Your two cents needed

Hi all, this is my first post here but after some lurking you seem like the sensible group of fellows to get an opinion on an idea I've been tossing around for a while.

I've been looking for ways to really justify having a printer and I'm certain I'm not the only one. my field of expertise is in creating monsters, video game characters, sci fi objects or fantasy items and so on, and various people have expressed an interest in procuring them in some form.

The reason I'm coming to you is to gauge whether or not there would be an interest from the 3D printing community in some type of subscription to unique, original printables. Ultimately my goal is to make a monthly monster, raygun, movie or game replica props, test print it to work out the bugs, and put it out there in such a way that I can afford the time to make another one the following month and so on. I love making things and I'm hooked on printing so I'd like to fuse them in a fun way that a lot of other people might enjoy as well and while I see that there's a lot of cool stuff out there, I'm not always up for testing and tweaking a found design until it actually prints.

Here's some recent examples of my work, please reply and let me know what you think of the idea, your two cents are much appreciated!

To clarify, these models are just things that I've made. My overall thinking is to design specifically for the home printing medium with respect to limitations, details and mechanical elements.

If you are intending to provide home-printed models, or models for home printing on current generation fdm machines, this is probably the wrong site for your question. What you could do however is upload a few of your creations, open a "shop" here to sell them on a print-on-demand basis (with your mark-up on top of the raw printing costs) and see how well it goes.
I cannot comment on the style or quality of your designs - not my area of interest - but I am very sceptical that a monthly subscription model would work, no matter the type of object. (And with movie or game replica props, there is the obvious problem of intellectual property rights.)

Nice work! I particularly like your horned mouth monster! Very creative!

I feel that it is an interesting idea and could work well for artists that have lots of fans. Let us know how it worked out if you try to implement something like this.

As a side note, you gave me an idea for Shapeways shops. We have a way to add products to a wish list and also a way to favor the products we like, but no way to subscribe to a shop or a designer to get notifications of when new products are created.

Thank you for your insights. I realize that Shapeways has a different marketplace model going but I reasoned that anybody here might also be thinking about the broader opportunities in the realm of 3D printing. My hesitation with the shapeways model (not that I'd rule it out) is the tradeoff between cost and market size. On Shapeways the market is large but the cost is very high. In a direct to printer owners situation the customer's cost would be comparatively very, very low but the market is small and the quality limitations are substantial.

@UniverseBecoming does Shapeways offer you some way to implement notifications of is this something you'll be requesting from the devs?

Also, I've been browsing the Shapeways stores but can anybody direct me to some of the most best or popular monster and sci-fi themed offerings?

Yeah, that would be a request to the developers.

You may be able to find such offerings by using some of the search methods I outlined here.

Shapeways WSF has better detail than the "home printers". In order to test you must print with different models of printers.

Nice sculpts!

Very nice work. All hail Zbrush! It's my favored weapon of choice.

I would strongly recommend using a service like Shapeways before buying a printer. Here is what you don't have to worry about if you choose to use Shapeways:

1.) Buying a printer.
2.) Buying materials.
3.) Complicated setups.
4.) Operation.
5.) Failed prints.
6.) Printer maintenance.
7.) Printer malfunction.
8.) Shipping and handling.

So I'd say go with Shapeways just on that principle alone.

Having used Shapways in the past, I can also vouch for their quality compared to home printer setups