Full Color Plastic is HERE!

Hi Everyone,

It is with great excitement that we can now offer our community Full Color Plastic. The material has a similar color range to Full Color Sandstone (note: FCP's colors are CMY & White, no true black, which Sandstone has) with a durability more comparable to our Strong and Flexible Families.

We are doing a Pilot with this material to start, to better understand its applications and see how the community engages with it. The initial designers in the pilot have been notified and will be able to start printing tomorrow.

We want you all to be involved, but signups for this portion of the pilot have closed.

The Materials Page will go live with our weekly release later today, but here's a sneak peak at the design guidelines:

Max bounding box 150 x 150 x 150 mm

Min bounding box X + Y + Z ≥ 10 mm

Min supported wall thickness 0.7 mm thick

Min unsupported wall thickness 0.7 mm thick

Min supported wires 0.8 mm thick

Min unsupported wires 1.6 mm thick

Min embossed detail 0.2 mm high & wide

Min engraved detail 0.2 mm high & wide

Min escape holes 4.0 mm diameter for one escape hole
2.0 mm diameter when there are two or more escape holes

Clearance .5mm
Interlocking and enclosed parts? Yes
Multiple parts per model file? No

Does this material add to your shop? What will it now enable you to create?

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Hi nosomosnada!

Yes, we don't mind at all!

For this initial Pilot Period, Full Color Plastic will be:

$3.00 Startup Cost
$2.00/CC

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Great! Curious to see what you come up with!

Nice! full color sandstone seems a little too brittle for some of my projects and this should help a lot with some of my smaller parts. So is the finish similar to the strong and flexible plastic?

@ID_Johnathan great questions. It is not as flexible as the Strong & Flexible family, but it is considerably stronger than FCS. The finish is not as smooth as polished Strong & Flexible, as it is not a polished material.

Thanks. I also noticed that multiple parts are not allowed is that something that can change in the future? Or is that a firm limitation?

It will likely not be an offering for this material, but we are looking into ways to fundamentally make it easier to have multi-part models across materials offered in your shop. Hang tight for now

I'm confused: It seems like there's an easy workaround for this - if I want two parts in the model, I make a little loop linking through both parts. When the model arrives, I cut off the loop and I have my multiple parts.

you could do that, yes, but then you're paying extra for material .

But if the startup cost is $3, then I would need to be using $3 of linking material to break even. Which is 1.5 cubic cm - I'm sure I can link things with less material than that!

Is it less trouble for Shapeways if multiple part models are linked together? If so, these rules would make sense.

The answer to this is a resounding yes. We frankly didn't know how many parts some folks would want to put into models, and have learned so much from you all over the last half a decade.

To explain further: when you have a multipart file, that means we're addressing each one of its pieces individually at multiple stages of our process. Each part has to be checked, planned, sorted and post processed before heading to our distribution center and getting sent on its way to you.

When there are multiple parts of a file, that means we have to make sure we have every piece perfect before going on the next stage of production, and that all the parts are together. Some models have tiny parts that our hard-working sorters only have a render to go off of to find. This can be tricky and time consuming. When your model is one part, or is connected as one part, it become far easier for us to keep track of it on our side.

Always good to remember that an average of 10 people touch your product before it's shipped out to you. If you think of every part having to go through 10 phases, it should help paint the picture for why we have to regulate this

There is hope for a more fundamental way to group products together in the future, we hope you'll like what we have in store.

Thanks Savannah, makes sense. It would be great of course if the price incentives were there to make it worthwhile for the designer to do the linking for you - perhaps that's what this rule is for. Then again, it's less good for the end-consumer if they have to cut things out. I'll look forward to better ways to group things.

I'm happy that helped, and I appreciate your feedback (and have shared it with the teams working on addressing the issue).

As always, your thoughts are welcomed! Looking forward to seeing what you create!

It will replace Full Color Sandstone ?! ... by the looks will make it less likely that a designer will use Sandstone due the fact this plastic will hold more and clients will be happier with something stronger.

Only wondering!

Good news!

Seeing that it is much more expensive and has a smaller or at least different color range (due to not having black ink/dye available), I would hope that this just complements FCS at least for the time being. There might also be applications - paperweights or possibly even some figurines, where the extra weight of the gypsum would be sorely missed.

Sandstone isn't going anywhere, don't worry We just saw such great products coming through in full color that we wanted to extend our offering. I think there are still great uses for both. Sandstone has black, and a very smooth finish. FCP is a bit rough, but much more durable than FCS. We'll let you be the ones to judge

I hope I didn't miss if it was already answered but what about the colour itself? Will it fade in contact with water? Or will it be weather-proof?
I'm thinking about custom nametags with phone numbers as keychains or collars or maybe business cards or something of that sort.

I've already placed my first order. Most are slimmed down versions of FCS prints I've already got so I can compare and contrast when they get here. A couple are the colored versions of old products that I could just never make before. And one is a brand new product that just wasn't feasible until now. Looking forward to seeing how they turn out!