3D printing is moving faster than ever at Shapeways as we streamline our production methods to deal with the increasing volume of items we are manufacturing for the Shapeways community.
We have managed to pull back the lead time on Frosted Ultra Detail (or as we may have to call it from now on Fast Ultra Detail) from 15 working days to 10 working days so you can get your miniature dinosaur, train, figurine, Siri faster than ever before.
You may have already noticed your 3D prints coming to you faster than before as we fire up the time machine, optimize our 3D printers and press go.
Will there be any way to reduce the lines or texture created by the machine creating these in the future? Im really interested in using the “Ultra Fast – Ultra Detail” but im concerned about the smoothness. Would you recommend sanding these if you want a nice smooth finish before paint?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/57124849@N07/
as you can see in the link above, moest models are printed in FUD.
You can get rid of those lines very easily with a fine sanding paper!
@Ryan – the only way to eliminate the texture from the face of a model is to orient the piece for printing so no support material is required to be in contact with that surface of the model. See this thread:
http://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=8071&start=0&
That’s great news!
A question:
Why are there weird lines creating a texture on one side of the tardis up there? One side looks great, but the other looks pretty bad.
@ Lincoln – the right face of the tardis was in contact with support material (it was probably the ‘bottom’ face of the print) when it was printed. The machine was going out of calibration and needed servicing, too; the diagonal lines forming when FUD contacts support material get really heavy at that point in time.
I would prefer “Precise Ultra Detail” than “Fast UD”. My model was printed in FUD and delivered in 6 days (!) but result was practically unusable. With smaller scales it is very difficult to remove this pattern. I.e. on this police booth letters on the right side are ruined. In many cases sanding will remove most of details…
No kidding about the texture! No matter how I orient my models, the operator always finds new and unique ways to change the orientation and ruin my models. We REALLY need OFUD. *Oriented* Frosted Ultra Detail.
@GWMT & @Mitchell. if you can successfully sand the texture out of the ‘POLICE’ label on the side of the tardis, then I have a job for you!
Tip of the day: if you know that you need to sand off a part of the model, try to extrude the Police label some more.
The label is extruded some better now, so if you sand the model you will not sand it away, and when your finished, you will see that the label is still visible 😉
That’s how i do it 😉
Oeps, this is my post 😉
wow what a disappointment, even back in December they said they were working on a ‘secret’ fix for this, obviously that hasn’t happend, why even spend your money on a highly detailed material if a good amount of it is messed up like that. also sanding may work for certain models but for others its not.
Hey all,
The image shown is an older print, apologies if I have misrepresented the current quality level.
If anyone does have issues with a print, detail, lines, warping, anything.
Please contact customer service ASAP at service(at)shapeways.com and they will sort out any problems you might have with quality.
Also Duann (& others) the Police Box in the image is about 3x actual size, so the ‘graining’ is significantly magnified – good to hear that quality has improved though 🙂
Paul
@spaceboy – I think Paul had that printed last summer when FUD was still in its experimental phase. The quality of my last FUD print in December was absofeakinglutely perfect (go to the last pic):
http://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=7124&start=0&
I don’t do sanding, either (especially around rivets;-)