Photoshop 3D Printing and Shapeways

So anyone play with Photoshop CC 14.2 yet?

Check out these two blogs at Adobe:
https://blogs.adobe.com/photoshopdotcom/2014/01/photoshop-cc- 14-2-release.html
https://blogs.adobe.com/photoshopdotcom/2014/01/photoshop-cc- gets-physical-3d-printing-in-just-one-click.html#more-7296

From a quick look, it seems they are making 3D printing as simple as one click, especially for home printing with generating scaffolding and such. But Shapeways is included, with material choices and detail settings.

I tried it out really quick, but there's no detailed explanation of what Photoshop is doing. They say it corrects wall thickness and repairs the model. But I find models that are at least at the 2 mm limit for Full Color Sandstone always come out terribly inflated. So it's usesuless. I'm hoping Shapeways might have a clue what Adobe is doing as it prepares it for print. LIke if it finds a random thin wall, does it inflate the whole model evenly until that one thin area meets minimum specs? Does it know the difference from a freestanding wall that needs to be 3mm compared to 2mm supported walls. Then the fact it turns the model to voxels to merge it loses some detail on top of the model being inflated.

It's also a bummer that I can't find a way to imported VRML file for vertex colors, or support for OBJ's with vertex color. Instead, they let you import STL and a few others with no color, then color it in Photoshop, which it exports for printing in VRML. That seems so odd it does that, but doesn't let you import VRML with color to start with.

At this point, don't think I'll use it. It might be handy for resizing a model that doesn't have color, or one you plan to add color, but all the repair features are part of the final step to print where it inflates the model and merges it into a single mesh with a voxel method.

I've successfully printed several objects directly from Photoshop CC to Shapeways. I've noticed that the uploaded rendering of the object shown on Shapeways sometimes looks poorly defined (lumpy, inflated, etc.) but in at least one case, I printed it anyway and the object came out just fine. I'm not sure if this is a problem caused by some of the printer settings in Photoshop (like the detail level), general bugs in photoshop's rendering of some types of 3D objects, issues with the Shapeways uploader, etc. The things that I've printed so far have been created from multiple extruded objects. In most cases the Shapeways rendering of these things has been fine. When I've uploaded lathed objects or objects using bump maps, they've usually looked strange. At some point I'll cross my fingers and order one of these strange looking objects and see what I get.