Shapeways Blog - Tutorials

How to Get Your Designs Promoted by Shapeways

blog@shapeways.com (Duann) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 14:07:19 +0000

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.

Continue reading "How to Get Your Designs Promoted by Shapeways"

Shop Owners: Share your Designs for the Holidays!

blog@shapeways.com (Carine) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:41:06 +0000

We're making magic happen this holiday season, with our new Holiday Gift Guide, the Wired Pop-Up Store, and some more treats headed your way over the next few weeks. For our shop owners, we hope that by sharing all your awesome designs with a broader community, you'll also see some magic happen in your stores.

There are so many great products, and we want to make sure we don't miss any gems. If you're interested in having your product featured by Shapeways this season, don't be shy! We'll be paying close attention to the "Feature this!" section of the Forum and will look for great products to feature across the site.

In particular, we'll be looking for designs that make great gifts - and those which are well-photographed.

The sooner you share, the better! We want to ensure everyone gets orders in time for all their gift-giving needs.

Frosted Detail/Frosted Ultra Detail Design Rules Update

blog@shapeways.com (Nancy Liang) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 15:17:00 +0000

Hey all!

Over the past half year, the Production Team has been busy with a few new materials. Combined with all the amazing designs we get from you, we really learn a lot about what types of structures works and what type needs to be tweaked. Over the past few months, we've been working to get a better understanding of how to best design for our Frosted Detail and Frosted Ultra Detail. We've sent test models through, got customer feedback, and revised the design rules.

The new design rules will go into affect next Monday. With this set of rules, we hope to help everybody build stronger prints, and decrease the number of items delayed due to breakages.

We split the rules into a "simple" section and a "nuanced" section. The nuanced section goes a bit more into details on how to design very delicate structures, but there are more things to consider (ratio between dimensions, etc.).

We also make different recommendations to suit the most common design structures and areas where we see issues (thin wires, wires supporting larger objects, etc.). This way, the design rules will be more targeted towards your specific design needs. In short, we recommend that unsupported walls to be at least 0.6mm thick, and wires supporting larger structures to be at least 1mm thick. Supported walls and wires can be more delicate, to read all the technical goodness, visit the design rules page.

Let me know if you have any questions, as always.

Happy creating,
Nancy

RepRap 3D Printing WITHOUT the Tyranny of Triangles... Goodbye STL?

blog@shapeways.com (Duann) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:40:00 +0000

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

How to Patina 3D Printed Silver & Experiments for Stainless Steel

blog@shapeways.com (Duann) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 01:52:27 +0000

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.

Continue reading "How to Patina 3D Printed Silver & Experiments for Stainless Steel "

Electrolysis Finish Silver : Post Production Tip

blog@shapeways.com (Duann) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 03:04:35 +0000

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.

Sweet As! The Perfect 3D Printed Wedding Gift

blog@shapeways.com (Duann) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 03:46:55 +0000

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

How To Create a Shapeways Shopping Cart for your own External Shop

blog@shapeways.com (Duann) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 11:36:14 +0000

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?

How to make Pawfect soap molds with Shapeways 3D Printing

blog@shapeways.com (Duann) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:45:00 +0000

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.

Continue reading "How to make Pawfect soap molds with Shapeways 3D Printing"

How To Design Your Own Ring for 3D Printing with ShapeWright

blog@shapeways.com (Duann) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 12:46:06 +0000

A quick video to show how you can design your own ring with ShapeWright to have it 3D printed in your choice of materials by Shapeways. Further awesomeness plugging into the Shapeways API.

Developed by macouno aka Dolf Veenvliet

Generate Your Own Fleet of 3D Printed Spaceships with ShipWright

blog@shapeways.com (Duann) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 08:48:40 +0000

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/

Continue reading "Generate Your Own Fleet of 3D Printed Spaceships with ShipWright"

Kelecrea: Design and 3D Print Jewelry from Your Android

blog@shapeways.com (Duann) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 12:48:00 +0000

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

Kickstarter Loves 3D Printing

blog@shapeways.com (Duann) — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:41:00 +0000

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.

Continue reading "Kickstarter Loves 3D Printing"

3D Print Yourself with Just Two Photos and ShapeMe by Archipelis

blog@shapeways.com (Nancy Liang) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 20:27:00 +0000

3D print a miniature version of yourself with just two photos and ShapeMe (developed by Archipelis).

Shapeways community member Archipelis has developed a really fun and mildly addictive app that lets you make a miniature version of yourself with NO 3D modeling skills needed. You simply download the ShapeMe app, take a front on and profile head shot of yourself, use the simple interface to map your head onto a range of bodies and you are ready to 3D print in our new full color... You can also add other elements such as hair, glasses and a base.

ShapeMe is currently only for Windows but soon to be released in the Apple app store so you can also use ShapeMe on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.. Being so easy to use it is a perfect way to get friends and family to start playing around with 3D printing. What better gift for grandma than a miniature grandchild to put on the mantlepiece, or perhaps you could do a personalised wedding topper, with the bride and groom imortalised in full color. Whatever you choose to do the ShapeMe is fun and easy. Take a look at the gallery of ShapMes so far.

Check out the tutorial page (download link is in the tutorial page), and the video below to get started.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/center&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; Few things we noticed while playing with the app:&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; 1) It's very important when constructing your face, to place the red dot on the tip of your nose. Don't worry about the face frame, you can adjust it later&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; 2) If you find that your face shape looks odd in the end, click the &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;back&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; button and readjust your face frames. Usually, it takes a few go to get it perfect&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; 3) At the last screen (the one with the spinning head), try to eliminate as much flash as you can, and brighten the colors. It's very important for print quality to take the picture in a well lit room and/or adjust the color well. Most cameras we find take too dark of pictures to be printed at a realistic quality. &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; We hope that you find this app nifty, and let us know if you are making or know of somebody making apps that would nicely plug into Shapeways.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; Enjoy!&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; Nancy &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/body&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/html&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;
Continue reading "3D Print Yourself with Just Two Photos and ShapeMe by Archipelis"

Digital Design Therapy in NYC with Shapeways

blog@shapeways.com (Duann) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 13:53:00 +0000

Digital Design Therapy is 3 NYC based designers and fashion educators hosting a series of e-courses and seminars for digital fashion! This Saturday, September 10, 2011, at 1:00 PM Shapeways will be helping NYC fashonistas understand the potential of 3D printing to make the move from printed fabric to digital fabrics. If you are interested in coming along or have a textile fetishist friend you would like to recommend, send them over to DDT's Meetup page to RSVP.. $5 will get you in the door for an inspiring presentation from Ana Hevesi, Mary Huang, John Briscella and more..

Thanks to Chris, Maura & Geoffry for hosting the event, we are looking forward to seeing some interesting cross pollination.