The Resin Revolution Inside Glidewell's 3D Printing Transformation
How America's largest dental lab is using resin printing to deliver same-day clear aligners, nightguards, and surgical guides — straight from an in-office printer to the patient's mouth.
For decades, getting a clear aligner meant a dental scan, a lab order, a two-to-three week wait, and multiple office visits. Today, thanks to advances in dental-grade resin 3D printing, a dentist can scan a patient's teeth, design custom aligners in minutes, and hand the patient a finished, FDA-cleared appliance — all in the same appointment.
Who Is Glidewell?
Newport Beach, CA | Founded 1970
America's Largest Dental Lab | ~5,000 Employees
Locations Across 4 Continents
- Founded by Jim Glidewell, CDT in January 1970
- Headquarters: 4141 MacArthur Blvd, Newport Beach, CA
- Largest privately owned dental lab in the world
- 73-person in-house R&D department
- 3D printing program launched internally in 2005
- Processes thousands of 3D printed appliances daily
- Mission: make advanced dentistry accessible and affordable
Established in January 1970 by Jim Glidewell, CDT, the lab specializes in crown and bridge, all-ceramics, removable full and partial dentures, dental implants, full-cast restorations, and appliances that treat snoring and sleep apnea. What began as a small dental laboratory in Southern California has grown into one of the most technologically advanced dental manufacturing operations anywhere on earth.
Glidewell started venturing into 3D printing back in 2005 — long before most industries had taken the technology seriously for production use. That early investment gave Glidewell an enormous head start, and today the company operates a floor of over 400 production-grade resin printers, processing cases at a volume and consistency that traditional dental lab workflows simply cannot match.
Glidewell is America's largest digital dental lab, pioneering industry-first innovations that expand what's possible in restorative dentistry. Its mission is to make advanced dental care more accessible and affordable by combining open digital workflows, AI-powered manufacturing, and vertically integrated operations.
The fastprint.io™ Solution
In May 2023, Glidewell announced a landmark partnership with LuxCreo — a San Francisco-based dental 3D printing company — to launch the fastprint.io™ 3D Printing Solution. The result is nothing less than a professional, FDA-cleared, lab-grade resin printing workflow that fits on a dental office countertop.
This co-branded dental 3D printing solution is part of Glidewell's rapidly growing glidewell.io™ In-Office Solution platform and expands Glidewell's portfolio of digital solutions that bring the world's most innovative dental lab chairside.
The system is essentially a miniaturized version of Glidewell's own production setup — the same LuxCreo hardware and AI-backed software used at the Newport Beach facility to produce thousands of appliances every day, now scaled for single-practice use. About the same size as a large microwave, fastprint.io easily fits into any office, allowing doctors to offer more comprehensive treatment options to their patients.
"By adding fastprint.io, we're building toward a future where every dentist can control their own restorative workflow — bringing value to the practice and patients alike."
— Jim Glidewell, Founder & President, GlidewellHow the Workflow Actually Works
The fastprint.io system is engineered around the principle of radical simplicity. Glidewell's design philosophy for the glidewell.io platform is that complex dental technology should require minimal training to operate — and fastprint.io embodies that philosophy at every step.
Step 1 — Scan
The workflow begins with a digital intraoral scan. The fastscan.io™ Scanning Solution collects highly accurate digital impressions while also saving time and money for the practice — saying goodbye to messy, uncomfortable impression material while increasing case acceptance with treatment planning visual aids. The fastprint.io integrates with most popular scanners on the market, including iTero.
Step 2 — Design
The fastprint.io™ 3D Printing Solution uses the same AI-backed software used at Glidewell — simplified for chairside use. Simply confirm your designs for nightguards or models in a single click, then send them to print. For clear aligners specifically, the AI software auto-generates treatment staging and designs each aligner tray step in the sequence without manual intervention.
Step 3 — Print
LuxCreo's LuxDental software continues the hands-off automated design process by staging and slicing, and LuxCreo Digital Polishing™ resin technology ensures the devices come out crystal-clear. The resin printer uses LEAP (Light Enabled Additive Production) technology — a high-resolution MSLA process producing layers at 3840 x 2400 ppi resolution across a build volume of 6 x 3.4 x 7.9 inches.
Step 4 — Wash, Cure, & Deliver
Printed parts move through a dedicated wash station and cure station included in the bundle. For most appliances, the LuxCreo Digital Polishing™ resin technology eliminates the manual polishing steps that traditional clear appliance fabrication requires — devices emerge crystal-clear and patient-ready with minimal handling.
The Science of Digital Polishing™
The single most transformative technology inside the fastprint.io system isn't the printer itself — it's LuxCreo Digital Polishing™. This is a proprietary resin formulation and print process that produces optically clear, smooth surfaces directly from the printer without the manual polishing steps that traditional dental clear appliance workflows require.
Conventional resin-printed clear appliances emerge with a matte, slightly opaque surface caused by the light-scattering microstructure of standard dental resins. Achieving clarity traditionally requires multiple rounds of wet polishing, buffing compounds, and finishing — a labor-intensive process that added 20 to 40 minutes per appliance and demanded skilled technician time.
With fastprint.io, doctors can now make clear, transparent appliances direct from the printer with no manual polishing required — through the first FDA Class II 510(k) cleared direct-print clear aligner workflow.
The net result: LuxCreo Digital Polishing™ eliminates 85% of post-processing labor. For a busy dental practice printing multiple sets of aligners daily, that efficiency gain translates directly into higher output, lower overhead, and faster patient turnaround.
Clear aligner therapy succeeds partly because patients wear the aligners consistently — and compliance is dramatically higher when the devices are aesthetically invisible. Cloudy, milky, or yellowed resin aligners undermine patient confidence and compliance. LuxCreo's DCA resin achieves optical clarity comparable to thermoformed PET-G film — the traditional material of choice — while enabling direct print geometry that thermoforming physically cannot produce.
The Resin Family
The fastprint.io system supports a suite of Glidewell-developed and LuxCreo-compatible resins, each engineered for a specific dental application. Understanding which resin goes where is key to appreciating the breadth of what the platform can produce.
DCA offers a world-first direct print solution for aligners and retainers, eliminating the need for manual polishing while providing exceptional clarity and precision. The gold standard for in-office aligner printing.
DNG delivers an industry-leading combination of toughness, transparency, and fast printing. High-accuracy, abrasion resistance, and high-performance mechanical properties make splint and nightguard appliances easy to fit and durable.
For orthodontic, restorative, and implant models, DMR III offers fast, high-resolution 3D printing with toughness, further enhanced by its vertical printing ability for exceptional throughput. Low volumetric shrinkage and high flexural strength means a more accurate finish with a precise fit.
Surgical guide material for implant procedures. DSG provides transparency, durability and biocompatibility, and accurate placement. Enables guided implant surgery directly from the chairside print workflow.
Clear Aligners: Traditional vs. Printed
To understand the significance of Glidewell's resin printing approach, it helps to understand what the traditional clear aligner manufacturing process looks like — and why it has been ripe for disruption.
| Step | Traditional Aligner Workflow | Glidewell fastprint.io |
|---|---|---|
| Impression / Scan | Physical impression or digital scan sent to lab | Digital scan taken chairside — stays in practice |
| Model Production | Lab prints resin model of arch | DMR III model printed in-office if needed |
| Aligner Fabrication | Thermoforming clear film over model — trim, polish | DCA resin prints aligner directly — no thermoforming |
| Polishing | Manual polishing required — 20–40 min per appliance | 85% less labor — exits printer clear |
| Turnaround | 2–4 weeks for lab-produced aligners | Same-day — as little as 2 hours |
| FDA Status | Established — thermoformed PET-G long approved | FDA Class II 510(k) cleared for DCA direct-print aligners |
| Patient Visits Required | Minimum 2 (scan + delivery); often 3+ | Potential single-visit scan-to-delivery |
| Practice Control | Dependent on lab schedule and shipping | Full control within practice — no external dependency |
The glidewell.io Ecosystem
The fastprint.io doesn't stand alone — it's one component in Glidewell's broader glidewell.io In-Office Solution ecosystem, designed to bring the full workflow of a professional dental lab into a single practice. Each component integrates seamlessly, and bundle pricing is available:
Intraoral scanning for highly accurate digital impressions. The digital intake point of the entire workflow — no physical impressions required.
AI-optimized restoration design software. Auto-generates individualized crown designs ready for milling in under five minutes.
Resin printing for clear aligners, nightguards, models, and surgical guides. Starting at $16,990 with wash and cure stations included.
Chairside milling of BruxZir NOW zirconia and other restorative materials. Enables same-visit crowns and full restorative completions.
Together, these four systems deliver on Glidewell's vision of the fully digital dental office — scan, design, print or mill, deliver, all within a single patient visit and without sending any case to a traditional dental lab.
Technical Specifications
For those integrating this system into a practice or looking at the hardware specifications behind the resin printing process:
Resin Printing & Dentistry at Large
Glidewell's fastprint.io is the most prominent example of a broader transformation occurring across the dental industry. The properties that make resin printing so powerful in dentistry — micron-level resolution, smooth optically clear surfaces, biocompatible formulations, and the ability to produce complex organic geometry — align precisely with what dental appliances demand.
Where FDM printing excels at large structural objects with visible layer lines, resin printing produces the kind of smooth, detail-perfect surfaces that oral appliances require for patient comfort, fit accuracy, and aesthetic clarity. A nightguard printed in FDM would have visible ridges that create discomfort and potential bacterial retention. A resin-printed nightguard using DNG can achieve a surface finish and dimensional accuracy approaching CNC-machined quality.
The dental industry has collectively recognized this — and Glidewell, with its 20-year head start in dental 3D printing, is better positioned than almost any organization on earth to define what best practice looks like as the technology matures.
"Our priority is to provide clinicians with streamlined workflows that are easy to use and cost-effective. In LuxCreo, we found a partner whose mission of improving dental additive manufacturing through digital innovations aligns with ours."
— Stephenie Goddard, CEO, GlidewellWhat This Means for You
The technology Glidewell has deployed at industrial scale — high-resolution MSLA resin printing, biocompatible dental resins, AI-backed design workflows — is the same fundamental technology underlying professional resin printing more broadly. At Dreaming3D in San Diego, we use the Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra, one of the highest-resolution consumer MSLA resin printers available, running similar UV-cured photopolymer resin chemistry to produce parts with exceptional surface detail and smooth geometry.
While dental-grade biocompatible resins are a specialized category requiring FDA clearance for intraoral use, the underlying resin printing physics are the same. The precision, clarity, and surface finish capabilities that Glidewell has industrialized for dental appliances are accessible in the broader resin printing world for product prototyping, custom parts, jewelry, figurines, props, and anything else requiring the finest surface quality available in additive manufacturing.
Glidewell's success is a compelling case study in what resin printing can do when combined with proper material science, AI-assisted design, and a commitment to engineering print workflows around the specific demands of an application — rather than treating a generic printer as a universal solution.
Frequently Asked
Printing, San Diego
The same resin printing precision driving dental innovation is available for your custom projects — right here in San Diego.