Personalize your products with our new CustomMaker feature!

Hey Shapies!

We're excited to announce CustomMaker, our newest pilot feature that will give you and shoppers the ability to personalize your favorite products! CustomMaker allows shop owners to enable their products to be personalized with text and images. This new feature is powered by our ShapeJS platform and is designed to be intuitive and easy to use for both shop owners and shoppers alike without requiring any coding expertise. By making customizable products available in shops, we are enabling you to expand your product line and offer customers the unique products they want! .

In the past, customizing existing models involved a lot of time and technique on behalf of the designer to put personalized text and images on their models. This new feature makes the process quick and efficient, and allows the shopper to feel like they have a part in the design process. The shopper viewer is IP-safe which means nobody can download or steal your base model - this is to ensure the copyright and design rights belonging to designer's and their work.

While developing CustomMaker, we have worked closely with a group of our shop owners to test and re-test this feature to make sure it's shop owner ready and shopper friendly. Now, we are launching with a public pilot to get even more feedback from our broader community, marking the first time we're opening up a pilot to everyone! As with all of our pilot features, we will look for feedback from the community to continue improving our offerings, so expect to see upgrades and improvements in the next few months..

We hope you enjoy CustomMaker! For more information and tutorials on how to use this new feature, click here. And, make sure to share your customizable products with us!

Looks like a great enhancement. The buyers can get in on the creativity.

For the text box will you be able to specify the font size at some point? I found for my small model house I could only get 2 letters on it. The image box would be a way around this but it is a little more advanced for the buyer.

The placement of the boxes requires orienting your model first. Is there a way to snap the view or the box to the model's geometry? Otherwise you have to do it by eye.

Thanks

Oh I see. I made a squarish box thinking that it would wrap. I just need to make it a wide rectangle. Thanks

Hi

It is exclusive feature and maybe will revolutionize customization soon. As I see it image-based 3Dviewer which shows result and can render also online. It would be really cool if this feature will able make interactive previews with simulations of all SW materials (via specific shaders). In this case all buyers will see more realistic simulation for their future prints (include customized).

I already tested it (maybe, was first) here http://shpws.me/IPbe

You could test it with attached pictures also.

Thank you for new really cool possibilities!

Hi guys...

This is a very cool feature!!! Thank you!!

I'm trying to make my Snitch Ring Box customizable, but I have some questions.

- In the image attached, you can see that the text not follow properly the curvature of the model, it's possible to fix this?
- Would be great if the first position of the model at the viewer, It was one that shows the customization, in my case, the first position is exactly the opposite.

Thank you!

UrbanoRodriguez:

If I follow correctly, you want to have the text parallel with the bottom edge of the model. Right now the text is based on the normals of the faces (based on the center) so it curves parallel to that. We currently don't have a way to make it curve in another direction but it certainly is a good idea.

panguver: Thats a great idea to have multi-material support. I hope its an improvement we can make in the future as well.

Extroo: yeah the text scales with the height of the box. keep in mind that the number of characters which can be included may be different depending on what characters you use:

www is 3
iiiiiiiiii is 10 and they both fit in the same space

I was wondering how to achieve customization with this new design!

Unfortunately I am having a few issues.

https://www.shapeways.com/product/3NU42DPQL

1. I activated a text box but was then unable to activate an image box. Tried re-editing the model and still could not add it. Maybe I'm clicking things in an improper sequence? The file needs to be rotated prior to selecting the box centers so I might be clicking wrong in that step and causing problems.

2. In my case the customization zone is round but it's conceivable that an image/text could overflow the round area. So hopefully there is an image scaler that let's the user optimize the image in a non-square display area. Otherwise I need to make the square box fit in the circle which would reduce customization area.

3. When I try to enter three letters into the text box only the middle letter is filling the box. There appears to be no auto sizing or ability to manually adjust size or to reposition things within the customization zone. I'm using Chrome.

Try to reduce height of text box using handles on it's sides.

This is a great feature to have but I have a few questions:

Can multiple text blocks be added?
I can't see how to do that. Text wrapping would be desirable as well.

Is there a way to better position the box, rather than just eyeballing it?

The text entry does not take punctuation or special characters. Just an oversight?

Finally, any thoughts about font style selection in the future?

Hi,

I have some suggestions else.

1. Can designer add to single model the several selectable (by buyer) customizations? As example, I want add one image and one/several text customizations to single model. And buyer could be select one/several customizations as he want.

2. Add "Fit" option (for buyer) for ability map (fit non-proportional) the custom image to customization area. Now customer's image just centered/scaled to area of customization.

3. Add possibility to copy/paste or/and save customization as template in account. It is not easy process the delicate map "customization" to model, and I have very many similar models with same dimensions/construction and different ornamental motif around. Such saved templates will add me ability make customization for other 100+ models by easy way.

4. Add buttons "fit model to screen", "align to nearest plane model (xy, xz, yz)" and ability to change perspective to parallel projection in 3D window for more accurate mapping customization to target model.

Thank you very much again!

Really Cool !!

But there's a little "printthrough"-Problem:



This will be a GREAT feature !

Markus

That's rather limiting. You really need to work on having word wrap capability with the ability to center align multiple lines within the box - despite the can of worms - so the customization area can be better utilized.

While a smaller rectangle helps fit the text in the desired area I found that entering "abc def' cuts off parts of the "a" and the "f", but if I type in "abc xyz" the characters are fully displayed. I can't attach a screen grab at the moment from this computer so you will need to recreate the bug.

And why can't I add an image box in addition to the text box? Is that also a limitation? For now adding an an image of text is probably the way to overcome the text box limitations.

Thank you !!

I could delete and re-edit the image box after you folks added it for me. Maybe it was a processing delay or something?