From new printers and materials to the latest software updates, Formlabs engineers are always working to shorten the path from design to print. Two new releases take on the parts of the workflow that happen around printing: organizing a large job before it starts, and keeping track of it once it's running.

The Form Mobile app puts your printers in your pocket. Monitoring status for ongoing prints, watch a live camera feed from anywhere, or start a queued print — no more walking across the shop to see how much time is left.

PreForm Projects brings an entire job into a single file. Group builds across printers, technologies, and materials under one overarching project, then prepare, save, print, and share the whole thing as a unit.

Tasks come up. Meetings happen. The Form Mobile app is a seamless way to stay connected to your printers when you're not standing in front of them — whether you want a print ready and waiting when you arrive, or just a status update from across the building.

From the Form Mobile app, you can now:  

• Monitor print status in real time
• View your printer's queue and print history
• Start queued or previously completed print jobs
• Watch a live camera feed of a job in progress
• View and share saved timelapse videos
• Receive push notifications as prints progress
• Add printers to your Formlabs account

Adding a printer to your account takes one step: scan the QR code on the device. Once it's set up, print updates come to you through push notifications, so checking on a job no longer means walking over to the printer to see how much time is left.

The Form Mobile app currently supports Form Studio 1, Form 4, Form 4B, Form 4L, and Form 4BL SLA 3D printers, with support for Fuse Series SLS printers coming soon. It's available today for iOS and Android through the App Store and Google Play.

Every project is made of parts, and rarely just a few. Some assemblies can consist of dozens or even hundreds of printed parts across multiple different materials, each one chosen for what that part has to do.

Preparing a job at that scale has meant working out of folders of model files and a long list of separate builds, held together by increasingly elaborate naming conventions. For high-volume users, the variables stack up fast — technology, material, iteration, request source — and that leads to user error and lost time sifting through hundreds of files named some version of Final_Final_Real_v2.

PreForm Projects streamlines the organization of your files and builds by letting you group builds under an overarching project. For multi-material assemblies, rapid iteration, or recurring jobs with different parameters for different clients, Projects makes categorization easier, so you spend less time hunting for the right build or a single part inside your saved files.

With Projects, you can have several builds open at once and switch between them freely. Each build comes with its own scene for importing, preparing, and printing parts, so a project spanning multiple build volumes stays in one place instead of several files.

Adding a build takes a single click. Moving parts between builds takes a click or a drag — if a print is looking too full, select the parts you want to move, then use the quick action menu to send them to a newly created build. New builds keep your existing print settings, including printer type and material, and you can change those for any build with the gear icon.

That means a single project can send one component to a Form Studio 1 in Flex 80A Resin and another one to a Fuse 1+ in Nylon 12 Powder, without ever leaving the same PreForm session.

A common use for PreForm Projects — which has been extensively tested by internal Formlabs users and PreForm Insiders — is assemblies that require both stereolithography (SLA) and selective laser sintering (SLS) parts. Under one project, you can group build files from different printers, technologies, materials, or iterations.

If you want to test a theory that a part might function best in Nylon 12 Powder, Nylon 12 Tough Powder, Tough 1500 Resin, or Tough 2000 Resin, you can put all four under a single "Tough Testing Project" and run the group of builds again and again without digging through a long list.

For service bureaus and print shops, you can group builds by customer, even across different printers and materials, and pull up a customer's full print history in PreForm instead of selecting tens or hundreds of separate files.

A new realistic rendering mode gives you a photorealistic view of your soon-to-be-printed parts. Layer lines, touch tips, and other surface details are all visible, so you can adjust orientation and supports to get the result you want before committing to a print.

Toggling support visibility shows you which surfaces will need post-processing, which is especially useful on parts with cosmetic or sealing surfaces.

Formlabs is committed to building tools that make your workflow easier, and we take feedback seriously — our products evolve to match the way you actually work. Form Mobile was developed to bring control of your printers to wherever you are. Projects and other PreForm features are tested first by users in our PreForm Insider Program, a public open beta that installs alongside your current version of PreForm. Hundreds of people are already giving feedback directly to the team building what's next.

Ready to start? Download Form Mobile and PreForm 3.61, or sign up for the Insider Program.