We love the new Premium Silver at Shapeways and of course our White Strong Flexible Nylon is a favorite for 3D printing everything from an Interlocking Tie to Micro Quadcopter Frames while our Stainless Steel has been used for items from Jewelry to G-Shock Watch housings but we want to know what is your favorite 3D printing material and why?
The Ora Pendant in Standard, Glossy and Premium Silver
I really love the polished alumide. It has a great look and feel, and holds up to a beating pretty well. I like it for test prints especially, though it can be trickier to get a print to work for that than the metals. Looking forward to seeing that black version…
Polished Alumide is great if you design it thick enough. It has a beautiful feel and a nice medium weight to it.
If you design it too thin it can be fragile though.
Thanks Gabriel.
I use Frosted Ultra Detail for molding masters for my miniature figures. I like it for it’s fine detail resolution. If only surface quality were more consistent. Sometimes it’s overly rough with little ‘stalactites’ that take a great deal of time to clean up.
WSF is what I order most – it’s durable and has a good balance between cost and resolution – but silver is my favorite because its sooo detailed and touchable!
Full color sandstone. If you have good idea, and model, this furry feeling of material fits perfect to some surfaces fike fur is.
Stainless Steel is the material I order the most. Really strong with nice details. Also available with differents coatings. It would great to have a “premium” polishing option as for Silver ..
White, Strong and Flexible would be my choice. I have gotten into making 3D printed costume accessories, specifically right now horns and head-worn fashions. The stuff out there at the moment is so heavy, out of paper mache or cast resin, it gives me the worst headaches to wear. I turned to the wsf material because it can be very thin, yet still very strong and very lightweight. I can produce hundreds of different designs rather cheaply and people with no craft inclinations can just paint them and go.
White Strong Flexible has obvious advantages in terms of cost and durablity for more utilitiarian objects. I would love to see solution died options (as opposed to post fabrication died). Other high strengh plastics (like Acetal) or even aluminum prints would also be cool.
Frosted Ultra detail! because of the level of detail and thin walls, i print a lot of parts for model trains so I use this material a lot.