Adding 3D Printers to Inventor

Issue:

You want to add additional 3D printers to the list of available printers that ship with Inventor, but you don’t see a way to do so.

Solution:
At this point in time there is not an “easy” way to add printers. To assist with this, review the instructions below for a method to manually add printers to the 3D print environment.

Note: You will need to edit the “3DPrinterDescriptions.xml” file in order to add your own printers. The tricky part about this is that the file doesn’t exist until you change your preferred printer in the 3D Print environment as shown below:

3D Printers

Select a printer from the list, doesn’t matter which one, and tick all the check boxes. This causes Inventor to generate the XML you need. Close Inventor once you complete this step.

3D Printers 2

Once that is done you can follow the steps below:

1. You can find the XML file in the following location (just change the year to match your version of Inventor)- %appdata%\Autodesk  \Inventor 20XX\3DPrinterDescriptions.xml

3D Printers 3

 2. In the last line of the XML file, copy the entire line (example below); for the GUID use this link [http://www.guidgen.com/]:

3D Printers 4

3. After making and saving the edits to this file, restart Inventor and your new printer should now be in the list.

About the Author

Heath White

Sr. Technical Support Specialist, Manufacturing

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