Okay, so about four weeks ago my curiosity got the better of me and I ordered the pendants in FUD and Silver - but I did it by creating .STL files of earrings composed of two of the pendants (one for each earring) in each file, rotated 45 degrees so that a corner hole was at the top of each, effectively halving the handling costs if I then used them as singular pendants instead of paired earrings.
Definitely more expensive than joining them all into one file, but until I have the suitable skills/skilled friends to separate the metal expertly for me, I thought it might work out better this way. Especially since I have a weakness for earrings. Worse case scenario would only be that I can't sell them and end up giving them away to friends and family during birthdays or holidays and keep my favourites for myself.
Do Shapeways still send out natural-paired earrings with complimentary earring hooks? I ordered them on the assumption that they did, but it's no biggy if they don't. I can just attempt to sell them on separately as pendants or attach some earring findings myself.
Expected ship date says 18th - but they haven't arrived and the status says still In Production. I'm assuming Expected ship date is actually the 30th for that order though, since if I count 15 working days on from the start of April and add a week for Silver being behind, then that works out about right.
I have a different order that says Expected ship date 30th but was actually shipped around the 18th and has arrived at my friend's house safely already - so not sure what's going on in there on the My Orders page?
Youknowwho4eva, I may take you up on that rendering offer for other items I make... although I think I might prefer to be taught how to take my .STL files and render them to make them look realistically Silver or FUD-ish. When learning texturing in University (I did Computer Games Design), realistic texturing tended to take a back seat for me. I think put more effort into trying to make the games actually work interactively than I did trying to learn how to use shaders and lighting properly, although I did browse tutorials on them occasionally...