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.

We all know that is possible to design and make the otherwise impossible with 3D printing: to 3D print incredibly detailed items that are light as air, with thin wiry structures, multiple internal cavities and complex, interlocking moving parts with minimal clearance.  Although it may be possible to 3D print such items, they do not always survive once they are removed from the 3D printer, cleaned, packed, and shipped around the world.

Recently Shapeways community member Dotsan designed an amazing Stag Wire 570mm that used the full size of our largest Nylon (WSF) 3D printer. We did manage to print two of these for Dotsan, but the model was so fine, with 1mm wires for such a large object it failed during printing and broke during post processing, so it took us multiple prints to get it to survive. We then packed it very, very carefully and shipped it to Dotsan with our fingers crossed, hoping that it was not damaged in transport.  

Fortunately, the 3D prints were delivered to Dotsan intact, as he shared in his very impressive unboxing video. Unfortunately, the risks involved in printing, post processing, packaging, and shipping the item are too great and we have asked Dotsan to take the design down from sale on Shapeways to ensure his customers don't have a negative experience.  This is not something we wanted to do, we struggled and debated internally about the ramifications of this, but in the end we were forced to take this action for a number of reasons, the two main issues are:

• The cost of such a large, wiry model with very little mass does not match the actual cost of 3D printing, especially as the model is prone to failure at any point along the supply chain so we would have to reprint multiple times. 
• When a model of this size fails and we need to reprint, it will consume capacity and delay all other models in the queue, especially large ones.

We need to look at how we address the pricing structure to account for large wiry models such as this in the future. We could look at them on a case by case basis, which could slow down the production of large models, lead to rejections after acceptance if they are too fragile and add a degree of unpredictability. Or we could address the pricing structure at Shapeways to better reflect the actual the cost of 3D printing.

At the moment, we only charge for the amount of material used and not the overall size (bounding box) of an object that we 3D print.  The size of an object DOES influence the actual cost of printing.  If we were to bring the bounding box into the pricing equation, it would make some thin, wiry 3D prints more expensive, but it would reduce the cost of many 3D prints that are thicker, with greater density.  Thin wiry models are more prone to print failure, damage during cleaning, post processing and shipping so there is additional cost (and delays) when we need to reprint a model.

We already offer a volume and density discount on Nylon (Strong & Flexible) materials. For models that have greater than 10% density (material volume divided by bounding box volume), after the first 20 cm3, the remaining volume is calculated with a 50% discount. 

Perhaps we need to incorporate the bounding box into the pricing equation on all models to better match the actual cost of 3D printing and incentivize designs that are less fragile and more reliable?

We would love to know your thoughts about bounding box being added to the pricing structure and how it would it change the way you design.