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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Bryan did an awesome job in making a tutorial that shows you exactly how to do this using the ColladaMaya plug-in by Feeling software. The tutorial has lots of screenshots and also shows you how to clean up your model using Maya, how to check for inverted normals and how to hollow your model out. I think it will be a great resource to help more Maya modelers get into 3D printing. We're very happy with another community made tutorial and would like to thank Bryan very much for it!

A decidedly unfriendly object is James McAdam's Safe Bedside Table, a small table that doubles as a club and shield to defend yourself. 

Some people say that 3D printing is like 'growing' objects. I would dispute this, Tokujin Yushioka, he grows things. He grew a chair consisting of crystals. The production process seems to be a bit slow for Shapeways but we should consider it.  

The confluence between animation and street art is bound to be something that I enjoy. This is a video showing you a wall painted animation. As in an animation made up of graffiti. It is like one of those 'flip books' that people used to have, only the city is your flip book.

Nike has 3D printed an individual prosthetic for an athlete. I do love the idea of a large company using its resources to do something nice. And cool, highly functional prosthetic legs and arms would be good for atletes who need them. But there is something quite scary about Nike making replacements for body parts.

There are already lots of people that have Nike Swoosh tattoo's: this gentleman has one on his wrist, this guy has one on his chest, this giant Swoosh across someone's back is rather too much though.

There seem to be rather a lot more people though who have the Apple logo etched into their skin. I'm not sure what makes people tattoo a corporate logo on themselves. Where will it all end? Oh..I nearly forgot, this is where it will end.