Why spend hours in painstaking, meticulous labor when you can simply 3D print a ship in a bottle? using Objet Connex 3D printer's ability to print two separate material types in one pass makes it possible to print an opaque object within a clear object...

What would YOU do if you could 3D print in a clear material such as this? 

The Eggbot designed by mygadgetlife and 3D printed in ceramics by Shapeways solves the problem, kinda.  Let the robot bring you breakfast and forget the chicken, until dinner time.

To celebrate the launch of the Shapeways Gift Guide and the impending Black Friday avalanche of traffic to your Shapeways shops this weeks Tag Tuesday is gift. Tag your designs with gift to help people find your designs that are suitable for giving this holiday gifting season.  Over the course of the day we will take a look back at the tag gift and will try and include more in preparation for Black Friday.  We will be doing some promotions over Black Friday so ensure your shop is ready with tags, descriptions and images, yes images!!!!.

Following are a few products in the Shapeways shops tagged with gift, what are yours tagged with?

We have seen our 3D printed ceramics used for quite a few applications that take advantage of the heat resistance and food safe properties, but this is the first smoking hot design to use those same properties for smoking tobacco.  Pookas has also designed the Skull Tobacco Pipe with a Bronze Stainless Steel mouthpiece, a clever use of combined 3D printed materials. 

This is a fully working tobacco pipe. The head is made 3D printed in glazed ceramics, the mouthpiece is 3D printed in antique bronze glossy.

A pipe is definitely a matchmaker. It makes you look distinguished and sexy. Like a successful scientist, a confident playboy or an experienced sailor.

Yeah, tabacco is bad for your health, so use bubbles instead! Works even better cause it gives you a great lemon flavor, but this depends on the dish soap you use. The ladies will appreciate it!

Pookas as bubble blowing playboy. 

Eric Haines with a quick introduction to Mineways video to make it easy to 3D Print parts of your Minecraft world with Shapeways. Check out more 3D printed Minecraft action at Minecon 2012.

Friday is here and this week we are going to take a look at some of the hottest designs in the Shapeways gift guides.

The MegaBlingBling as chosen by Marisa Tom of FabSugar.com

Headphones Cufflinks - Bassline as chosen by Ben Parr of cnet

Bone Dog Tag as selected by Jaime Derringer of Design Milk

Black Friday is usually the day of shopping nightmares/bargains in the USA, with congested shops full of shoppers sweating anxiety as they jostle to pick up gifts in time for the holiday season.

Why line up under harsh fluorescent lighting for a mass produced item (manufactured in an assembly line mirroring your shopping experience) when you can find or design unique gifts 3D printed on demand from the comfort of your own home? (Or computer/laptop/iPhone/iPad/Android/commodore 64/wherever!)

We have made selecting the perfect gift a little easier with our curated gift guides, but we will be sharing a little more 3D printed love leading up to the holidays that may make buying the perfect gift a little le$$ stressful. Time is limited though, so check out the last days to order, especially if you are designing something new that has not been printed before.

Stay tuned, keep an eye on the Shapeways Blog and the Shapeways social media stream of your choice for updates as we enter the gifting season...

MeshUp: Mashup for Meshes has only 55 hours left (at the time of writing) to raise an additional $4,000 for there Kickstarter project to be fully funded. MeshUp by Uformia is a stand alone product can be used to:

1) Mix meshes:

Create new objects by remixing any number of meshes and parts of meshes, or combining meshes with native MeshUp or Symvol models, without having to worry about vertices and polygons

2) Make one or two-side shells and combine it with microstructures

Make a one or two-sided shell volume, then combine it with microstructures to create lightweight yet structural object for 3D printing.  This shelling feature also means that you can convert ANY mesh into a volume - even meshes that do not represent any kind of solid object (a.k.a. polygon soup).

3) Fix STL and mesh files

Repair holes and other defects with your meshes either to prep your model for 3D printing, or to make it easier to convert the mesh into a volume object. Choose between a typical flat repair or the new rounded repair from Uformia, that acts more like smooth putty or clay when fixing a model.

4) Create slices to go directly to 3D printing

Output watertight STL files, or even better take advantage of direct manufacturing by using vector or image slice data at the resolution of the 3D printer. 

For $100 worth of love on Kickstarter you can get yourself a license for MeshUp and one year worth of upgrades. (only 12 left so hurry) or for $5000 you can use their modeling kernel to develop your own app (to plug into the Shapeways API and make customizable, mashable, 3D printable awesomeness.

There are some similarities between MeshUp and Mesh Mixer with the organic joining of multiple STLs.

Best of luck to the Uformia team. 

We see many architects 3D printing their models using Shapeways 3D printing service but most of them remain behind the scenes and never make it onto the Shapeways site or blog so it is always cool to see architectural 3D prints in the Shapeways marketplace to share what architects are doing.

One of the coolest architectural models we have 3D printed at Shapeways lately is the 1 WTC by Stefdos which is a 3D model of One World Trade Center (Freedom Tower) that glows when lit from within with an LED.

This amazing model that is 3D printed in full color at 25cm high is only $25 on Shapeways, that's $1 per cm... bargain. Check out the video below....

Also check out New Orleans tower Rotterdam 15cm by the ame designer that also glows when lit from within. 

People often describe the FDM (fused deposition modeling) process used by most desktop 3D printers as 'like a hot glue gun extruding plastic'. Well, check out this video of a DIY hot glue gun 3D printer. 

We are starting to see the new, smooth colors make there way out of our 3D Printers and into the hands of people around the world.  The new colors are looking amazing and feel fantastic.  Take a look at the Sweater Case, the winner of our iPhone 5 design contest.

Have your new colored 3D prints arrived yet? We would love to see them in the wild.

Shapeways now has hundreds of thousands of 3D models just waiting to be 3D printed.  Sometimes it can be a little hard to find exactly what you are looking for (unless you design it for yourself).  Giving your design a descriptive title will help people find your product in both Shapeways and Google search, adding your model to a category is essential to them appearing in the galleries and adding tags makes it easier for people to discover products around a very specific theme.

To help make it worth your while to head in and tag your products, we are going to feature a new tag every Tuesday, and so, Tag Tuesday is born. This week we are featuring products tagged meme.

Take a look at our Shop Owner tips on getting found in search and tag your designs with relevant terms.

Let us know what tags you think we should feature next week?

Joshua Harker has just launched Anatomica di Revolutis on Kickstarter, following up on his massively successful Crania Anatomica Filigre: Me to You project that used Shapeways 3D printing to realize his art.

My latest work entitled "Anatomica di Revolutis" is in honor of the developing 3rd Industrial Revolution. My art has been inspired, enabled, & defined by it. The resources & networks of the revolution are my tools, medium, & art gallery. I'm here to present my art within the context of how & why I make it, not on a shelf or wall in a gallery, but within the current landscape of the public psyche & part of a larger event.

ANATOMICA DI REVOLUTIS: Representing the project is a 3-piece sculpture entitled "Anatomica di Revolutis" (loosely intended to mean "Anatomy of the Revolution"). Each component is designed to assemble together to present a larger narrative about the developing 3rd Industrial Revolution. The fully assembled sculpture features all 3 pieces & symbolizes liberty & prosperity through an empowered participatory populace. It is designed to hang on a wall or other vertical surface.

 Good luck to Joshua on his latest Kickstarter project.... Join the revolution.