Stratasys has released GrabCAD Print version 1.117.10.3570, a monthly update dated August 18, 2026, according to the company's own release notes. The headline addition is native support for a second material option on the H350 line, alongside a handful of workflow and viewer changes that are smaller individually but collectively point at where Stratasys is spending its software effort this cycle: cost control and deployment flexibility rather than flashy new features.
GrabCAD Print is Stratasys' print-preparation software across its FDM and powder-bed platforms, and the H350 is the company's SAF system aimed at production-volume nylon parts. Software updates to it tend to be incremental — new slicing parameters, minor UI cleanup — but this release is a bit more substantive than most, mainly because of what it does to material economics on the machine.
SAF PA12 – Powered by Evonik, Officially in the Software
The centerpiece of 1.117 is formal GrabCAD Print support for SAF PA12, Powered by Evonik on H350 printers running firmware 1.14.0 or newer. Per Stratasys' own release notes, the material "delivers strong, resilient, and dimensionally accurate parts at faster print speeds and a lower overall per-part cost" than standard SAF PA12. Stratasys does not publish specific percentage figures for that cost or speed improvement in the release notes — the claim is directional rather than quantified, so shops should treat "lower cost" as a qualitative signal until they see it reflected in their own material pricing.
Evonik is a familiar name to anyone who has priced polyamide powder for industrial 3D printing; the company is a longstanding PA12 powder producer supplying the powder-bed fusion market broadly, not just Stratasys' ecosystem. Baking an Evonik-sourced PA12 grade directly into GrabCAD Print's material library means H350 owners get calibrated process parameters — the packing density, laser/fusing energy profiles, and post-processing guidance that make a "supported" material meaningfully different from a generic third-party powder a shop has to characterize itself.
Independent reseller GoEngineer's H350 product page, reviewed separately from the Stratasys release notes, corroborates the material's intended use case: it describes SAF PA12 Powered by Evonik as a cost-efficient, high-accuracy material with balanced mechanical performance, recommended for industrial brackets and mounts, connectors and assemblies, automotive interior parts, and manufacturing aids and fixtures. That's a fairly broad swath of the parts SAF buyers actually run in production — not a niche or specialty grade, but a general-purpose material meant to undercut the incumbent PA12 SKU on cost while staying inside the tolerance and durability envelope those applications need.
The Rest of the Release: Viewer and Licensing
Beyond the material support, 1.117 adds a transparent model display mode to the viewer toolbar, available to all users. It's a straightforward addition — toggle it on and the shaded solid view of a part becomes see-through — but it's the kind of feature that matters more in SAF workflows than in desktop FDM, where users are already accustomed to seeing supports through a translucent shell. On a powder-bed part, transparency is useful for checking internal geometry, voids, lattices, and whether hollowed or infilled sections line up the way they were designed, without having to section the model or export to a separate CAD viewer.
Stratasys also added improved layer-line visualization specific to the H350, listed under the GrabCAD Print Pro tier of the release notes, giving users a clearer read on how a build will stack before it's committed to the machine — useful for catching orientation or slicing issues that only show up layer by layer rather than in an overall bounding-box preview.
The other change in 1.117 is aimed less at individual print jobs and more at how organizations run GrabCAD Print at scale: offline licensing support is now built in, letting the software license air-gapped installations without needing to connect to the internet to renew. That's a requirement for defense contractors, aerospace suppliers, and other customers who can't or won't put a production print farm on a network with outbound internet access. It's a narrower release than some recent GrabCAD Print updates — the 1.117 notes do not include any CAD-interoperability changes (direct-import version bumps for packages like NX, Creo, CATIA, or Inventor showed up in an earlier release, not this one), so the CAD-to-print pipeline is unchanged this cycle.
What It Means for Makers
This release isn't aimed at desktop hobbyists — the H350 and GrabCAD Print Pro live squarely in the industrial and prosumer production tier, well above the price and scale of a typical maker's workshop. But it's a useful signal for anyone tracking where powder-bed nylon printing is headed on cost. A software-enabled reduction in per-part cost on a mainstream production material, delivered through a firmware-and-software pairing rather than a hardware change, is the kind of lever manufacturers actually pull when deciding whether SAF competes with injection molding or MJF on a given job. If Stratasys' cost claims hold up in the field, shops running H350s get a cost lever with no capital outlay — just a firmware update to 1.14.0+ and the new GrabCAD Print release.
For software-adjacent readers, the pattern is also worth noting: Stratasys continues to tie qualified materials to specific firmware minimums (1.14.0+ here), reinforcing that GrabCAD Print's material library functions as much as a controlled, revenue-relevant catalog as it does a slicer feature. Shops evaluating an H350 purchase or a materials switch should confirm their firmware version before assuming the new PA12 grade is available to them, and should ask Stratasys or their reseller for actual cost-per-part figures rather than relying on the general "lower cost" language in the release notes.
