What is Additive Manufacturing?

Additive manufacturing (AM) is the entire process of manufacturing materials using 3D-printing technology, from the conceptual design to the finished products - something which entails much more than just the 3D-printing step.

This is illustrated in images below, which both show the entire process of AM, and different 3D-printing technologies available for different groups of materials. The images are taken from the formnext AM field guide compact 2020, by Steffen Ritter from university of Reutlingen, Germany, and re-produced under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.