Bart and I had some fun painting some of our models with arcylic paint. You can use arcylics to paint White, Strong & Flexible and we wanted to show you guys that. For the both of us the last painting training & practice we ever did before making this video was in kindergarten. But, we can not wait to see what you guys will do with paint & Shapeways

The material White, Strong & Flexible is made by SLS(Selective Laser Sintering)on an EOS Formiga P 100. The official name of the material itself is Fine Polyamide PA 2200. If you are familiar with SLS parts and think that they are brittle, weak and don't look good then you probably have seen other materials made on other machines. I know I'm tooting our own horn since we have an EOS Formiga but this stuff looks amazing compared to all the other types of SLS out there. If anyone is on the market for an SLS machine, you simply have to pick EOS. And once you've seen Bryan's videos I think you can see why we named the material White, Strong & Flexible.    

After the design week was over I bought it. It is cuddly, soft and you can lie on it and I just think its a lot of fun. I do admit that it was a bit of an impulse buy and that it is not a very standard furntiture item.The net result is that I now have a unique design item and that my mom and girlfriend think I'm nuts.

Apart from the whacky and loveable appearance of the thing I really enjoy the concept of it. It is an indoor version of a common inflatable pool toy. Another piece by Geboren im Wald is "the island"(pictured below) which you might recognize as resembling quite closely the largest of these toys. So the deisgner took something standard and cheap that is for the outdoor use by playing children and turned it into something made for living rooms and grownups. Although some feel, incorrectly, that this purchase disqualifies me from belonging to this category.   

You can see the working gears and the spring clearly. These mechanisms as well as the axles work as soon as the support material is removed. The mechanism is intentionally exposed so that people can see what you can design and build with 3D printing. The entire car comes out of the machine in one piece. The only exception is the rubber for the wheels which is made up of standard O rings. 

When you pull the car back over the ground the wheels wind the gears that in turn wind the spring and once you let go the car zooms over the floor. You like?  

Look at the lamp to the left made by Geboren im Wald(born in the woods in German) it looks cute right something that you put on your bedside table perhaps. It was milled out of one solid piece of wood by a man using a water powered mill that is hundreds of years old. The man who milled it usually makes centerpieces for wooden spiral staircases. The lamp was finished by a high gloss paint that is very much in contrast to the wood it was made of. So far so good right.

Now look at the designer standing next to his lamp.

Niels Schuurmans, who is a really nice guy by the way, displayed his Balloon Furniture at his own stand at Dutch Design Week. It is the most fun furniture that I've seen in a while. It looks great and he is working on turning these demo models into an actual product. As soon as he has, I'm buying one. When is the last time you've seen a chair that can be described as hilarious? 

Their Oillight is quite the statement. The lamp explores the scarcity of natural resources, fluctuating oil prices and consumer demand. There are several different oillights each made on a different day. Because of the differences in oil prices also affect prices for oil derivatives such as the plastics that are used for 3D printing the lamp becomes bigger or smaller on each different day depending on how high the oil price is on the day when it is ordered. 

Each little barrel represents $1 and so the entire lamp which is a cluster of them accurately represents the price of oil on that day. A series of oillights then make up the Oillight work which shows you the fluctuation in oil prices over a given period.

Our Fruit Confession is now live! This is our second Creator Shape and it allows you to personalize a completely unique bowl. You can determine its height, shape, profile, size, contour and add a message to it. If you play around with the Fruit Confession you will see just how much variation and customization is possible with it. The end result should make an interesting center piece for a table or living room that is exactly as you would like it.

We think that this is a big step forward in mass customization and, once again, can't wait to see what kind of creations you will design.

One very important note: at the moment there is a bug in the Fruit Confession that causes problems with models created while using a Mac. This will be fixed within several days.

Right in time for Halloween we are introducing a new material: Black Detail. To make this introduction extra special we are giving you a 66.6% discount on this material up and until the 19th of October.

This means that 1 cubic centimetre of this material now, for a short time, costs $ 0.97 cents, including shipping. That is certifiably, insanly low so go order something already! 3D printing has never ever been this cheap!

So we now have a dark material suited for nice art objects, dark characters and perhaps some scary Halloween models.

The material shares the same characteristics as the White Detail and Transparent Detail materials and looks different, from a full black to a light grey to a silver, depending on which light you see it in. This material won our community poll to decide if we would introduce black or blue and we'd like to thank everyone that voted! 

You can compare Black Detail to our other materials here.

Image credit(for the pumpkin foto, I took the others), Janz Images, under Creative Commons Attribution.

Suffice it to say that we are very proud that Michael, or rather Dr. Michael Shaw, is a Shapeways member and one of our best customers to boot. We're also glad he took the time to answer some questions we had for him.

Why do you use Maya?

Maya, despite being horrendously complicated, is quite user friendly because the basic means for changing geometry are easily visible and there is a simple logic to things like the attributes editor and the history capability. However, I wouldn’t like to have to learn it again, that’s not to say I’m anyway near mastering it, but that I have no desire to go right back to the beginning! It is in some ways like Pandora’s box, once you open it all sorts of stuff comes out; for example how animation and particle systems can be used to modulate geometry. So it’s is an incredibly rich tool, but at the end of the day it’s just a tool; a really complicated pencil. What’s key is the geometry you develop with it, and without any kind of real world underlying philosophy it’s likely to be quite vacuous.

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