Absolutely WOW !

She sure did! hehe

I announced it here:

https://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=4897&a mp;start=0&

Just stumbled upon this pic at flickr ... nice hah?






Btw, anyone trying to contact me via private messages... i have issues with my inbox ..

If you dont get replies from me that's because i never got your PM..
try contact me here dizingof3d at walla.com


Nancy , any news ? i'm itching to order some more full color stuff


Cheers

Thread continues here.

Hey, thanks for pointing this out. Judging from the model, it seems like the process your white tiger used was dipped in superglue. We don't use that process (we have in the past) because it is messy, creates toxic fumes, and leads to parts that are less strong than our current process.

Your elephant looks like it is overbaked, which was an issue we brought up with our supplier as well. We are looking into alternative methods, which I can't say much more about at this point unfortunately--hopefully I'll have an update shortly (in a month) on this matter. I'm pushing to get some results sooner though. I have some nice Color Sandstone project I would like to work on as well.

Thanks,
Nancy

Hey Dizingof,

Thanks for taking the time to give feedback on where we need to step it up. All of us want to see better results on sandstone, so the team is working hard on it right now.

Nancy, good to hear you guys are working on alternatives. We're all excited to hear more as you're able to share it.

WOW, i agree!

Hey, Dizingof, care to explain your hollowing out process?

Glenn

Looks awesome!

I like to share my experiences as well. Because I am sure the Shapies wil consider them.

I Printed some full color scans of people. I had no problem with the color shapeways prints but the waxy finish was very spotty at times.

I tried i.competitive service and they where very helpful. I enjoyed the fact that when something was wrong with the model, in my case the seams of the texture I got an email from technical capable person and we could quickly sort it out.

The finish they used was much, much better. Also the are a little bit more pricey but I can use 1mm wall thickness instead of 3 so the total price went from ~60 euro at shapeways to 25 at i.competitive service. On top of that it is much more convenient for me to use thinner walls since some legs of my statuettes are to thin to support a wall thickness of 3mm.

But the colors where completely off! My first try they where way to light almost if the wrong gamma was used and the blacks where almost non existent and purple-ish. So I tried again compensating the texture to be darker that result was also bad since the black (or darker colors) where off again and purple-ish.

Also I explicitly asked that they print the model standing up since for human figures that improves the quality enormously (otherwise you get rings on the belly) And they failed that as well..

So I am still searching for a 3D print service who can reliably give me the same quality in color, finish etc.

My hope is that shapeways is that service since for everything else they have consistency down!

I did order 2 statuettes in the new frosted material. Curious to see what that will do!

The colors wear off on the Shapeways model or the other models?

I'm going to speak to a few more potential partners this week and next week on better solutions for color printing.

I definitely feel your pain and your need--there's a project I have in the pipeline that is dependent on having good color prints as well.

The colors of the i.material models where not good on arrival.

The originator of this thread had superb results with the same company.

That was maybe because he uses actual blacks in his model. I use photographs to create the texture so there is no black black but just dark shades of other colours.

Shapeways prints those colors perfectly but has a wax finish I do not like since it is spotty sometimes.

I am now trying 3dcreationlab.co.uk they seem to be very serious about quality although they are more expensive. I have to wait and see for the results though.

Please Let me know if you find a good color print service, I'll keep you posted if this one turns out well.

Again Hope that shapeways fixes the various ailments since I find them more convenient overal..

I see, would you like us to send you some models with and without the wax and see what you prefer? If you e-mail me a model you'd like to try out (nancy@shapeways.com), I can run some tests for you.

Without the wax might be nice in some areas, but may have downsides as well. But we can definitely try it!

That would be awesome. I want to add my own finish anyways and perhaps adding no finish form shapeways would be an option. Or maybe Shapeways could introduce a choise in finish?

Love to test it in any case! I sent you an email.

@tristan_bethe i'm actually surprised with your results
can you post some closeups? and those 1mm models ?

I have to say i'm still amazed by the quality i got (pics on top) - colors are *bright* , white it .. *white*.. and the smooth finish made my model look and feel "porcelain"...

I too hope Nancy will find other color partners that would make our color prints as amazing as that other 3d printing service.

It seems Full Color Sandstone is an "underdog" material .. and it shouldn't be that at all..

Hey Asher,

Sure, I'll take some pics tonight. Have to say To be save I used 1.4 mm but the model is rock solid.

However 3dcreationlab.co.uk could print it in 1mm but did not want to since it would not suck up the infiltrant enough. Could be also a reason SW does not do 1mm walls...

See this for very good color representation from our Belgian friends. A few more orders are scheduled to arrive early next week and we'll see the results.

You may be using a different conversion process or upload format and that may cause the dis-coloring.

I would be interested to give the guys from down-under a try (starting with a P and ending with onoko). They claim 1.5 mm and 0.80 USD per cm3. Would end up at 0.95 USD incl. import tax.

However, shipping costs to here seems a little prohibitive. We should be able to cut shipping costs when we combine orders. If somebody from continental Europe would be interested, let me know.

Hi Ulrich,

Yes your model looks stunning. I use a normal rgb jpeg texture. My models are too big to go trough their upload process so I sent it directly to them by email. I use .wrl as model format.

Curious how you sent your models. I've seen good results from those guys. I'll take some comparisons pics and I'll add the texture as well.

That might in fact be the cause. We have converted the texture into vertex colors and I just uploaded a 500,000 triangle mesh in VRML the other day.

Their upload is a little weird. You always have to do it twice before it works.
(but at least, they are not sending any "Thanks for uploading " spam)

same with my model - you have in zbrush an option to transfer texture into vertex color then you can retouch the surface like a Photoshop.. - can be done also in Meshlab (free)

Aha! That might indeed be the solution then!

Can very well be that Shapeways engineers knows this and make the conversion themselves.

The first time I wanted to print something at i.competitive service they spotted seams in between my uvw shards.

I was surprised since I never encountered the same problem at shapeways and used the same workflow.They where very friendly and helped me to solve that issue and hence I use 'Solidify' from Flaming Pear (https://www.flamingpear.com/goodies.html) to continue the color where the texture stops.

Could this be an indication that Shapeways converts my texture to vertex colors since you would not use uvw coordinates anymore?

Related question: does that mean that the resolution of your 'texture' is limited to the number of vertices? So in case of the lion did you add extra vertices to up the res?

As promised I've added 2 images. 1.jpg shows the difference between my shapeways print and the i.materialse prints and 2.jpg shows the wall thickness of the i.competitive service prints

those 1.0- 1.4mm wall thickness models are amazing.

yes you need to subdivide your model to as much as possible triangles.
in Zbrush simply hit Ctrl+D few times - now that shapeways has increased the limit of triangles to 1 million that would make your job easy.