Final Negotiations on FD/FUD

that's still more than double the price he would have payed before.

I'm aware of that. I've done that with another model where I ganged 20 small items onto a sprue. The thing is .. I've been praising Shapeways on the model railroad websites. Now .. none of the small parts I've uploaded to Shapeways make any sense ordering individually. Those people who follow my links to Shapeways .. will look .. and leave. Sure .. I can gang together however many items I can and mass print. Ok. Fine. so a customer instead of ordering one or two items has to order 20,30 or 50. The reason that there was so much excitement over FUD was the ability to have fine detail prints. This was of interest I know with the modeling crowd. A modeler might want say .. a fire plug in OO scale let's say. He or she might want two or three .. but now they have to purchase 30 ea? Just saying. The designer can order those 30 or 40 or 50 .. sure. He/She can then sell them individually to a customer. Ok. Got it. Just saying .. pretty much puts a stop to FUD sales for small items via the shop.

Yes, and it's a fraction of the $54 he'd pay under the current pricing scheme.

@eTraxx -- Instead of 50 fire hydrants, can you develop a Hero Kit? Some fire hydrants, mail boxes, park benches, chairs, light poles, etc. and gang them all together?

Yeah, not optimal. I get it. See my own previous grouses. I'm right there with you.

Here's how I feel about FUD.
It's great!

Here's how I feel about FUD pricing.
The previous price was the trial period price and was announced as such. The trial is now over.

Why do Shapeways need to have a trial period for a new material?
Because they need to gauge the popularity, useage and their overall cost.

Why has Shapeways now introduced FUD with a different pricing structure?
Because, due to the popularity and useage, the overall cost to them wasn't covered in the trial period.

To put it bluntly, we as designers have to adapt to the pricing structure.

My advice to those creating lots of individual miniatures, make up different groups as one model (they may need to be sprued together). Ask your customers what groups they'd like to see (maybe offer a discount for suggestions) Advertise the models as the group pack. Price the pack reasonably... and most of all, see the mainstream pricing structure as an advantage, after all the FUD cc price has decreased.

The above is my feelings and opinion... take it or leave it

Sadly I think it's going to push more of us model railway people down the road of having to buy our own stuff and resell it ourselves to the final consumer.

it's a change in role from being a drop-shipper to a small-scale manufacturer. It's also going to bring us increased costs which we are going to our customers, so we are going to have to think much more carefully about our pricing and what will sell.

But we have a wonderful new medium here, there is so much we can do that would not have been viable before, but it necessary for us and our market to mature a little and move on.


Tom

Tom, you put it much better then I tried to in my rambling comment. You said "it's a change in role from being a drop-shipper to a small-scale manufacturer" .. ha. In that one sentence you summed up what I was *attempting* to say.

Yes well I've been thinking about this for a while myself, so I've had time to crystallize my thoughts

Yeah right, I'll leave it. Going back to WSF.

Everything is supply and demand. When the supply decided to introduce measures to cut demand, demand will drop. And eventually there is no need to supply. The huge demand during the trial period will never be. Everybody loses.

BTW, FUD is not that great. My trial pieces suffers huge breakage due to the brittle nature. I won't dare re-pack and re-ship the products to my customers. I suspect the operators in Shapeways knew that too. I think a lost of pieces break during handling and that's one of the factors of the delays. And they need to reprint my broken parts too.

I think this increase is a simple way for Shapeways to kill two birds with one stone:

1. Clearing the backlog by cutting demand without the need to subcontract another printer.
2. More profitability through increased price for most parts sold in this material.

Before this increase, I guess scale models enthusiasts were ordering several parts in several shops. Now, they will think twice before they order something...

I'm wondering : Any plan to push the polygon limit to 2 Million for this material ?

@CGD - I've had parts in both FD & FUD. FD is quite brittle and sub 1mm areas break easily, but the parts in FUD have a fair amount of flexibility at 0.3 to 0.5 mm wall thickness. There's not alot of difference between FD & FUD, except for the material density, FUD is printed at double the resoultion of FD... FUD will appear quite transparent (~90% transparency), whereas FD is noticably more opaque (~60% or less)... are you sure you received the right material?

You can take a look at my recent shipment:
https://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=5621&a mp;start=0&

I ordered FUD. According to your description, I could have received 9 styles of figures in FUD and one style in FD?

That would have been very strange.

As for my previous test print of vehicles, I used the same models for WSF to print. So they were built with 0.75 to 1mm wall thickness. I got 1mm guns of FUD broken a lot. And one vehicle suffered a 3 feet (I meter) drop and shattered like glass, but that might be a FD according to your description.

that's odd... because the FUD pieces i have are very flexible...

in fact some 1:6 scale sword blade blanks i ordered using the image popper came out paper thin because of a miscalculation of the thickness (probably my fault ) and while they are useless for the purpose i intended... they are literally flexible enough to tie them in a loose knot without them breaking. and a miniature knife i printed in FUD has blade less than a millimeter thick at the thickest part and probably .3 mm at the nonbeveled point and edge and it's not remotely brittle...

i'm still waiting on my second shipment of much more detailed FUD pieces and am really hoping that your experience is the exception to the rule and mine is not.

I have a solution. I have a program that will auto generate stl files. If you provide me your designs customers could select all the designs they want from the list and it would auto generate a pack with them in it.

Pros: Only 1 startup fee per pack
Cons:
1) Takes 3 to 10 minutes to generate pack depending how quick shapeways render engine is running
2) New model would be sold on my ICC shop so I need to keep track of sales and pay you instead of shapeways.
3) You need to trust me with your stl files.

It is an option. I can price it in 1 of 2 ways.

1) Each model has a packing percentage and customer only gets charged $5.50 per block($0.50 to cover my costs) so a model with 500,000 triangles takes up 50 spaces customer can buy up to 100.
2) Have triangle limit and minimum order and include startup in cost of each model.

If people are interested I will set it up. If people aren't fine.

That's interesting, but you left out an option... You could tell us what program this is and let us do it...

I wrote it myself. It generates group packs and custom products and then uploads them to shapeways. Requires a PHP server with cron jobs. I guess I could sell the code also but figured more would be interested if I maintained it.

See, that's information that I would have considered important enough to be in the initial offer

Geeze. I have PHP running on my Windows XP using Apache. After 5 beers though .. "cron jobs" .. just makes me cross-eyed.

ya I do to, to test things. My server farm is in Toronto though. Do not recommend sending your clients to your personal computer.

The nice thing if one person hosts everything is people can buy products from different designers and get all grouped together.

I can pick up a dedicated domain for this service and instead of sending people to shapeways send them to www.????.com/yourshop

they see all your stuff first then get asked about others stuff afterwards. group together send to shapeways for them to order the pack.

Yeah, but imagine the meta customer service nightmares if one wall was too thin or some part gets returned.

I would like some software tool which can take a dozen strange shaped parts and pack them together so that the 10% density rule is satisfied as well as minimum clearance. I have done it by hand sometimes, but it can be tough!

Hey Guys,
Please hold tight,

We did not increase the price to kill demand, we have invested in new machines to handle the demand...

Nor is Shapeways trying and make the most cash possible from a popular product, we are just trying to get the balance right, as you can imagine, under $1 to print, clean and pack a delicate item is not sustainable at this point.

We are listening intently to your reactions and will do our absolute best to ensure that FD/FUD remains a viable option for your items...

Keep on letting us know what you think is a reasonable price, let us know of any quality issues you have and we will continue to try and make it happen.

Thanks again for all of your input..