Destination Moon by Max Grueter
Today we are excited to announce our newest material, Frosted Extreme Detail! It uses the same resin and printer as our popular material Frosted Ultra Detail (FUD), but it’s almost twice as detailed! Frosted Extreme Detail, or FXD for short, 3D prints using 16 micron layers (vs FUD’s 29 micron layers). This means 3D prints that have unprecedented detail and surface finish, sharper edges, less stepping, and stronger walls and wires. It’s perfect for the most demanding miniatures, figurines, and molds and masters for casting.
Aside from a smaller max bounding box, design guidelines are the exact same as FUD, so many of your existing FUD designs are printable and you can get started designing amazing new things right away! Pricing for this material is $5.00 startup and $5.99 per CC. The difference in price compared to FUD is that the thinner layers take longer to print and use more material.
HOn30 PBR 25 Ton Climax #1694 v1
Example of painted Frosted Extreme Detail, a finish many designers like to do themselves after receiving the prints. Mini Panton Chair by kspence
3D Prints by Heroforge
Also an important reminder for those using our acrylic family. As Frosted Detail customers have known for a few weeks, we’re retiring our Frosted Detail material on April 29th. This material prints fully enclosed in support material, which then needs to be cleaned away. The process is wasteful, expensive, and the difficulties in production and cleaning causes late and broken parts. We’ve tried hard hard to improve this process, but it does not meet our high standards and are focused on developing better alternatives for you.
4/27 Update: After the transition, designs that you’ve printed in FD will still be accessible on your My Models page, and can be printed in FUD or FXD as long as it meets bounding box requirements. If you have any questions, particularly issues around the bounding box for multi part models, please contact us at service@shapeways.com.
The statement “all your existing FUD designs are printable” currently clashes with a markedly smaller maximum bounding box size on the updated Materials page (as already decried in the forum). Could you please clarify ? (And btw making that phrase a hyperlink into ones models does not make much sense in my opinion)
Most of my models which were able to print in FUD now say unable to print in FXD, despite the claims that the requirements are the same…. any clarification on this matter? thanks! 🙂
“all your existing FUD designs are printable” is not accurate by any stretch. Not a single model that I have that has printed successfully is available to print in FXD. What is the deal?
Hello SW,
Well well, I checked on one single kit (Our Mercedes Benz in N 1:160 scale, see: http://shpws.me/CNQY ) how the price would evolve in FXD. The Mercedes has been printed numerous times in FUD with 100% success rate.
And what shows up?
I get a red cross ‘not printable’ message for this kit in FXD.
The selling colum says ‘not printable’ for FXD.
Sorry Shapeways, but do you never learn? Why is SWreally never ever testing anything? Or is this just one of your many many many bugs you seem to create in the meanwhile?
Come on, this is pathetic.
So, end of testing phase for us.
Good bye FXD.
Regards,
Maurice
RAILNSCALE
Who welcomes: properly cleaned models, constant print quality, proper/constant print orientation, better packaging and far better quality checks over FXD.
Thanks for the feedback about printability. We’re aware of and working through the issue and should have an update and hopefully solution later today. Sorry about that, and we’ll follow up on this thread this afternoon. In the meantime, if there’s a pressing order you have in FXD, please reach out to service@shapeways.com and we’d be happy to help.
Hi,
Thanks for all the feedback on these issues, and it’s good to hear that people are excited and starting to try to print stuff. Sorry for the confusion and frustration. We’re aware of the issues that have been mentioned, and I wanted to provide some context:
Models are Not Printable, No Reason
This was a bug that we encountered during this launch, and we implemented a fix late friday afternoon that resolved most cases. Most models that were coming up as Not Printable, but there was no reason should now be printable. If you run into additional models that still have this issue, please contact customer service and they can help you to reprocess the models.
Design Rules vs Bounding Box:
Apologies on the confusion there. We don’t generally think of max bounding box as a design rule, and didn’t mean to trick anyone with the our initial claims for the same design rules. We realized it might be confusing, and updated it in later communications.
Small Bounding Box:
This material is incredibly slow to print. 50mm models take about 48 hours, 100mm models about 96 hours and 200mm about 192 hours. That’s 8 days. The risk of machine crashes increases right alongside print time, as does the cost of the crash, especially if its late in the build. We’ve launched with 50mm because of these risks, but will work with our manufacturing teams to monitor the reliability of prints, and assuming everything goes well will likely be able to expand the bounding box (although not to as large as FUD) relatively quickly.
Bounding Box of Multi-Part Files
With this launch we’ve uncovered a bug in the way that we’re limiting the printability of multi-part files using the max BB. While min BB is calculating per part as it should, max BB is checked against the overall model BB not the individual part ones. This means that if you have a file which is 200 x 100 x 50 mm, and is made up of 4 parts, each of which is 50 x 50 x 50, this file should be printable in FXD and unfortunately right now is not. We understand the frustration this can cause, and that it limits the number of models that you can print in this already restrictive bounding box. We’re working hard on a solution to this, and will keep everyone updated.
Success Rate
We mentioned it in the email, but it’s definitely a bit confusing: We’re going to update printability so that FUD and FD prints count towards FXD success rate when we deprecate FD on the 29th. Until then, your FXD models will have no print history. After that, success rate of models that have been printed and FD and FUD will be set, and models will automatically be moved out of first to try when appropriate.
Best,
Raphael
Materials Product Manager
… and STILL many models cannot be selected in FXD.
For example this model: http://shpws.me/CM3G
This bus has been printed many many times successfully. For FXD it seems not printable.
And this is just one example. There are many more.
Shapeways: you didn’t solve your bugs.
Thanks for flagging, and sorry for the inconvenience.
We just updated this particular model manually so you can now print in FXD. For your context, we implemented a fix on Friday that seems to have resolved most issues, but there are a few edge cases we’re working through. Thanks so much for your patience – I’m sure this is frustrating and appreciate all the feedback to help us improve.
I think that FUD is extremely fragile, you state that FXD is stronger, can you try to describe by how much ?
Same as my reply below, but just so you get it in your inbox 🙂
To provide some more context, FUD is stronger than FD and FXD is stronger than FUD. Strength really depends on the model design. Designs that wouldn’t survive in FUD might be manufacturable in FXD…if you really want to push the limits, though, I’d suggest trying Print It Anyway. Hope that helps!
it says that is stronger than fud, so, im wondering, how much stronger? compared to, frosted detail, the frosted ultra detail, and the storng and flexible
To provide some more context, FUD is stronger than FD and FXD is stronger than FUD. Strength really depends on the model design. Designs that wouldn’t survive in FUD might be manufacturable in FXD…if you really want to push the limits, though, I’d suggest trying Print It Anyway. Hope that helps!
Could you print/make a 1/35 scale 1940s coke bottle from this material? Is there a tinted green frosted material?
Hey Daniel,
I’m not sure exactly how large that kind of coke bottle is, but I think it’s between 8 and 12 inches. That would make it 6-9mm tall at 1/35 scale. The astronauts in the photo above are about 12mm tall, so this size is definitely doable from a detail perspective, although you’ll need to sprue multiple bottles together to meet the minimum bounding box requirement.
We don’t offer this material in any colors, however it dyes very well, so if you’d like a tinted green part all you need is some RIT dye.
Best,
Raphael
What is happening to items that have FD as the only material selected by the designer?
Items that only had FD enabled are no longer for sale. The designer was notified of the change, and will need to enable the product in another material to continue to sell it.
Best,
Raphael
Hey All,
Raphael here again. It’s great to see that you have all ordered a LOT of FXD. Glad you’re excited about it 😉
Wanted to update you on a few of the issues in we’ve seen in this launch and where we are on fixing them.
Max Bounding Box per part vs Max Bounding Box per model
As many of you noticed, there was a bug in how we calculated the printability of FXD based on max bounding box (BB). While we were correctly checking min BB per part, max BB was checking both on per part and per model. This means that models where the overall oriented bounds are larger than the materials max BB were not printable, and substantially decreased the number of models which were printable in this material.
Last week we fixed this issue, and any newly uploaded model will now correctly check max BB per part. If you have models which should be printable but are currently not for this reason, reuploading them will fix that. We’re working on a potential solution to back process existing models and recalculate printability, but this will be a few weeks because we want to be careful to create a solution that addresses the maximum number of people’s needs while not decreasing existing model’s printability.
Original Bounding Box is Printable, Oriented Bounding Box is not
In the past we have only checked max BB printability on oriented bounding box, on the assumption that oriented bounds are always smaller than original bounds. However, as some of you have noticed, there are certain rare cases where because oriented bounds optimizes for bounding box volume, not fit into a machine, the original BB is printable, but the oriented BB is not, and thus the model itself is incorrectly not printable. We’re working to fix this, but like the Max BB per part vs Max BB per model issue above, will take some time to ensure that we don’t negatively impact printability of any existing models.
Not all models are visible in FXD in the CSV
There was a bug which was discovered after FXD launch which prevented all models from appearing in FXD in the CSV. This has been fixed, and you can now use the CSV to update pricing and for-sale status of all FXD models.
As always, post any questions or concerns here, and reach out to service@shapeways.com if you need help.
Best,
Raphael