Totally Clear Material

Hi, I was wondering what hurdles there are when it comes to printing totally clear objects and if it is currently being worked on.

Hi Tarantulasoup (love the username )

Welcome to Shapeways!

There are some totally clear 3D print systems out there, unfortunately the nearest you'll get via Shapeways is Frosted Ultra Detail, and then you will need to polish the model to increase clarity.

Paul

Yeh Ive been hoping that a clear material will be added soon but I havent seen anything posted by the team about such a material.
Would be very handy for printing many different types of objects that have glass/clear components.

I'll be doing some prints with transparent detail and frosted detail soon to see if they can be used as a slightly opaque material for glass visors etc.
Just worried about the strength of frosted detail given that its the most transparent material and im wondering if the transparency and colour of transparent detail will be any good given that it seems to be a muddy cream colour.
Will be interesting to see how they turn out however!

Frosted Ultra Detail is a 'clear' winner for me

Compare Kraken In Crystal - small in FUD not polished and Kraken In Crystal in TD polished with a white LED behind it.

Whoa, cheers for the example. That should work quite nicely for what Im after.

There are also quite a few of us doing railway models and the like, and a clear material for windows, etc., would be a huge benefit here.

What happened to the transparent detail material? Has it been withdrawn?

Transparent detail is still available. I'm pretty sure there's automatic checks on bounding box dimensions and some materials will not be available if the bounding box is too small.

It may be better to talk to Brian Hanson at Shawplan

Hey, the major hurdle to the transparent material I've looked into is in post processing. The transparent materials I've seen need support for downfacing surfaces. The support leaves a layer of film on the model. So the upfacing surfaces are glossy and transparent, the downfacing are mirky.

You can polish away the mirkiness, but that increases the cost of labor dramatically (and thus the price of the material).

We are still researching though! But I wanted to give you some insight into what we've looked into so far and what the issues are.

i.competitive service has a "clear" acrylic (and maybe Ponoko?) but they are more expensive than Shapeways...

Glenn

Thanks Nancy and everyone else for the input, I always look forward to new developments at Shapeways!