Compared with the equal material manufacturing process and the reduction manufacturing process, 3D printing has many advantages, and many articles have been analyzed and elaborated in detail. The author believes that 3D printing has three main advantages compared with traditional manufacturing technology

1. the design space is infinite. For the complex objects with complex geometry (such as those with very complex topology or cavity structure inside), traditional manufacturing technology cannot be processed, so it is necessary to decompose the objects and then process them separately. 3D printing decomposes the object into two-dimensional areas, so it is not difficult to process any complex object. The precision of the process is only determined by the smallest material particles that the printer can output. This is the biggest advantage that 3D printing brings us, which allows designers to design any complex geometry and design space is infinite. It is this advantage that gives us a lot of problems to be solved in the aspect of geometric design and optimization, which will be detailed in the future.

2. zero skill manufacturing. Traditional manufacturing equipment is huge and expensive, and requires high skills to operate. While 3D printers (such as FDM 3D printers) are small and cheap, some of them have entered the home and are easy to use; compared with expensive mold, 3D printing only needs a digital file to form. Therefore, through 3D printing, it can easily realize the personalized design and customization of the product, greatly reducing the time of product development. This advantage gives us non mechanical researchers, but also can carry out related geometry, structure, materials and other research, which greatly deepen and expand the related research problems in manufacturing.

3. unlimited combination of materials. The 3D printer with multiple nozzles can print multiple materials together. By stacking and combining materials, the printed items have different physical and mechanical properties than single materials. Therefore, by combining different materials, different "new materials" with different properties can be produced. This advantage provides us with the control of the distribution of materials to control the physical, mechanical and structural characteristics of the goods, thus can produce a variety of goods, increase the flexibility of products.

In short, the three most important advantages of 3D printing technology are accelerating the product development process, providing personalized and customized products and increasing the flexibility of production. From the perspective of forming technology, 3D printing breaks through the traditional forming method, without making mould and machining first. By combining the hardware system of rapid automatic forming and CAD software model, various products with complex shapes can be manufactured, which makes the design and production cycle of the product greatly shortened and the production cost decreased greatly.

Of course, 3D printing as a young molding process, there are many shortcomings, such as slow molding time, low precision, less types of materials, unable to mass production, etc. At present, the actual use of 3D printing still belongs to the rapid prototyping category, that is, to provide the manufacturing of product prototype for enterprises before producing formal products, which is also called handboards in the industry. Therefore, 3D printing molding technology is a complementary way with traditional manufacturing technology, and it will take time to become the mainstream manufacturing technology. But we should believe that the pursuit of technology is infinite. With the development of 3D printing equipment and printing materials, 3D printing technology will be widely used.

From another perspective, 3D printing technology has made manufacturing move from factory to family, which has spawned a large number of individual designers, which has inspired the possibility of infinite creative design. This is the author thinks 3D printing technology can bring us the greatest significance, will be elaborated in detail later.