price we've seen so much Innovation that's been spurred on by a few key players that I think the future of 3D printing is actually looking very bright I'm all about empowering creativity through technology and as it stands 3D printers have become so much easier to use in just the past year than ever before but at the start of 2023 I made a few predictions of how the year might pan out and well I thought it'd be fun to go through those predictions see if they came true or not and then make my new list of predictions for 2024 where I'm sure this rate of innovation and change is not going to slow down let's get started expic how's it going guys Angus here from makers Muse and if you're new to the channel then welcome I know so many people got their first 3D printer this Christmas and you're in for an awesome hobby because these machines have become so much more about the experience then about tinkering and trying to make them work I sincerely hope that through these videos on my channel you can learn how to use your 3D printer to make all sorts of amazing things and I have heaps of tutorials projects and guides on this channel to help you along your way but it hasn't always been like this has it if you've been 3D printing for a long time like I have well these low-end machines that you could buy at a hobbyist level they weren't always the most usable and I didn't tell recently that I'd actually comfortably recommend a 3D printer to someone who actually has no interest in tinkering with 3D printers people are coming into this hobby now buying 3D printers because they just want to print stuff and that takes us to my first prediction way at back at the start of 2023 the war for the pruma market will Begin Again well this certainly turned out to be true remember at the start of 2023 the bamboo lab X1 Carbon had only been out for a couple of months and I can comfortably say that this machine kickstarted The Innovation we're seeing in the 3D printing space because prior to this machine launching well there wasn't really much change we' had the same companies making pretty much the same 3D printers for five or so years with a few extra features added but nothing had come along like the X1 Carbon with the X1 Carbon bamboo lab managed to ship a machine that prints out of the box no tinkering required you hit go it does all its calibration automatically and it does a perfect first layer and even though I've tested probably over 100 3D printers by this point the 15minute benchi on the X1 Carbon blew me away that was just the start of 2023 because well all of these existing companies they had to pull their finger out to compete and we saw a huge amount of innovation and features being brought to the market that really benefited consumers and machines got faster and faster to the point where now at the end of 2023 we've seen the release of the A1 Mini and A1 from bamboo lab which their I3 style machines the A1 minis a can't leave at I3 but they're printing at speeds I never thought possible all completely automatically and companies that have been in the game for a very long time have had to catch up and compete companies like cheaty Tech that back in the day made make aot clones now they've got machines that are just as fast as the X1 Carbon and PR relased the markv after selling the mark iiii and its varience for a very long time companies had to innovate very quickly to keep up and maintain a customer base and I think it's just going to keep continuing on more and more as 2024 progresses my prediction number two of 2023 was increasing the need for easy to use CAD now CAD or computer AED design is what you need to create 3D models to 3D print you can 3D scan stuff but really if you want to design something that you want to print you have to use some form of CAD program and I predicted and hoped that easier to use CAD programs would pop up now we have seen a few popup but instead we had something occur which I didn't really predict which was the rise and hype of AI unless you've been living under a rock I don't need to tell you about the hype that is AI you know generating text and IM and even video but also 3D models and many companies jumped on the AI hype bandwagon to promise AI generated 3D printable models but not all is as it seems yes you can AI generate 3D models there's research papers on it but they're not that great but all these companies popped up two promise AI generated 3D models which are actually most likely created using lowcost 3D modeling employees in other countries and passing it off as AI or at worst training on models stolen from skill 3D modelers online which is a pretty crappy future and I personally stay far away from it I think a lot of focus was put on that and not on creating easy to use CAD programs because well although I use stuff like Fusion 360 that is slowly becoming more and more expensive and harder to use for free so there's definitely a gap in the market for another player to come in and create that easy to ous CAD there's a few I'm going to try out like plasticity of heard good things about and Tinker cat has become a lot more powerful since I used it way back in the day but if you do know any others please leave them in the comments below number three companies will Embrace 3D printing to alleviate supply chain issues again I don't think we already saw that companies will just jack up their prices and charge more for for their shipping and that's what we saw in 2023 a massive cost of living jump and companies really do just like to use mass production and 3D printing doesn't really play into it but instead what I did notice is a huge increase of people with 3D printers at home printing stuff that would be considered household items stuff like organizing systems there is a huge range of really popular models that are organizing systems different ways to store Small Things large things in a really neat way that's completely customizable and designed specifically for 3D printing so although large companies just decided to jack up prices individuals are definitely using 3D printing now to alleviate the cost of living and supply chain issues and it's really really cool to see number four industrial manufacturing will become more accessible this is absolutely true I've worked with PCB way a few times and this isn't a sponsored video but I'm working on a video where I'm rebuilding a combat robot and I got a part printed in 3D printed tool steel you might have heard of 3D print metal before but thought well that's cool but there's no way I could access it but companies like like PCB way are now offering anyone in the world the ability to use industrial 3D printing processors for I'll be honest a really reasonable cost you can just design your model set it up to the service get a quote and then a week or two later get your fully 3D printed metal part and I think that is insane and my fifth prediction back at the start of 2023 hobbyists will have to take plastic recycling into their own hands unfortunately yes this one turned out to be true as well companies around the world have failed to take recycling seriously and Australia is a just absolute disgrace at recycling like we can't even recycle aluminium cans we have a buyback program but they just get sent overseas for processing it's pathetic so people around the world are taking on the challenge of recycling and if you haven't seen it you should go check out Stefan's video over at CSC kitchen because he recently actually tackled this problem directly noting that in America there's a lot of single-use Cutlery flirting around even if you don't need it they give it to you and this Cutler is made from pla plastic and he just released a video where he got that pla plastic that Cutlery and recycled it into filament and it took a bit of work but he got workable 3D printing filament out of essentially waste single- use Cutlery and on a larger scale there Brothers make they started off pretty small recycling using a sandwich press but now have a full-blown injection molding machine to recycle waste Plastics into fully functional products that I think they sell which is really cool and they have all these videos on how they do it so if recycling Plastics is interesting to you there's plenty of resources available on the internet telling you how you can do it but don't expect like governments or corporations to do it because I don't think there's any money in it so especially now they're not going to do it unless your country is really good at it I know some European countries are actually very good at recycling in which case please leave a comment below so maybe Australia can learn how to actually recycle properly but that was 2020 23 how about 2024 I can't believe I'm saying that year it has gone so fast I've been on YouTube for almost 10 years now but what about my predictions for this year do I think things are going to continue or do I think things are going to change well let's start with my number one prediction which follows on from what we've seen shaking the 3D printing Market 3D printers will become less about repairing calibrating and upgrading and more about simply 3D printing I've talked about on the channel before about 3D printing being a hobby or tool so if you like to modify Tinker upgrade calibrate your 3D printer well then you probably fit more into the hobby category nothing wrong with that but some people just want the machine to print things as we've seen this year 3D printers are coming onto the market now that are literally zero user interaction ready to go they power up they initialize and calibrate all on their own with zero user interaction and are just ready to go if something goes wrong they know stuff's gone wrong and they'll pause and wait for you to clear the issue or they'll try to fix it themselves they're getting pretty smart and I think in 2024 they're going to keep getting smarter and I'll be honest I'm all for it I've always been about 3D printing as a tool personally because all of my projects I design them and I want them to work I'm not really interested in spending hours of my time modifying and tinkering with a 3D printer to make it work better or at all I just want it to function and I think we're going to see a lot more printers in that category in 2024 and a lot less focus on DIY systems which I'll be honest some people might be a bit upset about because the only reason we have desktop 3D printers at all is thanks to the rep rap movement because the inventors of fdm 3D printing Strat say they weren't interested in 3D printers for hobbyist at all their machines even to this day cost tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of dollars they couldn't care less about you owning a 3D printer for under 1,000 bucks so we actually owe a lot to the rep rap Movement we progressed pretty far from those early days of a replicatable 3D printer that was open source that you could print Parts on for your friends printer and it's a very much DIY hobbyist approach to machines you buy they arrive you set them up and you just use them to 3D print i' actually argue that early on 3D printing things was almost secondary to the whole like ethos of 3D printing with a rep rat project because the idea was to make a replicatable 3D printer but now you buy 3D printer to 3D print things with it not so much to print parts to upgrade it so it's pretty clear as 2024 rolls in that 3D printers are going to become easier to use more affordable and faster so my question to you is what are you going to do about it are you going to argue with people online about what brand is better or are you just going to suck it up learn Cad and make something awesome choice is yours but my prediction number two is a list little bit darker trusting recommendations online will become much harder I noticed a worrying Trend in 2023 and I think it's only going to get worse and worse as 2024 Rolls by and that is the manipulation of what a review is on YouTube in the 3D printing space in other Tech Fields this isn't really new companies will use things like embargos to hold back information until a specific release date so for example an influencer I can't talk about that new product until the same point which is why you see five videos Drop at the same time on the same topic that's because they're probably under embargo but also companies in other Tech spaces have been using contracts for a very long time to kind of control what influencers can say for years now the 3D printing space has actually been largely free of this companies would just send a product out and well they'd get a review and sometimes they'd be a bit upset about it or they'd be already happy with it but often they had very little control control over what someone said but that's starting to change and there's a few things that play some of them more fair than others obviously the idea of a review is to present an unbiased opinion of a product you look up a product you want to buy you find a video of it and you're like okay I think it looks pretty good I'll buy it or oh you know it looks pretty bad I think I'll give it a Miss but with the increased use of embargos and pre-release units it's getting much harder for you as a consumer to look online at videos from people like myself and say hey that looks like a thing I want to buy or maybe I'll give it a miss and the several factors at play for example early release units may be different to production units some influencers will get cherry-picked machines I know for a fact when machines come to me half the time I can see that the hot end's being used and the machine's already been assembled and then carefully disassembled and put back in the box companies are putting additional care into the machines that I receive versus what you might receive and also these machines may change by the time you get them because again embargos but that's not the worst of it unfortunately because well it all comes down to money if there's a product I've shown on the channel That I like often I'll put an affiliate Link in the description below which will take you to somewhere like Amazon and if you buy it I get a small percentage Kickback well surprise surprise 3D printing companies have realized that using affiliate programs can very much boost how their product is perceived online because well if I say a print is good and you buy it and I get 3% Kickback well that's a fair amount of money so the incentive there is to say it's good but it goes beyond that because if I say something isn't good as I've done in the past Not only would I lose out on the affiliate links but the company might cut me off Al together which has happened and that's a pretty shady practice so moving forwards into 2024 I think it's going to become much harder for you guys to really figure out what reviews are genuine and what reviews have been puffed up a bit because not only that well what if people took some money on the site for a review now many of my colleagues have been doing this for a very long time and we' never jeopardize our integrity by doing something like that if we have sponsored video content we say it's sponsored and we don't present it as a review but it can be very tempting if you're starting out to actually take on a paid review because these companies in their emails often say What is the cost for a review so it clearly happens and that's pretty crap and finally the darkest reason I think that trusting reviews is going to become harder is bot comments these are just some of the comments that I've received on my latest review of the creality Ender 3 V3 SE they're very clearly Bots they're doubled up with accounts that have been made either like a couple of weeks ago or a year ago very fake profiles and often the same lines again and again I don't know who who is making these comments but they're often very much supportive of the printer which is pretty suspicious and they clearly using some sort of AI to read the script of the video and write something vaguely related to it which is really wild to me and kind of awful because I read every comment on my videos and I want to trust that every comment is a real person these clearly aren't I don't know exactly who's making them but I am watching out prediction number three when in doubt go for the professional Market I seen this time and time again in the 3D printing space when a company can't cut it at the low-end consumer level well they say hey you know what we only make professional 3D printers here and that's what you're going to get so we don't need you guys we're making those instead it always feels like a bit of a cop out to me but regardless that's what I've seen again and again and I think many large 3D printing companies in 2024 are going to go down this route where they just just decide you know what we're not going to make affordable 3D printers for everyone we're just going to focus on professionals you know buying 3D printers for schools universities and businesses but not for the average person I am not interested in professional level 3D printers I am only interested showing on this channel things that Empower your creativity through technology I'm going to say it again and again and a professional expensive 3D printer does not do that a 3D printer that costs 500 bucks that works really well absolutely does and that's when you're going to see more and more on this Channel prediction number four the repository war will heat up so what the heck is a repository anyway well thingy verse is probably the most famous 3D printing file repository around it's the oldest and it's still going and it's been given recently the hands over to ultimaker in their merger to make it hopefully something better but the idea of a repository is where you can upload your files for other people to download them and 3D print them with 3D printers becoming easier and easier to use there is more demand than ever for fun awesome 3D models to be printed and we are spoiled for choice in terms of file repositories in 2024 every major company is trying to start their own and all these companies are competing against each other to grow the biggest and offer the best models so they're offering incentives to designers to upload to their platforms which means if you're a competent 3D modeler well you stand to make quite a bit of money in 2024 by designing files for 3D printing and uploading them to these repositories and prediction number five this is a bit of a wild card but with what's happened in 2023 who knows I think that these repositories because again there's there's money to be made are going to be flooded with poor quality AI 3D printable models as I said I don't think we're quite there yet generating 3D printable models with AI but once it does happen it's going to become a bit of a snake Hall salesman thing where people are going to say oh you can make passive income by using AI to generate 3D models and upload to them them to all of these sites it's already happening with images and uploading them to create t-shirts and Banners and that sort of thing on websites like Etsy so I think it's only a matter of time before it creeps its way into these 3D printable file repositories with that in mind keep a close eye on the terms and conditions of those file repositories you're uploading models to to make sure they're not destined to be used for AI purposes I'm looking at you Adobe and finally and I'm really surprised this hasn't happened yet I think we're going to get a 3mf scare so what the heck do I mean by that well the 3mf file format has quickly replaced STL as the most popular 3D printable file format so you save your geometry as a 3mf and Chuck it into your favorite slicer open it up and what's cool about a 3mf is it can store file settings it can store information like color and like instructions and all sorts of things to make your file suitable for 3D printing exactly how you want it but but that also means you can store other things in a 3mf in a previous video I demonstrated that a 3mf file is essentially just a archive like a zip file and using seven zip you can open 3 MFS and Chuck whatever you want into them and then you can upload them to these repositories and they don't care you can Chuck video files you can Chuck images you can do anything and I reckon there's only around the corner that someone's going to figure out how to Chuck something fairly nefarious into one and they might figure out how to make it fire off some delicious code when you load it into your slicer I don't know all I do know is I've searched it up a bit and there's been a few research papers on this already so I reckon that 3mf is a file to be careful of and personally I already Chuck 3 MFS through my virus scan before I load them up cuz I'm just a little bit paranoid like that but yeah that's just my Wild Card prediction for 2024 I think 3 MFS are going to become a little bit more um carefully uploaded and controlled versus what they are right now but I would love to hear your thoughts in the in the comments below of what you think 2024 has in store for us on this channel well I'm going to just keep doing what I'm doing I'm going to keep uploading project videos I've been working on machines from these little tiny ones all the way up to some less than tiny ones I will be doing more reviews and trying to navigate that field I already have lots of companies wanting to send me their machines but again it's going to become more difficult this year companies expect a lot and they have a lot of uh control and terms more than I used to I can get away with quite a bit but not everything so I'm going to try to bring you guys my unbiased reviews in machines that I think bring the most value and of course I have my makers music Community which is where you can get access to behind the scenes content all of my source files for my models that I design if you want to load them up in in in Fusion for example and modify them it's all uploaded there as well as my troubleshooting Forum which is where I will help you directly with your 3D printing problems and your CAD problems and try to help you figure them out that's the best way to get access to me it's only 5 bucks a month and it helps out the channel a great deal but either way guys thank you so much for watching I hope your 2024 is awesome and I'll see you again very shortly here on make Muse bye

Channel: Maker's Muse

Views: 277,759

Keywords: 3d, printing

Id: 81yhh5szFAs

Length: 22min 5sec (1325 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 08 2024