There’s been a bit of a milestone achieved this past week: 3MF has been declared an official ISO standard.
The new standard, ISO/IEC 25422:2025, is the culmination of an enormous amount of work by many individuals and companies over several years. This new standard definitively marks 3MF format as the proper file format for 3D printing going forward.
3MF Consortium Executive Director Duann Scott told us:
“Achieving ISO recognition for 3MF proves what’s possible when competitors join forces to clean up disparate AM workflows. Instead of every company patching its own fragile hacks to try and make arcane file formats ‘work’, we now share one rigorous, extensible standard, eliminating duplicated effort, lowering adoption barriers, and unlocking scalable growth for the entire industry.”
Reaction from industry was universally positive.
Global Head Product and Strategy at HP Additive Manufacturing Solutions, Arvind Rangarajan, said:
“I am excited to see 3MF becoming an ISO standard. 3MF file format expands the capability to transfer design and production intent in an efficient and secure way to support scaling of additive manufacturing. This should help drive wider adoption of 3MF format across the industry, and HP is happy to be leading the way!”
Materialise CEO, Brigitte de Vet-Veithen, said:
“Adopting and scaling additive manufacturing to create real, impactful solutions in manufacturing means overcoming long-standing hurdles. Seeing 3MF become an official ISO/IEC standard is a proud moment for all of us who work towards that future. At Materialise, we’ve been committed to this journey from the start, and I’m proud of the role our team played in making this milestone possible.”
3MF Technical Director, Alex Oster, said:
“For a decade, we’ve dedicated ourselves to standardizing additive data pipelines with the right craftsmanship. It’s incredible that 3MF is now the standard backend format for everything from millions of desktop FDM printers to multi-million-dollar aerospace equipment. Becoming an ISO standard is another important milestone in our journey to build a professional software ecosystem for Additive Manufacturing.”
The new standard will enable easier use of 3D print technology in organizations that require use of official standards.
3MF emerged to fill a wide gap in the industry. While STL format describes (poorly) the geometry of a 3D model, it does not have the capability of describing much else about a 3D print job, which could include information like materials, print parameters, etc.
Standards are always challenging to implement, and we’ve seen that in most of the 3D print software tools. It took many years for most of them to implement 3MF. Some still use only STL. At this point, most major tools use both STL and 3MF.
Perhaps the announcement of 3MF as an official ISO standard will begin a trend to stop using STL at all. Eventually, we may see tools remove STL export capabilities, allowing more focus on 3MF.
Via 3MF Consortium and ISO
