We have thousands upon thousands of amazing products for sale in the Shapeways shops designed by the Shapeways community.  We are always on the lookout for great products to put on our home page, to share with journalists and take to events to promote the amazing quality and breadth of items designed by you.  For us to promote your designs it is essential that you have high quality photographs that properly capture your designs.

We have posted some tips on the Shapeways blog on the value of a great photograph along with how to photograph your 3D prints and how to make sure your best image is the lead image on your product page and in the Shapeways Galleries. Take a look at the previous posts, take a look at the successful Shapeways Shops, then take a look at your shop and consider how you can improve your presentation.

Father of the RepRap and nearly all things DIY 3D printing has managed to bypass the tyranny of the triangle to 3D print directly from OpenSCAD's CSG representation without using an STL file in the workflow.

What does this mean?

Printing directly from CSG is much more robust than using the flakey (literally) STL file format.  A CSG file can be wrong - we can all make mistakes - but, unlike STL, it always represents an unambiguous solid.
It should also be faster (5%)........  Finally, it should allow us easily to do fancy things like filling solids with scalar and vector fields representing build parameters, so you can have an object that is flexible (and/or green) at one end and rigid (and/or blue) at the other.

Visit the RepRap Wiki for instructions on how to use this process on your RepRap.

Perhaps this will actually pave the way to better communicate multiple materials to Objet 3D printers which currently require multiple STL files to create multiple material parts?  

Thank you Adrian

Shapeways community member Erckgillis has shared some great tips on how to patina 3D printed Silver using Liver of Sulfur, along with some patina processes for other metals.

Patinating Silver

While Liver of Sulfur is usually used to form a black or gray patina on silver, there are a number of intermediate interference colors formed, especially if a weak solution is used. These include yellow, reddish brown, purple and blue. Some people recommend adding a small amount of household ammonia to the solution claiming it intensifies the lovely blue-green-red-purple interference colors one gets when using a dilute solution and slow approach. These pretty colors are not very stable over time because they continue to react with sulfur in the air and darken. You can sometimes 'save' them by spraying a lacquer over them. They may be retained if the surface is properly sealed. Acrylic resin is the recommended sealer for durability and resistance to darkening in light. Some jeweler's lacquers also work. Envirotex® works very well for this.

Using Liver of Sulfur on Silver

1.Take a piece of Liver of Sulfur, about the size of your finger nail, and dissolve it in a cup or more of warm water.

2.Heat the piece of metal to be treated and then dip in the Liver of Sulfur solution.

3.Rinse in water after each dip. While Liver of Sulfur is usually used to obtain gray and black colors on silver, there are a number of intermediate interference colors formed, especially if a weak solution is used. These include yellow, reddish brown, purple and blue. Some people recommend adding a small amount of household ammonia to the solution claiming it intensifies the lovely blue-green-red-purple interference colors one gets when using a dilute solution and slow approach. These pretty colors are not very stable over time because they continue to react with sulfur in the air and darken. You can sometimes 'save' them by spraying an appropriate lacquer over them. They may be retained if the surface is properly sealed. Acrylic resin is the recommended sealer for durability and resistance to darkening in light. Some jeweler's lacquers also work. Envirotex® works very well for this.

4.The piece may be sanded lightly and polished. Raised areas will show the original color of the metal, recessed areas will remained blackened.

5.Be sure to wear gloves and protective clothing when working with Liver of Sulfur. The fumes are dangerous and it should be used with good ventilation and covered right after use. It must not be allowed to come in contact with acids as a toxic gas is then rapidly evolved.

Michael Mueller has used another post production technique on his silver 3D prints to give them a little more character. See the before and after below.

If you want to try this for your own ... if you need some hints... ... There are also a lot of links in the web how to do this. All you need is a glass, water, salt, wire and a 12 volt dc power supply. 

Sounds like dangerous fun... For a slightly less electrically charged option you could try Mark Cheng's methods.

Tom Kluyskens of Made on Jupiter has made the perfect, Sweet As! wedding gift using Shapeways 3D printing. Not satisfied with the standard coffee maker, kettle or toaster as a gift, Tom designed and fabricated a tie and bracelet in the wedding theme of Sweet As!

The pieces were modeled parametrically in Houdini (a high end digital film effects tool), and the resulting 3D model was sent to Shapeways for 3D printing. We (digitally) engraved the two key sterling silver pieces with the theme of the wedding:

Take a look at Tom's post that steps through the process including a video of how the tie was set up in Houdini, really interesting to see node based architecture for 3D modeling.

All images by Tom Kluyskens, see all project images on Flickr

This tutorial is for those with a bit of HTML prowess and want to use the Shapeways Shopping Cart to sell your 3D prints from your own external shop.  Plugging into the Shapeways API it offer levels of customization and complexity not possible with the Shapeways Widget.

Take a look at the tutorial, experiment with your own website, share your examples and let us know if this is something you would like integrated into your Shapeways Shop to sell your own 3D printed designs?

Want to make your own soaps with 3D printing, the perfect personalized gift? Take a look how Fredrik Perman of the Product Farm and his girlfriend used 3D printing to make his own Pawfect Suds.

The Pawfect Suds paw print shape for our silicone mold finally arrived from Shapeways! We’re really excited to get some OOMOO silicone compound and start experimenting with making actual “negative” silicone molds from this “positive” soap shape.

3D Print your Star Fleet

Dolf Veenvliet aka macouno of Enotforms fame has been working on some fun tools to generate 3D forms for the 3D Cad illiterate.  Under the ShapeWright moniker Dolf has produced a random space ship generator entitled ShipWright that generates unique configurations of space ships ready for 3D printing with Shapeways... Yeah, awesome.. You can also have a personalized Space Ship generated by your name, or whatever text you enter into the build system... Yeah, super awesome. ShipWright is another awesome project that uses the Shapeways API to upload 3D files to Shapeways, if you have a project to generate 3D forms take a look at the API documentation to see how you can send the files to Shapeways for 3D printing too.

The original version generated space ships based on the nicknames of all Blender 3D coders The code is based on the entoforms scripts... which you can find here: http://www.entoforms.com

You can download the base blend from: http://www.blendswap.com/3D-models/vehicles/shipwright-06/

You can download the scripts from: http://code.google.com/p/entoforms/

Create your own silver ring on your Android device and 3D Print it with Shapeways!

kelecrea is developed for the Android platform by Shapeways community member Lajos Kelemen that lets you add text as engraving or embossing to 3D models. Currently you can modify a choice of rings, pendants, nameplates, coins, brooches and hairpins.  You can already see some of the designs generated in his shop gallery.

Check out the video of the app in action then download it from the Android market.

It is applications like kelecrea, ShapeMe, Endless Forms, 3DTin and Tinkercad that will really bring 3D printing to the masses.  

Awesome work Lajos 

How to succeed with Kickstarter and Shapeways 3D printing.

We mentioned Joshua Harker's Kickstarter project a few days back where he was looking for $500 worth of backing to get his intricate skull sculptures out into the world but with 34 days to go and over $25,000 dollars raised it is fair to say Joshua is very happy with his decision to put his project on Kickstarter. 

We also mentioned the Mathematician's Dice by Matt Chisolm who raised $19,620 when seeking $2000 to get his project off of the ground using Kickstarter. I am sure a market research department would have been hard pressed to find enough respondents to take the product to market through any other means, but crowdfunding reveals itself to be a perfect way to find a market for really unique items.

And of course you know how much we love the Glif which raised over $137,000 when seeking $10,000 to get their iPhone tripod connector off of the ground using Kickstarter. The guys from Studio Neat have become the poster boys for success on Kickstarter by successfully launching a second product, 'The Cosmonaught' that even trialled a Radiohead inspired 'Pay What You Want' pledge. Maybe not for everyone but definitely proving the point that products are becoming more digital, in that the way they are designed, fabricated, sold and distributed.