Hi all,
I'm terriby green on Shapeways and it's going to take me a while just to nose around and get vaguely oriented. So please do your best to forgive my clumsiness until I get a little familiar with the ropes
I'm not new to 3D design though. In over 10 years I've run into several good pieces of software, some of them preposterously sophisticated, some brutally simple, most of them somewhere in between. And when it comes to do some
practical design - minute mechanical parts, a new computer bench for my wife, a special clamp I desperately need and must contrive by myself - I regularly end up using AC3D (www.inivis.com).
It lays pretty much on the 'brutal' side: very few whistles and bells, straightforward, essential - definitely a Jeep, not a Rolls-Royce. But it allows me to keep an eye on each vertex, face and normal, to make sure my model has no holes, to smooth it down, to minimize the vertices count and eventually to export the outcome as .obj, .dae, .stl , .3ds, and quite a number of other formats.
I'm
not advertising it, I'm just asking you (the Shapeways team) to consider adding it to your list of supported applications. Yes, I'm pretty lazy and don't feel like switching to another app as long as the one I'm most comfortable with (and still curse pretty often) may grant me the astonishing privilege of
touching my virtual models with my own hands