Metal 3D printing offers significant advantages over conventional forming processes, including reduced material waste, increased design freedom, and the possibility of manufacturing highly complex geometries without mechanical assembly. Nevertheless, components produced by metal 3D printing are susceptible to residual stresses and distortions, and identification of suitable process parameters remains a challenge. Predictive computational frameworks are therefore essential to understand process-structure relationships and to support parameter optimisation. In this work, a computational framework for metal 3D printing based on the Particle Finite Element Method (PFEM) is investigated, with a focus on the Laser beam-Directed Energy Deposition process . PFEM is particularly well suited for this application due to its ability to handle large deformations and rapidly evolving free surfaces of the metal stream through its inherent remeshing. Moreover, the remeshing procedure enables a natural representation of perfect-stick bonding between the deposited melt and the substrate without the need for a dedicated contact formulation. The framework utilises a simplified perfect-stick contact treatment between the substrate and the hot molten metal by mesh manipulation of both domains. Extending the 2D PFEM approach established in [1] to 3D raises additional numerical challenges, such as occurrence of poorly shaped tetrahedral elements, e.g. slivers, arising from highly dynamic and inhomogeneous particle distributions leading to a poor mesh quality. This can negatively affect the accuracy and convergence behaviour of the finite element simulation. To address this, the framework incorporates mesh treatment strategies such as Laplacian smoothing and surface refinement. Furthermore, the flow and solidification behaviour of the molten metal is described by a temperature-dependent viscous material model. The developed framework provides a basis for predicting weld-track geometry and thermal evolution and will serve as a foundation for future residual stress analyses in metal 3D printing. REFERENCES [1] M. Schewe, I. Noll, T. Bartel, and A. Menzel, Towards the simulation of metal deposition with the Particle Finite Element Method and a phase transformation model. (2025), Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering 437:117730. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cma.2025.117730.