Continuous Improvement: Single Page Product Edit

Discussion in 'Official Announcements' started by katkinkead, Aug 22, 2016.

  1. katkinkead
    katkinkead Well-Known Member
    Hey everyone,

    In an effort to clean up and simplify the process of setting up your shop we will be releasing a series of improvements that will optimize the action of enabling your products for sale. Today’s improvement is called Single Page Edit, which can be found in the “Sell a Product” section of your model edit page.

    Previously “Sell a Product” was divided out into two sections; details and selling. After much feedback and experimentation, we found that by consolidating these two tabs into one page, users have a much more streamlined experience setting their products for sale.

    As we mentioned, Single Page Edit is one of many improvements we will adding to your product set-up experience. Last week, we released the ability to set your product for sale by material family.

    We hope you enjoy this new feature. Stay tuned, we’ve got more good things on the way!
     

    Attached Files:

    mygadgetlife likes this.
  2. seriaforma
    seriaforma Well-Known Member
    Much better thank you!

    Maybe a new interface to organize and manage shop inventory next?
     
    crnm and katkinkead like this.
  3. Ngineer
    Ngineer Well-Known Member
    Great improvement!
     
  4. coelian276
    coelian276 Well-Known Member
    Can't find is the Beta ckeckbox.
     
  5. MitchellJetten
    MitchellJetten Shapeways Employee CS Team
    We're definitely looking into improving these, as quoted by Henrik from the Product team yesterday:

     
    Last edited: Aug 24, 2016
    mygadgetlife likes this.
  6. MitchellJetten
    MitchellJetten Shapeways Employee CS Team
    This has been fixed :D
     
  7. Sparkshot
    Sparkshot Well-Known Member
    Must admit, as whingy and critical as I often am this improvement is making life a LOT smoother and easier!

    Many thanks.
     
    HenrikRydberg likes this.
  8. Rick_D_Ryo
    Rick_D_Ryo Active Member
    Hey,
    Add me to the list of "much better now" :)
    Thanks for this update!
    Cheers!
     
    HenrikRydberg likes this.
  9. draw
    draw Well-Known Member
    Have the old gray renders been removed from all the product pages? Was there an announcement about this somewhere that I missed? Or is this just a temporary bug?
     
  10. NimlothCQ
    NimlothCQ Well-Known Member
    Hi there!

    Indeed - as part of collecting user feedback, we've made an improvement to hide the gray renders when:

    Either
    • There are in-material renders present
    And/Or
    • There are user-uploaded photos/renders present.
    This aims to help our designers and shop owners better merchandise and present their products with their choice of high quality visuals (renders/photos), without having the generic/low-rez old gray render impede on their presentation :)
     
  11. draw
    draw Well-Known Member
    Well this puts me in a bit of a bind because very often I have used the old gray render as my default render for wsf, because the wsf renders are, in general, quite horrible. The generic/low-rez gray render is often infinitely superior to the wsf or pwsf renders, particularly if you need to reveal certain details or shape contours to the customer.

    So my user feedback is how can we access the old grey renders for download and use in our stores if that is our preference? I'm assuming that if it is hidden it exists for each model and must be accessible in some way. Could you add a link to the old grey render somewhere on the model edit page so it can continue to be downloaded and used in the future? I'm just asking for the choice and to retain the processes and procedures I have been using for so many years with previously uploaded products.
     
  12. draw
    draw Well-Known Member
    For example,

    old low-rez gray render can be very awesome!
    [​IMG]
    wsf material render simulates a retinal-eye disorder
    [​IMG]




     
  13. HenrikRydberg
    HenrikRydberg Shapeways Employee Design Team
    Hi Draw.

    We want to provide renders that mimic how the 3D prints would look as close as possible. While the black and white renders brought up the surface difference in great technical detail, it also created unrealistic expectations. E.g. the example you provide, the surface of the 3D print would never be as sharp and clearly visible as in the picture.

    But since the black and white renders are great for technical use, we still show and use them with My Models.
     
  14. draw
    draw Well-Known Member
    Sometimes the sf renders are just fine, but it depends on the model. But if your goal is to generate lowered expectations for the cases when the renders are awful you're doing a good job. There needs to be some middle ground that lets us adjust between the mushy low expectation renders and something with a tiny bit of additional shading or line edge enhancements, depending on the model. Models that are more technical in nature, i.e. mechanical parts for drones, cameras, etc., are better served with additional shading relief and darkened line edges. If the product is just a blob of something uncomplicated that sits on a shelf then a foggy image could be just fine.

    I'll assume the old gray render will be inaccessible unless we opt for the basic render option, assuming that option will remain on the site. The image in the My Models section is very small and would need to be resized for use but also at the cost of being stuck with a lot of pixelation, but that would definitely fulfill the lowered expectation concept.

    I don't really want to go the route of rendering using some other program. Any suggestions for a different work-around we can use that might help manage customer expectations yet show some additional detail?
     
  15. Sparkshot
    Sparkshot Well-Known Member
    I agree with the above, the 'old grey' redners were better for certain things.

    It showed details up that the material renders do not show, and this doesn't always mean they won't print becasue there are several materials available.

    I liked the old ones as they revealed where the detail was and in my case they also revealed where I needed to improve my models as they can be very visual if your designs are too 'polygonny'

    As a customer looking at other peoples designs the old grey was useful in highlighting where their model was good and where it was crap, as a result I think removing this from all the shops was a bad move. Should have given us the choice.

    They did need mending though as many kept zooming out for some reason.
     
  16. draw
    draw Well-Known Member
    I have been trying to figure out how the old renders might be accessed for download when needed, so here's my list of potential workarounds. Will any of these work (without damaging the store)?

    1. When wanting to download a grey sale render, toggle the store setting from using material renders to only using the grey renders. Download the grey render you want, and then change the setting back to use material renders. Possible danger: all renders and previously uploaded images get corrupted (captions get lost and other bad things happen).

    2. Is there a naming convention for all the renders that are generated such that you could take the web link address for another material render and perhaps just change a few numbers in the link address to access the grey render? In other words is there a material code embedded in each render link that can be changed to get a different render? This seems like a great immediate solution to get the grey renders without worrying about the rest of the store. No additional work or worry for Shapeways and people who need the old renders can easily get to them.

    3. Generate the grey render the same way Shapeways does, perhaps using a script in a 3rd party program that will render things consistently with the same appearance in a grey scale mode. Ick, way more work than I want to do.

    4. Open a bogus store just to generate grey scale renders. Set up the store to not use the material renders, upload a model to it when you want the grey scale image, download the grey scale image, and then delete the model from the bogus store. Also no additional work for Shapeways but not as simple as solution #2.

    Any other ideas?
     
  17. LrdSatyr8
    LrdSatyr8 Well-Known Member
    I don't mind the grayscale renders... sometimes they show off the detail of a model better then the material render itself. I know if you've got a model in FXD/FUD you can barely see the details, but with the grayscale they can clearly see them. What I would like to see is that if you generate a render position, that it will also update the thumbnail pics that are displayed when you click on your models list. Right now, the thumbnails that are shown are the very first images that are generated when you upload the model. Sometimes when it's uploaded the model is in an odd position and you can't make out what it's suppose to be unless you rotate it or something. But when that first thumbnail is generated in that hard to identify pose, it's next to impossible to tell what it is at that small size!
     
  18. draw
    draw Well-Known Member
    There is a silver lining to the change in that now I don't have two of the grey renders when I re-upload the grey render to the system as the default image. So there's that. It's just a matter of retaining access to the old render if we want to use it. My fear is that generation of the old grey render may also be ended without adequate warning, which would kill any workaround to getting a copy of the render.