Bad printing quality and Printing orientation. Please FIX!

Ok i have been getting really bad printing results from shapeways lately. Many times the printing orienattion is wrong, giving a very bad look to the main parts of my design.

I purchase this twice spending about $100usd, and i still get the same ugly results.

How am i suppose to sell this type of quality to my customers?


here is a print that was done correctly, notice the smooth surfaces and clean look.



Now this was was printed wrongly, the whole front side seemed to be sheared off. It also has a very bad feel to it.
The under side on the other hand is smooth.



I cant sell this stuff to customers, especially people who don't understand 3D printing.

I have ordered the above case TWICE and still got the same results. Can someone please explain to me how i can fix this issue. This problem is obviously due to the printing orientation.

Difficult to see from the photo, but it looks like the second model has coarser edges than the first?
Chamfer the edges usually helps with this problem.

Did you contact customer service about this?

Cheers,

Stijn

People still don't seem to get this 3D stuff. We get stepping because the pieces are built in layers. If your piece has visible stepping, changing the orientation doesn't eliminate stepping, it just transfers it to a different face. Think of an egg, if the build layers are visible, no matter how it is orientated in the machine there will still be stepping.

The answer is not to try and second guess the orientation, but to try and persuade Shapeways to run some of these machines with a smaller layer thickness. Of course halving the layer thickness will more than double the price, which may not be the magic bullet people were looking for.

Oh sorry "those" edges, had missed that :blush:

Bill I do get this "3D Stuff",

Let me show you a design i did before, same design with same amount of details. But very well printed, no obvious stepping.



Most of the stepping happens on the UNDERSIDE, which doesn't matter.

Printing orientation makes a BIG difference. Especially for small details.

The problem is inconsistency with the prints. Some times i get good results and sometimes i get bad. Its like a lucky draw now, and I cant built a business that way.

Thanks for the response virtox, ill send them an email soon.

The curves on that last one look a lot rounder than on the other model?
That makes a huge difference, because the stepping is also smeared out over a larger surface.

And yes print orientation has influence, but the curvature in the model has major influence on that.

The design is the same. On both fingerprint designs. The Iphone and blackberry case use the same design.

All have hard edge with a bevel.

But the printing is noticeably different.

In fact for the iphone case, the under side of the case is very smooth, but the front facing side is rough and "sheared" off.

But in reality the 3D model is exactly the same on both sides.
Something is wrong with the printing.

Well I mean, if you look a the cross section of the phones themselves, the blackberry looks rounder than the iphone, but I have neither of those, so I can't be sure.
Could you post renders of both models side by side?

Btw CS is closed during weekends, so it might take a while for them to answer.

I think the side you have called 'smooth' is wrong. If you look closely there appears to be a bulge in the middle of each of the lines. I have assumed when I have had prints like this that the powder has been over heated and melted more that it should have. I can be a real pig to deal with if the surface has to be fitted to something else.

I'll talk to CS tmr.

I have had this problem on other prints as well.
Once i printed 10 pieces of a certain design for a customer, and 2 out of the 10 had this "shearing" problem.

My customer was'nt happy at all. Very bad for business i must say!

Ok, i did up an image to illustrate my point.

Both sides of the case feels different. And the printing quality for the front side does not look as desirable as the back.



*I am not complaing about the stepping, My problem is with the roughed textured front side. It seems as if it has been "sheared" off, for a lack of a better term..

polychemy, As virtox said, it's best to contact CS directly with this, as they have the power to fix it for you.

While we can't yet let people specify print orientation, If it's known that one orientation versus another works better then we do try to accomodate those requests.


Best,
Natalia

Part of the problem is that a piece of WSF is like a piece of timber - it is weaker with the grain than across the grain. I found this with small detail features. On an incorrectly orientated model, a heap of small features had sheared off, but when correctly orientated, the model was fully intact.

We are gladly waiting for specified print orientation. The lottery system simply won't do if models are to be publicly saleable.

And there is also the problem that it isn't Shapeways themselves that print the models. They are outsourced to more than one company. Different printers, different standards of operating and different quality acceptance...

But I agree that a maker being able to specify build orientation HAS to be high on Shapeways' TO DO list...

Glenn

You can partially fool the Shapeways system into guaranteeing your build orientation. You need to build a basket around your model that is equal on the X and Y axis, and so that the Z axis is the biggest dimension (unless your part barely fits into the build envelope of the machines they have). Shapeways runs 3D systems HD3000 and HD3000plus machines. The maximum size of the model is your build envelope. Alternately, if you have a LOT of small parts or a couple large parts, you can make a basket to just fit inside the build envelope. If your parts are critical it will make it possible to get the parts you need.

This is all possible because of the way shapeways shoves stuff through their system. They orient the parts so that the maximum number of them fits into their build envelope. They will rotate the model so that the smallest dimension is facing down. This is not necessarily the best way for your model, so you need to make your part so that the base is equal and the Z axis is the biggest dimension.

Jeff Briggs

Hear hear!
I have a set of parts with *mostly* flat panels on the exposed surface... these will clearly be best if oriented parallel to the print plane.

I have a plan, I'll see if it works... I appended to the end of each file the text "...My Zaxis UP Please.stl".

If I can't have my preferred orientation respected, then this service is of little use to me.

Re Briggsmodels
I'm not so sure that production would be happy with such practices, as it will hugely impact the spatial planning of the tray, if they cannot compact the tray, and the printer density per tray goes down, the cost will need to go up
And I think the biggest axis in most printers is the X axis, so I'm not entirely sure making Z the largest will help much?

Re patmat2350:
I do not think the name of the .stl will matter much, as far as I can tell the name is lost/changed once in the process chain (to model id or similar)
You might have a chance with the model title.
But even then, which axis is Z or up is not really defined in STL and more matter of which software is used.
I think the upload render takes an educated guess based on file type.
So it's no real guarantee.

But I agree, it is becoming more and more important that print orientation can be chosen and/or guaranteed to always be the same.
This will however make things more complicated for printer planners and logistics and might bump the prices up.

Hi everyone, I have spoken to CS, they say they don't know what's the problem.

Anyway, they weill be reprinting the defective designs. Hopefully the print quality will be better. I have my doubts, but for my customers sake i hope everything is solved.

Hi everyone, I'm glad to say the problem has been fixed!
The printing is much better now!

Thanks Shapeways for reprinting them!





Also I have just recently opened my shop, check it out here:
Polychemy Shapeways Shop.



The IPhone cases were also featured recently on trendhunter.com!
https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/polchemy-3d-printed-iphone -case

Hi Polychemy, I'm glad that worked out, your shop looks great!