Announcing Frosted Extreme Detail (or FXD), our highest resolution 3D printed plastic ever

Today we are excited to announce our newest material, Frosted Extreme Detail! It uses the same resin and printer as our popular material Frosted Ultra Detail (FUD), but it's almost twice as detailed! Frosted Extreme Detail, or FXD for short, 3D prints using 16 micron layers (vs FUD's 29 micron layers). This means 3D prints that have unprecedented detail and surface finish, sharper edges, less stepping, and stronger walls and wires. It's perfect for the most demanding miniatures, figurines, and molds and masters for casting.

Design guidelines are the exact same as FUD, so all your existing FUD designs are printable and you can get started designing amazing new things right away! Pricing for this material is $5.00 startup and $5.99 per CC. The difference in price compared to FUD is that the thinner layers take longer to print and use more material.


HOn30 PBR 25 Ton Climax #1694 v1 by Jeevi



Example of painted Frosted Extreme Detail, a finish many designers like to do themselves after receiving the prints.
Mini Panton Chair (1:24) by kspence



Custom Figurine by Heroforge


Also an important reminder for those using our acrylic family. As Frosted Detail customers have known for a few weeks, we're retiring our Frosted Detail material on April 29th. This material prints fully enclosed in support material, which then needs to be cleaned away. The process is wasteful, expensive, and the difficulties in production and cleaning causes late and broken parts. We've tried hard hard to improve this process, but it does not meet our high standards and are focused on developing better alternatives for you.

Just a couple of questions...

You state it uses more material using FXD than FUD because the layers are thinner. Can you please explain how it uses more material when the layers are thinner, but the model is exactly the same size, hence the volume is identical?

As well, on the materials page it lists a maximum bounding box of 50 X 50 X 200, rather than 284 X 184 X 203 as per FUD. Why? This will certainly limit the interest from railway modelers. Even FUD is pretty restrictive at a 284 mm maximum dimension.

So much for your claims the material guidelines would be unchanged from FUD.

The price difference is 165% on the model I checked... this will certainly limit sales, as even FUD is a hard sell in HO.

Thanks,

Steve Hunter

I also notice there may be a few other bugs to work out, unless it's because of the bounding box change. But some of my models that have 100% printing in FUD are shown to have issues in FXD. One such model looks like it simply exploded in the preview window. What happened to this?

https://www.shapeways.com/model/3dtools/1599442/0/114

I totally understand there will be kinks with a new rollout, but hopefully these are just minor issues and not a sign of things to come.

Thanks,
Bill

To be literal, the volume of material consumed is greater....
The areas in blue below would not be present on a 28 micron model.
It would be easy to quibble about how much expense the blue areas actually add, but it DOES make the model "bigger".
No, the volume displayed in your shop will not change, because that's computed from the triangulated representation of your model.

It could be more, or less. It all depends of the sample place, as it could decide to build the blocks with the mesh always inside them (always overshoot), or never go out of the mesh bounds (always undershoot). In first case, smaller blocks means less over use and thus reduction, but in the other, it means more approximate to the mesh volume and thus higher.

But what if for every layer pass, the system has to trim the surface? It tries to fill the layer height and then some (error +X, never -+X). More layers, more trim passes.



Or maybe it was a typo.

PS: Above image/doc is from other 3d print system, not the one behind FUD/FXD.

Re: Material Usage

The way these printers work is that they deposit a layer of material, cure this material, and then come back and shave off a very thin layer of that same material in order to ensure a perfect layer surface and height. This process accounts for a significant amount of material usage, both build and support, and because it happens per layer this material usage increases as layer height gets smaller. Thus, smaller layers mean both longer build times and increased material usage.

PS: that's what the little tub attached to the leveling roller in the diagram above is for.

Best,
Raphael

Same question from my side.

Printing in FXD would be of great interest for me, but the bounding box size ist really too small for my parts. Will this be increased????

Greetings

Tobias

Check the other thread for an explanation... https://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=rview&goto=1 13926&th=26598#msg_113926
The bounding box is now per PART, not per file.

Yes, I read that post. But I have single parts that use almost the complete length of the FUD bounding box.

Greetings

Tobias

Ok then, to say that " so all your existing FUD designs are printable" isn't an accurate statement, but that's how they presented it. At the very lease that should have been conveyed to designers a lot more clearly. Best case would be to not limit the size of the parts so small but....

Bill

I totally agree. That´s why I would like to hear some official info about this issue.

Tobias

Hello SW,

Well well, I checked on one single kit (Our Mercedes Benz in N 1:160 scale, see: https://shpws.me/CNQY ) how the price would evolve in FXD. The Mercedes has been printed numerous times in FUD with 100% success rate.

And what shows up?

I get a red cross 'not printable' message for this kit in FXD.

The selling colum says 'not printable' for FXD.


Sorry Shapeways, but do you never learn? Why is SWreally never ever testing anything? Or is this just one of your many many many bugs you seem to create in the meanwhile?

Come on, this is pathetic.

So, end of testing phase for us.

Good bye FXD.

Regards,
Maurice
RAILNSCALE
Who welcomes: properly cleaned models, constant print quality, proper/constant print orientation, better packaging and far better quality checks over FXD.

Every modell will be changed by hand? This will take time i guess.

Obviously depends on the number of arms and/or minions he has

hopefully they can find a site wide fix - I have had the same on my FUD models. Went into the 3D tools view and after a while it showed no red crosses (some dashes/blanks) but no red crosses. Still unavailable on the main page though.

Hi,

Thanks for all the feedback on these issues, and it's good to hear that people are excited and starting to try to print stuff. Sorry for the confusion and frustration. We're aware of the issues that have been mentioned, and I wanted to provide some context:

Models are Not Printable, No Reason
This was a bug that we encountered during this launch, and we implemented a fix late friday afternoon that resolved most cases. Most models that were coming up as Not Printable, but there was no reason should now be printable. If you run into additional models that still have this issue, please contact customer service and they can help you to reprocess the models.

Design Rules vs Bounding Box:
Apologies on the confusion there. We don't generally think of max bounding box as a design rule, and didn't mean to trick anyone with the our initial claims for the same design rules. We realized it might be confusing, and updated it in later communications.

Small Bounding Box:
This material is incredibly slow to print. 50mm models take about 48 hours, 100mm models about 96 hours and 200mm about 192 hours. That's 8 days. The risk of machine crashes increases right alongside print time, as does the cost of the crash, especially if its late in the build. We've launched with 50mm because of these risks, but will work with our manufacturing teams to monitor the reliability of prints, and assuming everything goes well will likely be able to expand the bounding box (although not to as large as FUD) relatively quickly.

Bounding Box of Multi-Part Files
With this launch we've uncovered a bug in the way that we're limiting the printability of multi-part files using the max BB. While min BB is calculating per part as it should, max BB is checked against the overall model BB not the individual part ones. This means that if you have a file which is 200 x 100 x 50 mm, and is made up of 4 parts, each of which is 50 x 50 x 50, this file should be printable in FXD and unfortunately right now is not. We understand the frustration this can cause, and that it limits the number of models that you can print in this already restrictive bounding box. We're working hard on a solution to this, and will keep everyone updated.

Success Rate
We mentioned it in the email, but it's definitely a bit confusing: We're going to update printability so that FUD and FD prints count towards FXD success rate when we deprecate FD on the 29th. Until then, your FXD models will have no print history. After that, success rate of models that have been printed and FD and FUD will be set, and models will automatically be moved out of first to try when appropriate.

Best,
Raphael

Well, there is still a big number of models that are unprintable -red-cross- in fxd, despite the fact they were printed several time in FUD. The models are all green in the model preview (wall-thickness,bounding box,...). The problem isn't solved.
one example: https://www.shapeways.com/model/1229204 I can't list everything, it's just to show the problem isn't gone.

Same issue here.

SW did simply not solve this bug.