A version of this article originally appeared on Forbes.
FDM has already proven it can make the part. The harder question on today's production floor is whether you can prove that every part coming off the printer will meet requirements, pass certification and still make economic sense. Answering that question digitally is the job of FDM simulation software, and it only works if the simulation understands how the part is actually printed.
This article looks at why qualifying printed parts is so expensive, why general-purpose simulation misses what matters in FDM, and what manufacturing leaders can do now to move parts from the prototyping lab into trusted production.
According to Wohlers Associates, global additive manufacturing revenue reached $24.2 billion in 2025, a growth rate of 10.9%. That is a slight uptick from 2024 but still well below the 20%-plus rates the industry saw before the pandemic. The more telling signal is where growth came from: printing services, the companies actually producing parts, now account for 48% of industry revenue and grew 15.5%, while system sales grew 3.6%.
Value is moving toward production. The industry's next chapter depends less on selling more printers and more on whether the parts those printers make can be trusted.
For safety-critical applications, trust is expensive by design. NIST notes that fully qualifying a material through extensive empirical testing often requires many thousands of individual tests, millions of dollars and 5 to 15 years. Facing that burden, many manufacturers keep additive in the prototyping lab, where mistakes are cheap and no one asks hard questions about a part's history.
The printers are rarely the bottleneck. Modern FDM systems are more capable than the workflows around them. Trusted production requires each stage to inform the next: design, process definition, build, inspection, performance and cost. In most organizations, those stages live in separate tools, and every handoff between them is a place where trust leaks out.
Simulation is a clear example. If you simulate an FDM part without knowing its actual toolpath, you are predicting the behavior of a part that may never be built. When digital models cannot be trusted, the only fallback is slow, destructive physical testing, or over-designing the part to cover for what the simulation cannot see.
In conventional machining, a part starts as a certified billet, and its material properties are managed separately from its geometry. Additive manufacturing works differently. The material is created at the same moment as the geometry, and the toolpath is what creates both.
Novineer's physical testing program, which has completed more than 700 tests on the way to a 1,500-test validation, shows how much this matters. Two parts with identical geometry and feedstock, printed on the same machine and loaded the same way, can differ in deflection by as much as six times based only on the toolpath used to fill them. Any simulation that separates process from material will be structurally wrong.
One way to picture it: a printed part has an anatomy (its geometry) and a physiology (its material). It also has a nervous system, the toolpath, which defines how the part is formed layer by layer and, together with its thermal history, how it performs under load. That is why toolpath simulation matters far more for FDM than geometry-only analysis.
When simulation models validated against physical tests are tied to the actual toolpath and build record, evidence carries over from one part to the next. Qualification becomes an asset that compounds instead of a cost that repeats every time a parameter changes.
NoviPath was built by Novineer to close this gap for Stratasys users. Instead of simulating an idealized solid, it simulates the part as it will actually print, using the real toolpath, layer orientation, material and printer data passed directly from GrabCAD Print Pro, with no export.
The workflow takes four steps: open the job from GrabCAD Print Pro, which hands NoviPath the geometry, toolpath, material and printer data; apply point loads, area loads and fixturing constraints; solve, with NoviPath mapping the locally varying filament orientation onto the part in minutes; then review stress hotspots, displacement and the predicted failure point in an automated report.
Results validated against destructive bench testing:
NoviPath supports the Stratasys F900, Fortus 450mc and F3300, with pre-validated parameters for ULTEM 9085, Antero 800NA and FDM Nylon 12CF. It is available now as an upgrade for GrabCAD Print Pro customers, and no credit card is required to start a trial.
For a deeper walkthrough of the method, read our earlier post on additive manufacturing simulation for FDM.
For manufacturing leaders evaluating 3D printing for production, three priorities stand out:
Production will not forgive parts without memory. Sooner or later, a customer will ask for the record behind a part. The question is whether you will have one to hand them.
FDM simulation software predicts how a part made with fused deposition modeling will perform under load before it is printed. The most accurate tools use the actual toolpath and material data, because FDM parts behave differently depending on how material is deposited.
General FEA tools such as ANSYS and Abaqus simulate the part as a homogeneous solid, so the toolpath never enters the model. NoviPath implements the actual toolpath from GrabCAD Print Pro and maps the locally varying filament orientation onto the part, so the stiffness and strength of every region follow the way the material was deposited. The data passes directly from GrabCAD Print Pro.
In FDM, the toolpath determines how material is laid down, which directly affects strength and stiffness. Parts with identical geometry can perform very differently depending on their toolpath, so simulation based on the real toolpath gives far more reliable predictions than geometry-only analysis.
Simulation validated against physical tests lets engineers check structural requirements digitally first, reducing physical test cycles and saving destructive testing for final certification. It also reduces over-design, since teams no longer need to pad wall thickness and infill to cover uncertainty.
You need an active GrabCAD Print Pro subscription and a supported Stratasys FDM printer (F900, Fortus 450mc or F3300) to generate compatible toolpath exports. You can start a trial with no credit card required.
Try NoviPath with GrabCAD Print Pro and see where your part will fail, and at what load, before it reaches the build plate. Sign up for your free trial
Prefer a guided walkthrough? Talk to an expert.
