Being able to characterize the process signatures of powder bed based additive manufacturing process is key to improving the product quality. This paper demonstrates the implementation of a digital fringe projection technique to measure surface topography of the powder bed layers during the fabrication. We focus on developing the metrology tool and observing the types of information that can be extracted from such topographical data. The performance of the system is demonstrated with selected in situ measurements. Experimental results show this system is capable of measuring powder bed signatures including the powder layer flatness, surface texture, the average height drop of the fused regions, characteristic length scales on the surface, and splatter drop location and dimension.