Last year, MACK Books published Architecture from Below, which anthologized writings by the French Brazilian architect, theorist, and painter Sérgio Ferro. (Douglas Spencer reviewed it for AN.) Now, MACK follows with Design and the Building Site and Complementary Essays, the second in the trilogy of books dedicated to Ferro’s scholarship. The following excerpt of the author’s 2023 preface to the English edition, which preserves its British phrasing, captures Ferro’s realization about the working conditions of construction sites in Brasília. The sentiment is likely relatable even today for young architects as they discover how drawings become buildings. Design and the Building Site and Complementary Essays will be released on May 22. If I remember correctly, it was in 1958 or 1959, when Rodrigo and I were second- or third year architecture students at FAUUSP, that my father, the real estate developer Armando Simone Pereira, commissioned us to design two large office buildings and eleven shops in Brasilia, which was then under construction. Of course, we were not adequately prepared for such an undertaking. Fortunately, Oscar Niemeyer and his team, who were responsible for overseeing the construction of the capital, had drawn up a detailed document determining the essential characteristics of all the private sector buildings. We followed these prescriptions to the letter, which saved us from disaster. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine the degree to which the construction of Brasilia inspired enthusiasm and professional pride in the country’s architects. And in the national imagination, the city’s establishment in the supposedly unpopulated hinterland evoked a re-founding of Brazil. Up until that point, the occupation of our immense territory had been reduced to a collection of arborescent communication routes, generally converging upon some river, following it up to the Atlantic Ocean. Through its ports, agricultural or extractive commodities produced by enslaved peoples or their substitutes passed towards the metropolises; goods were exchanged in the metropolises for more elaborate products, which took the opposite route. Our national identity was summed up in a few symbols, such as the anthem or the flag, and this scattering of paths pointing overseas. Brasilia would radically change this situation, or so we believed. It would create a central hub where the internal communication routes could converge, linking together hithertoseparate junctions, stimulating trade and economic progress in the country’s interior. It was as if, for the first time, we were taking care of ourselves. At the nucleus of this centripetal movement, architecture would embody the renaissance. And at the naval of the nucleus, the symbolic mandala of this utopia: the cathedral. Rodrigo and I got caught up in the euphoria. And perhaps more so than our colleagues, because we were taking part in the adventure with ‘our’ designs. The reality was very different — but we did not know that yet. At that time, architects in Brazil were responsible for verifying that the construction was in line with the design. We had already monitored some of our first building sites. But the construction company in charge of them, Osmar Souza e Silva’s CENPLA, specialized in the building sites of modernist architects from the so-called Escola Paulista led by Vilanova Artigas (which we aspired to be a part of, like the pretentious students we were). Osmar was very attentive to his clients and his workers, who formed a supportive and helpful team. He was even more careful with us, because he knew how inexperienced we were. I believe that the CENPLA was particularly important in São Paulo modernism: with its congeniality, it facilitated experimentation, but for the same reason, it deceived novices like us about the reality of other building sites. Consequently, Rodrigo and I travelled to Brasilia several times to check that the constructions followed ‘our’ designs and to resolve any issues. From the very first trip, our little bubble burst. Our building sites, like all the others in the future capital, bore no relation to Osmar’s. They were more like a branch of hell. A huge, muddy wasteland, in which a few cranes, pile drivers, tractors, and excavators dotted the mound of scaffolding occupied by thousands of skinny, seemingly exhausted wretches, who were nevertheless driven on by the shouts of master builders and foremen, in turn pressured by the imminence of the fateful inauguration date. Surrounding or huddled underneath the marquees of buildings under construction, entire families, equally skeletal and ragged, were waiting for some accident or death to open up a vacancy. In contact only with the master builders, and under close surveillance so we would not speak to the workers, we were not allowed to see what comrades who had worked on these sites later told us in prison: suicide abounded; escape was known to be futile in the unpopulated surroundings with no viable roads; fatal accidents were often caused by weakness due to chronic diarrhoea, brought on by rotten food that came from far away; outright theft took place in the calculation of wages and expenses in the contractor’s grocery store; camps were surrounded by law enforcement. I repeat this anecdote yet again not to invoke the benevolence of potential readers, but rather to point out the conditions that, in my opinion, allowed two students (Flávio Império joined us a little later) still in their professional infancy to quickly adopt positions that were contrary to the usual stance of architects. As the project was more Oscar Niemeyer’s than it was our own, we did not have the same emotional attachment that is understandably engendered between real authors and their designs. We had not yet been imbued with the charm and aura of the métier. And the only building sites we had visited thus far, Osmar’s, were incomparable to those we discovered in Brasilia. In short, our youthfulness and unpreparedness up against an unbearable situation made us react almost immediately to the profession’s satisfied doxa. Unprepared and young perhaps, but already with Marx by our side. Rodrigo and I joined the student cell of the Brazilian Communist Party during our first year at university. In itself, this did not help us much: the Party’s Marxism, revised in the interests of the USSR, was pitiful. Even high-level leaders rarely went beyond the first chapter of Capital. But at the end of the 1950s, the effervescence of the years to come was already nascent:  […] this extraordinary revival […] the rediscovery of Marxism and the great dialectical texts and traditions in the 1960s: an excitement that identifies a forgotten or repressed moment of the past as the new and subversive, and learns the dialectical grammar of a Hegel or an Adorno, a Marx or a Lukács, like a foreign language that has resources unavailable in our own. And what is more: the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, the war in Vietnam, guerrilla warfare of all kinds, national liberation movements, and a rare libertarian disposition in contemporary history, totally averse to fanaticism and respect for ideological apparatuses of (any) state or institution. Going against the grain was almost the norm. We were of course no more than contemporaries of our time. We were soon able to position ourselves from chapters 13, 14, and 15 of Capital, but only because we could constantly cross-reference Marx with our observations from well-contrasted building sites and do our own experimenting. As soon as we identified construction as manufacture, for example, thanks to the willingness and even encouragement of two friends and clients, Boris Fausto and Bernardo Issler, I was able to test both types of manufacture — organic and heterogeneous — on similar-sized projects taking place simultaneously, in order to find out which would be most convenient for the situation in Brazil, particularly in São Paulo. Despite the scientific shortcomings of these tests, they sufficed for us to select organic manufacture. Arquitetura Nova had defined its line of practice, studies, and research. There were other sources that were central to our theory and practice. Flávio Império was one of the founders of the Teatro de Arena, undoubtedly the vanguard of popular, militant theatre in Brazil. He won practically every set design award. He brought us his marvelous findings in spatial condensation and malleability, and in the creative diversion of techniques and material—appropriate devices for an underdeveloped country. This is what helped us pave the way to reformulating the reigning design paradigms.  We had to do what Flávio had done in the theatre: thoroughly rethink how to be an architect. Upend the perspective. The way we were taught was to start from a desired result; then others would take care of getting there, no matter how. We, on the other hand, set out to go down to the building site and accompany those carrying out the labor itself, those who actually build, the formally subsumed workers in manufacture who are increasingly deprived of the knowledge and know-how presupposed by this kind of subsumption. We should have been fostering the reconstitution of this knowledge and know-how—not so as to fulfil this assumption, but in order to reinvigorate the other side of this assumption according to Marx: the historical rebellion of the manufacture worker, especially the construction worker. We had to rekindle the demand that fueled this rebellion: total self-determination, and not just that of the manual operation as such. Our aim was above all political and ethical. Aesthetics only mattered by way of what it included—ethics. Instead of estética, we wrote est ética [this is ethics]. We wanted to make building sites into nests for the return of revolutionary syndicalism, which we ourselves had yet to discover. Sérgio Ferro, born in Brazil in 1938, studied architecture at FAUUSP, São Paulo. In the 1960s, he joined the Brazilian communist party and started, along with Rodrigo Lefevre and Flávio Império, the collective known as Arquitetura Nova. After being arrested by the military dictatorship that took power in Brazil in 1964, he moved to France as an exile. As a painter and a professor at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble, where he founded the Dessin/Chantier laboratory, he engaged in extensive research which resulted in several publications, exhibitions, and awards in Brazil and in France, including the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1992. Following his retirement from teaching, Ferro continues to research, write, and paint.

Cozy Games Free & Open-Source Godot Add-Ons / News, Resources / May 31, 2025 / Add-On, Godot The folks over at Cozy Cube Games have provided a GitHub repository that offers a fantastic collection of tools to enhance your Godot game development workflow. Here’s a look at 14 of the add-ons you can find there, all of which are available under the MIT open-source license and implemented using 100% GDScript. The repository consists of the following free add-ons for the Godot game engine: area_lights: Enhances lighting capabilities within your scenes. control_proxies: doodle_texture:  Create textures directly in Godot by doodling or sketching, perfect for prototyping and “sticky notes”. editor_relays: This add-on allows you to manage the Godot Editor from your application at run-time. gizmo_presets: Gain precise control over the visibility of Gizmos in Godot. Show/hide them all, or create and toggle your own custom presets. light_shafts: Add breathtaking volumetric light scattering effects, often known as “god rays,” to your scenes. lines_and_trails_3d: Easily create and manage dynamic 3D lines and trail effects for projectiles, movement paths, and more. manual_multimesh: Optimize your scenes by gaining more direct control over MultiMeshInstances, perfect for rendering many similar meshes efficiently. nine_patch_mesh: Create scalable 3D nine-patch meshes, ideal for flexible UI elements or environment pieces with repeating borders and centers. parallel_scene_views: Boost your productivity by viewing and interacting with multiple scene views simultaneously within the editor. preview_2d: Seamlessly integrate 2D and 3D workflows by adding a button to preview your 2D viewport directly from a 3D scene. procedural_texture_baker: Generate and bake unique procedural textures directly within Godot, saving time and adding variety. tile_path_3d: Effortlessly instance 3D objects along a spline path. Perfect for creating paths, roads, fences, and other repeating environmental details. transform_clusters: Once again, not really sure the use case on this one Key Links Cozy Cube Games Godot Add-Ons GitHub Repository Cozy Cube Games Homepage You can learn more about the Cozy Cube Games add-ons for the Godot game engine as well as see many of them in action in the video below.

Discover how to add stunning variations and glowing effects to your scenes in Unreal Engine 5. In this quick tutorial, learn the secrets of point lights and volume scattering to elevate your visuals!#UnrealEngine #LightingTutorial #UE5 #GameDev #RealtimeVFX

Grab Dash by Polygonflow and revolutionize your Unreal workflow here: https://www.polygonflow.io/ Ever wondered how some artists are building incredibly detailed and vast environments in Unreal Engine with shocking speed? In this video, I'm revealing the "genius" new workflow powered by Dash by Polygonflow, a plugin that's truly transforming how we approach environment creation in Unreal Engine 5! Join me as we dive deep into how Dash makes complex procedural content generation (PCG) accessible and incredibly fast. We'll build a stunning road environment from scratch, showcasing Dash's core features step-by-step: Lightning-Fast Content Browser: Discover its integrated asset management, seamless Quixel integration, and awesome AI tagging for effortless organization. Intuitive Scattering Tools: Learn how to quickly populate your scenes with plants, rocks, and custom meshes, precisely controlling their placement. Powerful Masking Features: Master Dash's sophisticated proximity, height, angle, and border masks to achieve incredibly realistic and nuanced distribution of your scattered assets. Dynamic Curve-Based Generation: See how to create full roads, add detailed borders, and build complex structures along custom curves, all with instant, procedural updates. Interactive Physics Tools: Watch how "Physics Drop" and "Physics Paint" allow you to add natural-looking debris and scatter elements with real-time physical simulation. Whether you're struggling with traditional PCG, tired of manual placement, or just looking for the next big leap in your Unreal Engine workflow, Dash is a game-changer you won't want to miss. Get ready to build bigger, faster, and smarter! PolygonFlow's videos for Smart Content Browser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjTv9jWfY4s Tools & Assets Used/Mentioned: Dash by Polygonflow: https://www.polygonflow.io/ Ultra Dynamic Sky: https://www.fab.com/listings/84fda27a-c79f-49c9-8458-82401fb37cfb Conifer Trees Biome: https://www.fab.com/listings/e7de608e-94c4-4b9e-9bb2-3085604fdf5e Chapters: [0:00] Intro: The GENIUS new Unreal Engine workflow 01:24 Dash's Content Browser & AI Tagging 03:48 Easy Scattering & Proximity Masks 08:50 Advanced Feature & Border Masking 11:47 The Power of the Curve Tool & Path Creation 17:45 Building a Procedural Road Scene from Scratch 22:39 Dynamic Landscape Sculpting & Tree Placement 25:03 Detailed Road Shoulders & Barriers 27:21 Lighting with Ultra Dynamic Sky 30:00 Physics Drop & Physics Paint Showcase 31:40 Final Thoughts & Outro Music Licenses: The Life and Death of a Certain K. Zabriskie, Patriarch by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Images: CrytekCrysis was released back in 2007, and it was beautiful, which meant it had pretty high hardware demands – something that players still joke about with the "Can it run Crysis?" meme.Crysis's director and Crytek founder Cevat Yerli explained that the team wanted to "make sure Crysis does not age, that [it] is future proofed, meaning that if I played it three years from now, it should look better than today."If you are curious what was going on at Crytek during the development, you're in luck: Michael Khaimzon, former art director at Crytek, who worked on the game, generously shared some insights that you should hear."The back-stories are almost as crazy as the visuals, so I figured I’d start sharing a few," he said on LinkedIn.The developers, based in Frankfurt, Germany, were tasked to build "the most realistic jungle ever.""What do we know about jungles? We book tickets to Tahiti. The brief is simple: study how a real jungle works and shoot enough photos for textures. ... Ironically, none of the photos we took were usable. In the end we decided to model every single vegetation texture in 3D instead. It sounds insane, but that call ends up driving one of the biggest leaps in real-time graphics. So the trip was essentially useless other than a pack of reference shots."With Crysis, the team wanted to delve into photorealism: "Not “pretty,” not “stylized” – we wanted players to squint and wonder if it was real." Before, Far Cry was lauded for its amazing jungle environments, but for this game, the "trick of hand-painting specular and bump effects straight into textures wasn’t gonna cut it.""At the time, no one used high-poly models for foliage. Leaves were painted, not sculpted. Modeling them sounded insane – until we did it. Suddenly, we had full control over layout, and flawless normal maps where every leaf caught light at its own angle."Another solution that made Crysis look so good was light scattering. The developers simulated the color shifts and shadow plays of leaves, used vertex color and bone rigs to make leaves sway realistically, and did some manual alpha tuning for mipmaps to fix long-distance opacity glitches, "but honestly, the two real breakthroughs were high-poly leaves and subsurface light scattering."Yerli wanted to create "something the world has never seen," so art director Magnus Larbrant provided a concept showing winter in the jungle."As production rolled on, our regular jungles started looking insanely good – photoreal, even by today’s standards. Next to them, the icy levels felt gimmicky, but we’d promised them, so they stayed. ... Sometimes the image that sells the game isn’t the one that defines it. Still, that frozen-jungle concept sparked the entire franchise, so here it is for the history books," Khaimzon explained.What players do remember is the Nanosuit, which, it turns out, "wasn’t even planned until a year into production." Apparently, Delta Force agents were supposed to wear tank-looking supersuits mid-game, but "that didn’t strike a nerve, and Cevat was never satisfied with mediocrity," so the developer tried to focus on "the rubbery muscle structure" from early concepts, but it was not enough, still."And then came the franchise-defining idea: strip away all the armor. Keep the muscles only. Let’s go for a ninja-like figure – black, agile, enhanced. We made our first actual nanosuit... ...but it still didn’t work."The muscles were flat, Khaimzon says, so Crytek asked an external concept artist to look at the suite "with a fresh set of eyes, to take our design and separate each major muscle group as much as possible." This resulted in "the most amazing concepting and modeling feat I’ve ever seen."Crytek's artists created a low-poly model using smoothing groups to separate muscles and then a detailed high-poly sculpt."The Nanosuit was born."In 2004, voxels were all the rage, but they didn't suit the game: "No creature with an IQ over 1 would build a spaceship out of blobs and mush." Playing with the shapes, Crytek loved the organic feel and started looking into blending organic and technological forms, "how to make something that looked alien, but also engineered.""We quickly realized that the key to making it look like advanced technology was in repeating, parallel elements – something that looks artificially crafted."Once that was done, the team focused on zero gravity, which sounds great but demands a lot from developers. Players could get nose-to-nose to textures with zero gravity, but they didn't look good that close; they were "pixely and blurry." "Add detail textures, and they barely helped – they only showed when you were right on top of the surface. Using lots of unique textures wasn’t the answer either – it ate up memory and made the surface look noisy and chaotic from afar."So Crytek invented "one of the most unconventional art pipelines" it'd ever used: designing all alien objects using only tiled textures. The entire 1000-meter alien ship and its interiors were built with a handful of unique textures."Artists had to break objects into clearly defined zones, each mapped with a repeating texture. The structure and flow of the texture became part of the design itself. The real challenge? Creating compelling, alien shapes under such a strict limitation. A huge task."I'd say the developers succeeded in their task, creating a game that will stay with gamers for years to come, thanks to its amazing environments, characters, and mechanics that Crytek worked so hard on making work.Khaimzon has shared 6 parts of this exciting journey, and if you want to know more, follow him on LinkedIn.Also, join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.

A research team at the University of Arkansas has demonstrated that molecular dynamics (MD) simulations can reveal key mechanisms behind silicon nanoparticle crystallization during laser-induced forward transfer (LIFT) printing. The findings are detailed in a non-peer-reviewed preprint available on arXiv, where the authors show how nanoparticle size and cooling rate affect the ability of silicon to solidify into single-crystalline structures during flight, a development with potential implications for additive manufacturing of optoelectronic materials. Molecular-level insight into LIFT printing Laser-induced forward transfer (LIFT) is a promising technique for direct-write micro- and nanoscale printing of functional materials. Unlike conventional additive manufacturing processes that build parts layer by layer, LIFT uses a pulsed laser to eject material droplets from a donor film, enabling high-resolution patterning of metals, polymers, and semiconductors. While LIFT has been applied to amorphous silicon printing, the atomic-level dynamics of silicon crystallization during droplet flight remain poorly understood. To address this, researchers Youwen Liang and Wan Shou used MD simulations to analyze how size and thermal conditions influence silicon nanoparticle behavior during solidification. Simulated crystallization of silicon nanoparticles during LIFT printing. Image via Liang & Shou. Size and cooling rate determine crystal structure The simulations revealed a strong correlation between nanoparticle diameter and crystallization potential. Particles smaller than 4 nm failed to crystallize, even under slow cooling conditions, while larger particles (8–12 nm) exhibited latent heat release and structural ordering, key signatures of crystallization. The study also found that slow cooling rates are essential to promote crystallization. At higher cooling rates, supercooling effects dominated, resulting in amorphous structures. Under controlled thermal conditions, the researchers observed the formation of single-crystal-like silicon nanoparticles, with nucleation beginning just beneath the particle’s surface. The authors suggest that single-crystal formation in-flight is achievable, provided that droplet size and cooling rate are carefully controlled, a finding that may inform future single-crystal silicon additive manufacturing.Crystallization begins beneath the surface A key finding is that crystallization rarely initiates at the particle surface. Instead, nucleation typically begins ~5 Å beneath the outer layer, within what the researchers describe as a structurally distinct sub-surface region. These early nuclei then migrate toward the particle center, where crystal growth accelerates. Simulations also showed that surface atoms remain more mobile and disordered, even at low temperatures. Using bond order parameters (BOP), radial distribution functions (RDF), coordination numbers, and mean square displacement (MSD), the researchers tracked the atomic structure evolution throughout solidification. Comparison of atomic structures from MD simulations. Image via Liang & Shou. Towards single-crystal 3D printing The ability to predict and control crystallization at the nanoscale opens new possibilities for high-performance printed electronics, where grain boundaries can reduce efficiency and durability. By adjusting droplet size and cooling profiles, LIFT could eventually enable on-demand printing of single-crystal semiconductors, bypassing traditional lithography or epitaxy methods. While the current results are based on simulations, they provide a foundational framework for experimental validation and future process optimization in nanoscale additive manufacturing.Crystallization Control in Additive Manufacturing Achieving precise control over crystallization during additive manufacturing is pivotal for enhancing material properties and performance. In polymer-based 3D printing, researchers from the Air Force Research Laboratory, Cornell University, and Boeing have successfully mapped the crystallization process of poly(ether ether ketone) (PEEK) during fused filament fabrication. Utilizing synchrotron-based microbeam wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS), they provided a detailed 2D map of PEEK crystallization process in the initial seconds post-extrusion. This study revealed that higher print bed temperatures delay the onset of crystallization but result in a higher final degree of crystallinity, thereby enhancing the mechanical properties of the printed parts. In metal additive manufacturing, researchers in Japan demonstrated the fabrication of single-crystal nickel using selective laser melting (SLM). By optimizing laser parameters and using a flat-top beam profile, they achieved homogenous, single-crystal structures without a pre-existing seed, a breakthrough with potential for high-temperature aerospace components such as turbine blades.These studies highlight the central role of thermal management and process design in crystallization control. The current MD simulation of silicon nanoparticle solidification during LIFT builds upon this foundation, offering atomic-level insights into nucleation and growth. Such fundamental understanding is essential to push the boundaries of precision-engineered, crystallinity-controlled 3D printed materials. Subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry newsletter to keep up with the latest 3D printing news. You can also follow us onLinkedIn and subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry YouTube channel to access more exclusive content. At 3DPI, our mission is to deliver high-quality journalism, technical insight, and industry intelligence to professionals across the AM ecosystem. Help us shape the future of 3D printing industry news with our2025 reader survey. Feature Image shows comparison of atomic structures from MD simulations. Image via Liang & Shou.

A team from the National Research Council Canada and the University of Victoria has developed a fully automatic exposure control system for tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing (VAM), a technique that fabricates entire objects at once using projected light patterns inside a rotating resin vat, significantly improving the process’s accuracy and repeatability. The results, shared in a non-peer-reviewed preprint on arXiv, show that the technique enables hands-free printing with comparable or better feature resolution than commercial SLA and DLP printers, while printing parts up to ten times faster. Dubbed AE-VAM (Automatic Exposure Volumetric Additive Manufacturing), the new system uses real-time monitoring of light scattering inside the resin to automatically terminate exposure during printing. This eliminates the need for manual adjustments, which previously limited the consistency and commercial viability of VAM. The researchers demonstrated their system by printing 25 iterations of the widely used 3DBenchy model. AE-VAM achieved an average RMS surface deviation of 0.100 mm and inter-print variation of 0.053 mm. Notably, all fine features, including blind holes, chimneys, and underside text, were successfully reproduced, outperforming prints from commercial SLA and DLP systems in some key respects. Schematic of the AE-VAM system, which uses light scattering measurements to determine the optimal exposure endpoint in real-time. Image via Antony Orth et al., National Research Council Canada / University of Victoria. From lab to potential production Tomographic VAM differs from conventional 3D printing in that it exposes the entire resin volume at once, rather than layer by layer. While this allows for faster printing and the elimination of support structures, previous implementations suffered from unpredictable exposure levels due to resin reuse and light diffusion, often requiring experienced operators and frequent recalibration. AE-VAM addresses this by using a simple optical feedback system that measures scattered red light during curing. When the measured signal reaches a calibrated threshold, the UV exposure is halted automatically. According to the authors, this makes the process “insensitive to geometry” and viable for multi-part assembly printing, such as gear systems and threaded components. A step toward commercial VAM The team benchmarked AE-VAM against the Formlabs Form 2, Form 4, and Asiga PRO4K. While the Form 2 achieved slightly higher accuracy (0.081 mm RMS error), AE-VAM outperformed on small feature reproduction and consistency, especially as resin was re-used. The system printed the same 3DBenchy model in under a minute, compared to over 8 minutes on the fastest SLA system. “AE-VAM has repeatability and accuracy specifications that are within the range measured for commercial systems,” the authors wrote, noting that it also enables resin reuse up to five times with minimal degradation. They anticipate that broader testing of AE-VAM with different resins could bring the technology closer to commercialization. The team notes the approach is computationally lightweight and suitable for general-purpose use with minimal operator training. The work has been funded by the National Research Council of Canada’s Ideation program. Several authors are listed as inventors on provisional patents related to the system. AE-VAM-printed mechanical components: a functional ¼-20 screw and nut, and a gear assembly with 50 μm tolerances. Parts could also be mated with standard metal hardware. Image via Antony Orth et al., National Research Council Canada / University of Victoria. Volumetric 3D printing gains momentum across research and industry Volumetric additive manufacturing (VAM) has garnered increasing attention in recent years as a fast, support-free alternative to conventional layer-based 3D printing. Previous VAM advancements include Manifest Technologies’ (formerly Vitro3D) launch of a high-speed P-VAM evaluation kit aimed at commercial adoption, and EPFL’s demonstration of opaque resin printing using volumetric techniques. Meanwhile, researchers at Utrecht University have leveraged volumetric bioprinting to fabricate miniature liver models for regenerative medicine, and University College London explored rapid drug-loaded tablet fabrication. More recently, a holographic variant of tomographic VAM (TVAM) showed promise in reducing print times and improving light efficiency. These developments underscore the broad applicability and accelerating pace of innovation in volumetric 3D printing technologies. Subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry newsletter to keep up with the latest 3D printing news. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry YouTube channel to access more exclusive content. At 3DPI, our mission is to deliver high-quality journalism, technical insight, and industry intelligence to professionals across the AM ecosystem. Help us shape the future of 3D printing industry news with our 2025 reader survey. Feature image shows comparison of 3DBenchy models printed with VAM, SLA and DLP. Antony Orth et al., National Research Council Canada / University of Victoria.