“Computational design and 3D printing go together like peanut butter and chocolate.”

For most of its history, 3D printing was considered speculative, risky, even fringe. Today, says Eric Utley, 3D printing applications engineering manager at Protolabs, it’s boring, and that’s exactly the point.

In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, TECH B2B Marketing’s Jimmy Carroll sits down with Utley, a 16-year veteran of the additive manufacturing industry, to explore how 3D printing has quietly evolved from a rapid prototyping curiosity into mainstream production technology, and where it’s headed next.

The conversation covers how Fortune 500 companies like GE and HP helped shift additive manufacturing toward end-use production, why the explosion of application-specific materials is one of the clearest signs of the industry’s maturation, and how customers are increasingly designing parts specifically for 3D printing rather than as a stepping stone to other processes. Additional topics include the growing role of AI and computational design, how hobbyists are quietly driving innovation, and why algorithmic-based design processes paired with digital manufacturing are creating new opportunities.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:02] Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of the Manufacturing Matters podcast, where we discuss the trends and technologies reshaping the manufacturing industry and beyond. My name is Jimmy Carroll. I’m the vice president of operations at Tech B2B Marketing. Today I have the pleasure of being joined by Eric Utley, who’s a 3D printing applications engineering manager at Protolabs. Eric, thanks so much for joining. Really appreciate it.

Eric Utley: [00:00:24] Yeah. Thanks Jimmy. This will be fun.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:27] Of course. Yeah. So for those who don’t know, I’d like to just start off by asking, tell us about Protolabs and what you guys do there.

Eric Utley: [00:00:34] Yeah. So Protolabs is a custom parts manufacturer. We have a core competency in digital manufacturing, which you can think of as just really highly automated manufacturing processes. We do 3D printing, sheet metal, CNC machining, injection molding. And we cater to anything from like a single copy to a proto to end use production of like tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of parts.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:58] Okay. Well, it’s a very important topic. And it’s a technology that’s grown over the years, much like all the other technologies we discuss on the podcast. And one thing I thought was interesting that you said was that 3D printing is boring now and that’s a good thing, which is a nice provocative sort of statement or headline. What do you mean by that?

Eric Utley: [00:01:19] Yeah. So I should have clarified more. I’m specifically on the additive manufacturing side of the company. And I’m here at Raleigh, which is one of the largest 3D printing labs in the country. And I’ve been in the additive industry for 16 years, and something really good is that the industry is just rapidly evolving all the time. And we’re really in unprecedented times of, yeah, it’s kind of boring now. But in the sense of I would make little titanium printed lattices to take to our trade shows and show people, and they would be wowed at it. And I would tell people I work in the 3D printing industry, and it was borderline science fiction to people and kind of magical. And nowadays I tell people I work in 3D printing, and they go, “Oh, yeah, my kid’s got one of those.” And it’s old news for them. And like I said, that’s kind of unprecedented for us in the industry is people kind of being in the know of what we do, and on the face of it, it sounds bad. It’s like, “Oh God, we’re boring now.” But really it’s a good thing. And it’s by design. We’ve done our part for the last 20 years, educating the public about 3D printing, explaining how the technology works, where it wins and excels. And we’re a victim of our own success in that way of spreading the word on the technology, and as I said, it’s a good thing now because there’s a flip side of that, that historically 3D printing was kind of considered speculative or risky or fringe. And now it’s a much more mainstream technology. You know, I have colleagues who are specialists in CNC machining and injection molding, and it feels kind of like we’ve graduated to being a more traditional, considered industrial manufacturing process for that. And so, yes, it’s not as sexy or exciting or mysterious as it was before. But in turn, it’s now considered much more realistically for things like end use production. And it’s kind of a norm now in manufacturing to consider additive as a possible avenue for making an end use part. That wasn’t around before.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:03:53] It’s kind of funny — like part of that description could almost be used for AI as well. You know, it’s like it’s kind of a pipe dream and now it’s becoming sort of commonplace. And I’ll ask you about AI a little bit later, but I do want to ask kind of a selfish question because you mentioned the technology was sort of foreign to people and now it’s commonplace, and you can buy pretty decent 3D printers from Amazon — not that expensive. In fact, I have three boys, and one of the gifts we got them for Christmas was a 3D printer, and people are amazed by it and they’re going, “How does this work?” And I try to explain to them and my parents or my in-laws or whomever, and they’re kind of like, “I still don’t get it, but that’s really cool.” Somebody looking to get started in 3D printing just for fun — first of all, do you do that? Like as a hobbyist? And how do you recommend people get started? Just jump right in?

Eric Utley: [00:04:51] Yeah, yeah. So I have a little Ender 3 at home, and I kind of use car analogies here. I have what’s called the Ender 3 at home. And it’s kind of like the Honda Civic of desktop 3D printers. It’s cheap. It’s commonplace. But it’s not very fast. It’s not very fancy in the things it can do. And then lately you have really impressive ones coming from like Bambu and Prusa. They’re kind of like the Lexus and BMWs. They’re a little more expensive, but they’ve got the heated seats and the cruise control and the stuff like that. And nice little features with them and then, yeah, I think it’s a very approachable hobby and things to do. You need a little bit of technical aptitude for it. And I was thinking, when I was in high school, my dad bought me a Volkswagen Beetle as something to take apart and work on and tinker with, and cars have just gotten — that doesn’t exist anymore, right? They’re so much more sophisticated now. And they’re not designed to be easy to work on. So I feel like 3D printers have kind of taken that place of being something kind of accessible and tinker-able to work on, and kind of the sky’s the limit. You know, you can take it and put it together, and it’s akin to putting together Ikea furniture. And it’s very doable as something a middle-schooler can tackle. There’s a lot of online resources to get up and running. And then, like I said, the sky’s the limit. You know, you can go down deep rabbit holes of like coding your own G-code and things like that. And you’re not going to get too in over your head with one of the cheaper printers.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:06:46] Yeah. I love a good analogy, and I appreciate that.  We bought a Flashforge 5, and I didn’t want to go to the high end because my kids are young. My oldest is 10. And so we do have a free version of a CAD program that they kind of tinker with a little bit, but then there’s a bunch of libraries out there, and you can find those and print things and then put things together. But I love that it’s like almost secretly a way to get kids into learning about CAD software and modeling and coding and things like that without them fully realizing it.

Eric Utley: [00:07:24] Right. Yeah. Sneak it in.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:07:26] They’re a little young for it, but anyway it’s super cool. And I was glad to find you guys and I want to ask about that. Back to the manufacturing side of things, kind of two questions in one. I know that for a while, 3D printing — and I’m sure it still is — was used for things like rapid prototyping, but it’s evolved past that a little bit, right? What are some of the new and innovative ways that manufacturers now are using 3D printing technology?

Eric Utley: [00:07:58] Yeah. So it’s still key to rapid prototyping. And we still do a lot of that. And I always tell people who are kind of unfamiliar with it, anything you touch basically that’s manufactured, I can nearly guarantee you 3D printing was used at some point in the design process, like it is just extremely ubiquitous in the research labs and the product development side of things. But absolutely, and you mentioned AI undergoing the same sort of transformation, right? And a lot of your listeners are probably familiar with it — it’s called the Gartner curve. It’s where a disruptive technology kind of enters, and there’s all this hype, and then it kind of crashes out, and then it kind of rebounds, and 3D printing underwent that. And exactly to your point, it was back in the mid-2010s when traditionally rapid prototyping was really where it was used. And then you had big, big Fortune 500 companies like GE and HP jumping into the ring and making 3D printers. And they were not interested in rapid prototyping. You know, they were interested in using it for end use production. And that was really when that shift started to happen. And you started to see 3D printing being used for end use production.

Eric Utley: [00:09:16] For example, we print in metal using technology called direct metal laser sintering. And that’s extremely popular in aerospace. It’s just extreme lightweighting of parts and consolidating of assemblies. And then we’ll print in black nylon using a technology called multi-jet fusion that can make really lightweight and strong plastic parts, and it prints very quickly. So it has some scalability that kind of encroaches on injection molding for that. But something that’s really changed is — again, you go back 10, 15 years and virtually everything that was printing was a prototype and would eventually be made some other way. So you look at a 3D-printed part and you would say this is eventually going to be injection molded or this is eventually going to be five-axis machined or something like that. And more recently we’re seeing a lot of our customers actually design for 3D printing. And I think something to kind of take away from that is that any kind of application where complexity equates to value or usefulness is where 3D printing really thrives. So you get these kind of Swiss army knife type parts where it’s in pieces of material but it does a lot of things. A really interesting example is something that used to be obscure and is now downright commonplace is what are called TPMs. Or they’re called triply periodic minimal surfaces. So basically these very mathy repeating geometries. And they used to be extremely obscure, but they’re getting more common in 3D printing. And one thing they’ll do is be used in heat exchangers. So one property of them is that they separate. They have an A side and a B side essentially. And they kind of keep volumes separated. So you can pump a coolant in one way. You can pump the heated material through another way. And the structure kind of weaves it together without physically mixing the material. So these are used in things like heat exchangers and condensers and applications like that. And they’re just completely unmanufacturable without 3D printing. And so it’s a great case again of that heat exchangers are a great thing where the more surface area it has, the more functional it is. And then these structures are also very smooth and flowing. So it flows really cleanly through there. And so it’s just a great example of kind of leveraging the geometry capability of 3D printing to make something that you couldn’t before.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:12:00] And that’s a great last line there because my eyes have really been open in the last I’d say three or so years to 3D printing because before that I thought of it as small parts and prototyping and kind of that realm. But then I was visiting a company not too long ago, a year or so ago, and they had a 3D-printed robot arm. They had other robots in the facility as well. It was a cobot arm. And those can be tens of thousands of dollars, and their 3D-printed robot was like $5,000 or $6,000. And I’m like, I had no idea that this was possible. I think part of that is because there’s been a lot of innovations on, and you kind of touched on this, the material side of things. Like there’s a lot more materials being used than ever before in 3D, which I didn’t know, and maybe a lot of other people don’t know about. What are some other ways that the expansion of the different types of materials that people are using are benefiting 3D printing tech and manufacturers?

Eric Utley: [00:13:05] Yeah, this has been a major sign of, again, it’s kind of like speaking to that maturation of the 3D printing industry. Back in rapid prototyping — you’ll still see it on our website. We call it ABS-like, PC-like, and these were materials that were designed to mimic something that would eventually be injection molded. And then a challenge of 3D printing was always in that raw material. At least the 3D printers we run, they don’t use injection molding pellets. They don’t use the blocks you would buy from CNC mills. And so they need to be processed in a certain way that can be fed into the printer, and that in turn limits the materials you can run. We may have customers who say, “Hey, can you 3D-print in this specific metal alloy?” There needs to be a vendor out there who atomizes that into a powder with a specific particle distribution and build parameters made around it. It’s not as easy as just loading a block into a CNC mill or pellets into an injection molding press.

Eric Utley: [00:14:10] But as the industry has grown, now there’s a business case for these little niche materials, right? So when you’re small, you only got vanilla and chocolate.  But as the industry grows, now you have all these niche specialty materials. So today we have things like flame-retardant materials, ceramic-filled materials that can handle high temperatures, ESD-safe materials for electrical applications, biocompatible materials, silicone materials. So it’s that move towards production too that there’s a stronger focus towards application-specific materials that are kind of targeting specific use cases and not general use cases. And so that’s something that we’ll go back and forth with our customers on and kind of have our ear to the ground with our customers of what sort of material requirements are coming. And again, that’s kind of an evolving situation with additive, of how do you build up that material pipeline and get materials that match to the application that’s required for the part.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:15:24] Another question that’s sort of selfish, and it’s not necessarily what you do, but I want to ask because I have seen video, and these days you don’t know what video is real and what’s not, but how viable are 3D-printed homes? Have you seen those?

Eric Utley: [00:15:45] Yeah.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:15:46] Is that a realistic thing?

Eric Utley: [00:15:47] Yeah. Well, that’s a goal of mine is to retire in one. I’ve been doing 3D printing for almost 20 years now. And I’m like, all right, that’ll be the capstone is I’m going to design my own 3D-printed house and live in one. So let’s kind of talk both sides, right? I think that’s the best way to do it. So some of the criticisms are — the ones you typically see they’re like a gantry-style system. They’re basically building a really big FDM printer and filling it with concrete, and then they extrude material. And then, as we were talking about, like you’re talking about kids and desktop FDM printers. One thing I recommend exploring is called the continuous contour mode or vase mode. And it’s actually very comparable to how houses are built. So that might be something kind of fun to explore if someone wants to design their own 3D-printed house. If you have continuous contour mode or run on your desktop printer. But some of the criticisms are: Okay, we set this up and we hit go, and then we come in the next day and all the walls are built. And that’s relatively a small fraction of the cost of the house. All your cost goes into the windows, into the electrical wiring, and things like that. And there’s been some interesting ones with low-cost housing, where they do it. But again, for me, it’s like the design complexity, right? Like I want it to be like a little Hobbit, Lord of the Rings or mushroom house or something. Something really organic that you couldn’t make otherwise. It’s something we do with other manufacturing processes too. Something I always think of is you almost want the design process to mimic the manufacturing process, right? So if someone’s designing a CNC part, a lot of it is like, this is what this cross section looks like. And then you cut out this way and you cut out that way. And that sort of raises the question: How do you design parts for 3D printing? And it does almost make sense to have these kind of like organic, grown shapes through that. So for me, you can get some really interesting designs with 3D-printed houses, but I’m a little skeptical of it being like a cost-saving way of doing it unless you’re really just banging out a bunch of really small houses there could be something there. But for me it would really be about getting away — again, it’s like that design. It’s like, hey, we got straight walls because we’re using two-by-fours to make this thing. But 3D printing allows you to get away from that and have things like curved walls and interesting arches. I was going to do something around catenary curves and 3D printing, because there’s a lot you can learn from medieval architecture in designing for 3D printing because they had a lot of the same problems of making these kind of self-supporting structures. So a lot of the architecture you see from like medieval Islamic structures and medieval structures, they actually print really well. So it could be like a little bit of a resurgence for that. And I think that’s the way it would go is you’d have some really creative designs that you could then 3D-print a house out of.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:19:23] Yeah, I mean, what’s the fun in making a house-shaped house from a 3D printer? If you ever develop a Hobbit house, a viable 3D-printed Hobbit house, put me on your wait list please.

Eric Utley: [00:19:38] Yeah, I’ll let you know.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:19:40] That’s cool. We talked about AI earlier, and I’m wondering — generative AI is such a hot topic now. And its capabilities are growing so fast, like scary fast — in a good way. I don’t know how to code, for example, so is there a scenario where if you have an AI agent, whether it’s OpenClaw or whatever, could you use generative AI to create a model? Or in general, how is generative AI and all types of it boosting 3D printing efforts today?

Eric Utley: [00:20:22] Yeah, yeah. So like you said, this is evolving super fast. And I’ll start it like two years ago and then rapidly get up to here. So I wrote an article about this in the first few months when ChatGPT came out. And I enjoy using Blender. It’s open source, and it’s a 3D design software, but it’s really for animation and game assets. It’s not a manufacturing design software necessarily, but it has a Python terminal inside of it. So right at the get-go, right when LLMs became available, what I could do is go in there and say, “Write me a Python code for Blender to make a 3D CAD of a da da da da da da da.” And then it would spit out a code snippet, copy and paste, hit enter, and it would create something in Blender. I was like, “Oh, wow. This is awesome.” Right off the bat. But it had limitations, right? Like you could get simple things. And again, in hindsight, I didn’t understand it at the time, but now if you think about it, if you kind of worded it in a code-y way, then it would do it, but it couldn’t really do like organic things. But it could do pretty impressive things. You could say, like, create a random distribution of posts that are within this size, and it could do that. But you’d say like, create a cat up a tree. And it wouldn’t do that because there wasn’t really any code out there for it to read to make something like that. And then nowadays there’s actually a lot of companies offering text to CAD or really text to mesh I think is the better way of saying it, of either text to mesh or image to mesh. And I play with that a lot, honestly. I’ll create images in the AI-generated software and then feed it into these and create things. I got little things on my desk. This is one I made like a year-plus ago. This is when they were first available. And you can see it’s like a little fighting robot thing, but it’s really kind of doughy and no features on it. And if you’re in modeling, that’s sort of useful because you can kind of drop it in and at least kind of get the silhouette and the shape of what you want. But nowadays — like this one’s more recent. And you can see it’s got a lot more detail on it. So I imagine it’s kind of done similar to how a human would design it, where it kind of roughs in and gets the general profile and the volumes and then kind of comes back in and does detail. But they’re at the mercy of their training data and what they have. So for these sorts of models that are going from image to mesh or text to mesh, like the primary use case is for people creating video game assets or people creating renderings. So they’re quite good at creating little figures and fantasy weapons, like bows and arrows and space guns. And they’re quite good at furniture, because you can imagine, you may want to fill that out, or architects will have a lot of use of that because they’ll design the building and then they’ll want to make it looked more lived in. And so they’ll fill it in with furniture. And I’ve noticed they’ve started to get like a phone stand. You can get a decent output on it. But it’s not good at developing a surgical device. It’s not good at developing a part for your car. Because that’s really not in the training data. Something I noticed was they probably didn’t have a paleontologist labeling the data because it was really bad at making specific dinosaurs. You would try to say make a stegosaurus, and it would make some generic dinosaur, but it really didn’t have the specificity to know what it was. But the fact that we went from nothing to this in two years to where you can create these models is really impressive. And it’s funny because the hobbyists are really the ones who are benefiting from that the most right now it feels like.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:24:40] Yeah, we’ve seen that over the years with the proliferation of 3D imaging, like 3D imaging used to be a kind of a cost-prohibitive and larger technology. And if you look at the Microsoft Kinect — remember the Kinect that came with Xbox? That was kind of revolutionary, and people were taking that from their Xbox and finding ways to use it. And that kind of opened the door to lower-cost, more accessible 3D imaging. And it’s interesting to see how hobbyists kind of drive innovation sometimes, or often I guess.

Eric Utley: [00:25:15] Yeah, I was going to mention that people who wanted to go further with their FDM printers is photogrammetry. Like you said, they’re affordable or they’ve got a pretty generous free trial period of you can get photogrammetry on your phone and can scan things, and it takes a little bit of work to kind of get it printable. And also, this picture doesn’t have any sense of scale, but I’ve gotten pretty good results with that. Like one thing you can do is just go to a thrift shop and buy some little chintzy statues and stuff and print and scan them just to kind of build up your skill set. But that’s very doable nowadays.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:25:57] Oh, interesting. Well, that’s some good input. I’ve got some good homework here to start getting some more cool stuff out of the printer. We’ve been doing things like you said, like Zelda toys and ninja stars whatever. Some pretty useful stuff. What else? So you’ve seen a lot when it comes to the 3D printing industry. Do you have any predictions over the next couple of years? I know that’s hard, but anything you expect to see?

Eric Utley: [00:26:31] Yeah. So we talked about the hobbyist side of AI, but like there’s an opposite end too. We’ve done a lot of public collaborations with the NASA AI team, and that’s just a completely different approach, where it’s more of a constraint-based system. So they’re kind of setting in things and saying that there has to be material here, putting up no zones, where it says “no material here,” and just saying it has to be under this weight and at least this strong. And then they let the algorithm kind of tinker away with it and then get an output. And those historically are really compute heavy. And all that I mentioned, some of that it would take overnight, but then they recently did one where they did it within the span of a presentation. So it’s getting faster, but I spoke to it a bit earlier about just the complexity of the designs going up. But there’s a trend in additive towards — and it’s not necessarily AI design but like a more broad term would be like computational design, where it’s like these are our very compute-heavy algorithmic-based design processes that either iterate on the design or make the design from scratch. And that’s a huge evolving subject in this this industry and a really exciting one, because they just go together like peanut butter and chocolate. These algorithms can design these really complex parts. And then the digital manufacturing can in turn manufacture them. And depending on the application, you get a lot of value out of that. Again, it’s just extreme lightweighting for parts on satellites and rockets and just extreme surface area for chemical reactors. And there’s just a lot of unexplored territory there. That’s really exciting.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:28:33] I guess one of my last questions for you would be: For a company looking to get serious in 3D printing, where do you recommend they start?

Eric Utley: [00:28:44] Yeah, they can contact us and talk about their project, and it could be anywhere in that journey in the sense of, “Hey, we just want to kind of understand.” I did that last week even. I gave a tour to a company. And they didn’t have any parts in front of them even at that point. They’re just trying to understand where do we use additive? Where is it? When? And when is it a better fit than these other technologies? And then we can also get to the point where there’s a CAD file in front of us and kind of discuss it and kind of get down to the nuts and bolts of: what are the material requirements, what are the quantities, what sort of pricing are we looking at for that? But there’s a wealth of information out there. What’s really changed is we used to be kind of really educating our customers on the technology, and now they are much more educated as far as where the technology is. And it’s penetrating further upstream, right? It used to be like we’re going to 3D-print this and then jump the molding. But you know, lately we really had customers who are like, “We like this. It works. We just want more of it now.” And then we’ll take it and critically look at it and say: How can we get more efficient with this part and make it viable for something like low-volume production?

Jimmy Carroll: [00:30:14] And I guess in those cases, if people do have parts they could send you or CAD files, and it kind of makes it easy to be like, “Well, here’s what we can do. Here are the different materials that we could use, and here’s what it looks like.” And then they have it in their hands and they can say, “Yeah, this is what we need.”

Eric Utley: [00:30:30] Yeah, our website is a great resource for that. So again, with digital manufacturing we provide instant quoting so someone can upload a 3D CAD to the website. And depending on the material and the quantities you pick, you’re going to get back an instant price and lead time for that. And then we have some automated design for manufacturability. So that’s going to do things like look the file over for walls too thin to form or small gaps that will seal during the print. And then our team has customer-facing engineers who can kind of answer questions around: Are there ways to improve this? Are there better options for this part? And really kind of drive towards solutions that way.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:31:14] Well, that’s very cool. And that’s actually the last question I was going to ask you as we wrap up: Where can people go to learn more? I think it’s protolabs.com, right?

Eric Utley: [00:31:22] Yeah, yeah. Protolabs.com is great, and you can reach out to us. People are welcome to email me. It’s just going to be my name, just eric.utley@protolabs.com.  But yeah, feel free to reach out to us. And we got a lot of information online and got people happy to talk to you.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:31:39] Awesome. Yeah. And if anybody has questions, we’d be happy to also pass them along to Eric. If you have questions, comments, want to join the podcast, whatever. It’s manufacturing-matters.com. And Eric, thanks so much for joining today, and I appreciate you letting me pick your brain, both on the manufacturing side and the selfish personal side of 3D printing.

Eric Utley: [00:32:00] Yeah. No problem. Thanks, Jimmy.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:32:03] Thanks again.

Eric Utley: [00:32:04] Yep. Thanks. Bye.