All Recently new to Shapeways myself but an avid blender user I thought some may find this useful. Blender can export .x3d/.vrml for those wanting to utilise FCS but there is a trick. If you are using any of the newer version of blender that come with cycles, make sure you have blender set to Blender Internal before you export - otherwise any textures you have on your model will not be included in the resulting .x3d export file. I use Blender 2.63 and have had no problem successfully exporting .x3d with textures that shapeways accepts fine. The only thing I have noticed is that the exported model appears to be x10 scaled (in my case) and I get a message on upload that it was too big and shapways has rescaled to the mm scale (which is what I selected) and then it is fine and the size I created it at. Hope this helps all you blender users in some way.
Merci beaucoup ! For the size "problem", at scale 1 it was uploaded X 10, and I had to scale X 10 my object in Blender to have it at normal size, not X 0.1 :confused !!! Merci encore!
Thanks for the feedback. From my own experience to date, all my .stl models (assuming 1BU=1mm as outlined in This Tutorial on prepping blender files ) upload and print at the correct size when selecting mm scale, however appear x10 scaled (or 1BU=1cm) on upload when exported as .x3d. I realise that the tutorial in question is only refering to .stl models and I have assumed the same scale would work for the .x3d export as well (which it does not appear to do) This is most likely due to differences in the export file formats (or something) but should be kept in mine when using Blender for .x3d/.vrml full colour sandstone models.