Road To Major Fud Improvements Starts With Repricing

Discussion in 'Official Announcements' started by Andrewsimonthomas, May 9, 2017.

  1. IntelXeon
    IntelXeon Well-Known Member
    there still using pentium 1 based servers
     
    1068084_deleted likes this.
  2. 1068084_deleted
    1068084_deleted Active Member
    no problem for me.
    I just wanted to communicate it;)
    I do not know the server size and how much load is on this.
    A beer on the maintenance team that need to fix that.

    PS. Instead of the tool for the printing direction, there would not be better a switch, the server says that it only -x or + x calculate? or -y ; +y or -z ; +z btw on the upload tab. With no preselection is calculated automatically.
     
    Last edited: Jun 17, 2017
  3. Also having issues with models processing for a long time. Think mine have been sitting for 12+ hours now. Maybe it's a hint that they're the ones with 25+ clearly separated shells?
     
  4. MMShapeways
    MMShapeways Well-Known Member
    Hi Mitchell

    Quick update, files are still struggling to process. Assume the developers haven't had chance to look at this yet. What have you guys been doing over there with your code? looks like someone's lobbed a turd in the punchbowl! :)

    Also, these aren't multi-part models as per another shop owner with the same problems. These are 10 items on the same sprue.

    Hopefully, the developer A Team will get onto this on Monday morning.

    Many thanks

    Simon
     
  5. MitchellJetten
    MitchellJetten Shapeways Employee CS Team
    We are aware of the ongoing issue with bigger models, please see other threads about this.
    Let's keep this topic regarding FUD repricing :)

    Mitch
     
    taz_of_boyds and 1068084_deleted like this.
  6. HOLDEN8702
    HOLDEN8702 Well-Known Member
    CAN'T BE SEEING THE SUPPORT MATERIAL PREVIEW FROM DAYS.

    NOW IT'S 9:30 H. IN EUROPE, THUS U.S.A. DESIGNERS ARE SLEEPING, SURE THERE ISN'T A HUGE TRAFFIC ON WEB JUST NOW.
     
  7. CybranKNight
    CybranKNight Well-Known Member
    Any update on Orientation implementation?
     
  8. HOLDEN8702
    HOLDEN8702 Well-Known Member

    WHEN WE'LL HAVE SOME NEWS ABOUT PRINT ORIENTATING TOOL? THIS SITUATION IS AN ABSOLUTE LACK OF RESPECT TO DESIGNERS.
     
  9. Andrewsimonthomas
    Andrewsimonthomas Well-Known Member
    @HOLDEN8702 we expect to give you an update shortly. We're making lots of progress and are looking forward to getting it into your hands as soon as we can.

    Regardless I'll check back in with you guys at the end of the week. Thanks for your patience.
     
  10. HOLDEN8702
    HOLDEN8702 Well-Known Member
    SURE YOU ARE HAPPY DOING "LOTS OF PROGRESS".

    ON MY OWN, ALL MY WORK IS ABSOLUTELY STOPPED WAITING FOR YOUR "LOTS OF PROGRESS".
    MY RATE OF SALES IS FREEZED TOO.

    I ONLY HOPE SOME PEOPLE WILL BE FIRED AFTER ALL THIS MESS.
     
  11. CybranKNight
    CybranKNight Well-Known Member
    I've got my fingers crossed for good news, I'm running out of time for my order! xD
     
  12. Derek66
    Derek66 Active Member
    If you feel angry enough to write to the CEO of Shapeways, Pete Weijmarshausen, don't bother. I sent him an email on the 6th June and have not even had an acknowledgment, let alone a reply. I thought I would try and chivy things along by asking Customer Service & Quality Manager, Kevin Nichols to check that his CEO had even seen my mail. No reply there either until I contacted a Customer Service Representative who has always been very helpful to me. At her prompting Kevin did then reply, but I think his he was more determined to demonstrate his "customer care" credentials to his junior than to me, because despite a promise that he would discuss my case with his CEO, I STILL HAVE NOT HEARD A THING FROM EITHER OF THEM!

    But I am small fry: orders through my shop, CLASSIC AIRSHIPS, amounted to just a few thousand dollars worth over the year before the price change, but as I explained to Mr W, I had been working extremely hard to double that over the next 12 months. But Airships in any scale are relatively BIG and out of 109 airship products that I have listed in my shop, the new pricing formula lowered the price on just six of them - all of the others increased; most very dramatically and some by well over 200%...
    upload_2017-6-27_23-24-0.png

    It would have been clear to any of the Shapeways guys involved that my airship business was about to be wrecked by the new pricing, but not one of them gave me a heads up before the event. None of them saw the need to make any special allowances for those of us that were to be very badly affected by the changes. They were all so very pleased with themselves at how jolly clever the new pricing formula is. So very pleased that they could apparently claim that they were acting for the common good : that extreme pain for a few was somehow justified for the good of the majority.

    Never mind the fact that those same people had never applied a simple bit of maths to tackle the insanity of the lack of per part charging for FUD over the years - something that might well have averted the need for extreme action now. Never mind the fact that the new formula actually amounts to heavily penalising anyone actually going deep into the 3rd Dimension - exactly what 3D printing was supposed to be all about.

    But why should they give an s.h.1.t when their own CEO clearly does not? Why should they see just how truly amateurish they are at customer service when they are so very busy doing their own really clever complicated stuff?

    The big lesson to learn here is NOT to have all of your eggs in one basket: that applies to the material you are printing in AND to who is doing the printing. Try not to limit yourself to the finer tolerances that Shapeways appear to offer (and how many of us have been getting more of those "help us resolve issues .." rejection emails lately anyway? ) And try to find time to test that your models upload ok to other platforms. That way you will always have emergency backstops available in the event of catastrophe like this one AND you will be ready to get on board with someone else when some decent competition finally comes Shapeways way.

    More easily said than done I know, but that is what I am in the process of doing right now. I have to revisit virtually all of my designs to "optimise" them against the new price formula so now is the time to thicken things up a bit and be ready to change horses altogether.
     
    taz_of_boyds likes this.
  13. taz_of_boyds
    taz_of_boyds Active Member
    Redraw and Able to Improve Pricing?

    Derek66,

    Have you able to get any of your pricing improved with changes to parting of your models? You really got dropped in the wilderness on your own with the sudden pricing improvements on Frosted Detail.

    It was painful for me with just my one almost production Hay Street Station, and I don't even have a shop yet. The complex curves of your models seem to be a further challenge in trying to control the volume of support material filler.

    Have you tried anything like breaking items into two model files with long body segments in one file and short parts (end caps etc.) in a second model file?

    All the best,
    Charles Sloane
     
  14. PenistoneRailwayWorks
    PenistoneRailwayWorks Well-Known Member
    Derek66, don't get me wrong I can completely understand why you are upset/mad about the pricing change, but you have to be able to view this from both sides. Yes your models have got more expensive, but maybe this is simply because they are more expensive to print than you were previously paying? Given the amount of support material required to print an airship surely you can see that every model of yours that was previously printed was probably being subsided, not by shapeways, but by other designers (and people buying their designs). Given how much the price of some of your models have risen that subsidy was in some cases huge, and clearly that's not fair on anyone, and in the long term isn't sustainable.

    Surely, with a little bit of calm reflection, you can see that a pricing model that accurately reflects the cost of printing an item is a solution that is fair to all, even if you have been disproportionately affected?

    While I agree having the flexibility to change suppliers etc. is good, if we accept that the new pricing formula reflects the cost of printing more accurately, chances are printing your models elsewhere won't necessarily be cheaper; certainly not in the long term as other companies update their prices to better match their costs.

    Mark
     
  15. Derek66
    Derek66 Active Member
    Mark, I can see that you are very taken with the populist yarn that Shapeways have spun you about the "little fellas" having been all this time subsidising the "big ones". But consider this...

    The bounding box sizes for FUD and FXD are as follows...

    X x Y x Z axes:

    FUD : 284 x 184 x 203 mm

    FXD : 50 x 50 x 200 mm

    Do you think that the designers of the printers would have built in such large Z axis capacity had they imagined that companies like Shapeways would engineer their pricing to effectively slash that capacity by making good use of it prohibitively expensive?

    Do you think that perhaps those designers did not give their machines a Z-axis capacity of just a few centimeters because other technologies do a better job in that region?

    Have a look at the products of companies like GHQ with their military models and at some of the Japanese and German manufactures of exquisite small-scale model warships. You will see that, using centrifugally cast, low-melting point metals and chemically cured resins, they achieve levels of detail far superior to what is possible in Frosted Detail 3D. Is it actually responsible of Shapeways to lower the cost of 3D printed items in the lower height ranges where there are better production methods available, while stymieing those designers who want to explore the truly unique potential of 3D printing in the higher height ranges?

    Instead of swallowing the divide and conquer, one subsidising the other, story of Shapeways Mark, try considering the idea that smaller items are now actually over benefiting from printers that are inappropriately large for them. Perhaps smaller items should actually be carrying a premium so that they contribute more fairly to the cost of the capacity available?

    A logical conclusion of Shapeways's new pricing formula is that their next round of "FD plastic" machine purchases will be for printers with Z-Axis capacities of just a few centimeters; that their "factory of the future" will step further back into the past. But I don't think they will do that. What they are doing now is clawing back from fundamental mistakes that they themselves made with pricing. Like any generals in the war for profit, they see a few dozen (hundreds even?) designers being badly crippled as simply collateral damage. ... and it suits Shapeways to have people like you like you sitting there believing "ah well, it was those designers' fault all along, they deserved it!" Well done.
     
  16. MitchellJetten
    MitchellJetten Shapeways Employee CS Team
    FXD can be printed at the exact same size as FUD.

    We've chosen not to offer this as printing time is doubled for FXD. the longer we print the more chances of a printer crash (meaning we have to throw everything away and start over).
    Right now we can start a print job in the evening and clean it in the morning and start a new job right away.

    I'm not sure if I understand this correctly.
    Because GHQ offers cast metals and resin model kits, that aren't 3D printed, at a lower cost and higher quality, Shapeways has to drop the prices for FUD because the quality is lower than their non 3D printed parts?

    By all means, I would love to see my FUD trains go from $80 to $40 because other companies sell resin trains at a lower price.
    But this isn't really realistic, 3D printing is expensive and just because other technologies provide a better quality at a lower price.
    That would mean Shapeways will lose money on printing FUD and if we lose money....

    The pricing for FUD was created back in 2010.
    We had a vendor that was willing to do a trial for us on their FUD printer, we sent them a bunch of models and they would provide a price.
    To keep the pricing simple we just used the cm3 of used printing material.
    This is indeed a fundamental problem, all other factors of 3D printing FUD wasn't included and while we got away with making a bit of money on most models (we are a company in the end that need to survive) we also ended up losing a lot of money on other people their models.

    so yes, the repricing will fix a fundamental problem we created ourselves when launching FUD back in 2010 by creating a pricing that didn't reflect the actual costs (Which we got to learn over the years when we started printing FUD ourselves in Ehv and LIC)



    Ps. if you really want it, I could ask the product team if we can change the max bounding box for FXD :)
     
    Last edited: Jun 29, 2017
    PenistoneRailwayWorks likes this.
  17. PenistoneRailwayWorks
    PenistoneRailwayWorks Well-Known Member
    Sorry but that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Yes the machines have a large bounding box in the z-axis but using that space raises the cost disproportionately as has been covered numerous times before. The taller the parts the longer it takes to print the entire batch, which costs more (electricity) and takes longer. If an entire batch is made of items short in the z-axis (they will always fill the x and y axis with models so that makes no difference) then it will finish quicker, will crash less often, and that reduces the costs, not only for that batch, but it will also mean that multiple batches can be printed in the time it would take to print one batch with a high z axis, which further reduces the costs (same amount of electricity spread over more models) and actually increases the utilisation of the machine.

    Simply put the more of the z axis capacity you use the more expensive the prints, while there is no wasted capacity to worry about.

    Also as I understand with your models it's not really the z-axis that's the biggest problem, it's the amount of support wax needed to support the airship hull that causes the huge rise in cost (although z-axis will factor in as well it's just not the biggest issue). When it comes to support wax it's clear the more you need the more the print costs, and there is no reason anyone else (shapeways, designers, or buyers) should subsidise the cost of the support wax needed for your model,

    Mark
     
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  18. PenistoneRailwayWorks
    PenistoneRailwayWorks Well-Known Member
    I realised I missed replying to this bit earlier. If you read back through all my posts on this thread I have never once suggested that designers who are now seeing price increases in any way "deserve it". In fact some of my pieces (mostly private commissions) have got more expensive, and some will get even more expensive when we can control orientation as I don't want the cheapest orientation currently being used.

    My point is that the new formula seems fair regardless of how it affects my designs. I think the idea that when printing an item we pay an amount related to how much printing it costs is the only fair way forward. Some people are seeing price drops for their models which means they have essentially been overpaying for years, whereas others, including yourself, are seeing price increases which means you and your customers have been paying less than the cost of production. Now I don't blame you for this, as you say, and Shapeways admit, the issue is that the original pricing formula was wrong, but clearly you must see that given the formula was wrong unless we want Shapeways to stop offering FUD altogether or to go bust subsidising prints the only option is for them to change the formula.

    I love being able to 3D print my designs, and yes the cheaper they are the more I can sell, but at the same time the process isn't cheap. 3D printing is often the cheapest route if you want to print just one copy of an item, trying to resin cast one copy would be much more expensive. Casting only really gets cheaper if you want to do a large batch. In fact this is a process we have seen before where items get popular on Shapeways but to scale up and reduce costs the designers do move on to casting or injection moulding. This is great and is possibly how things should work, but it means there is no sensible price comparison between 3D printing and other production methods,

    Mark
     
  19. Derek66
    Derek66 Active Member
    Thanks so much for your interest Charles.

    The single biggest problem for me is the sheer number of models involved. It will literally take me months to revisit the most significantly affected and to "optimise" each design to best fit the new pricing formula.

    What I think I am going to do is alter my larger models (1/700th scale and above) to be printable in Strong and Flexible, instead of FD. The new HP printers that I am hoping Shapeways will soon be using, give a step up in quality that will offset a little from


    the loss of detail.

    Doing something different with my 1/1250th scale models is more difficult. FD is just about the perfect material for these smaller items, but I have been trialing differing approaches and it is pretty clear that I am not going to get anywhere near to the original prices. A good example is my USS Macon. It is in one piece and the price has gone from €32.68 to €98.44.
    upload_2017-6-29_17-24-59.png

    I have so far tried six different arrangements : cutting it length-ways is no good. Out of 2,3,4,5 and 6 cup shaped slices the, best price option is with 4 at €51.35. BUT that is without the spigot joints I am going to have to add between each part AND I will have to increase the overall thickness or add bracing, to compensate for the loss of intrinsic strength of the one-piece, egg-shell style original design. I cannot see that I will be getting away with anything less than around €55 to €56 and that sadly, still represents a 70% increase.
    I have to admit that I haven't tried your idea yet of having two files with short bits in one and long in the other. I am concerned though Charles, that doing that will start to make the models a bit too complicated for customers to be happy to deal with.
    upload_2017-6-29_17-26-55.png
    Another big issue for me of course, is the cost of prototypes to test the new designs before putting them on sale - I simply will not be able to afford doing it all over again. The fact is as well that 1/1250th scale is an area where there are other major players in the market place and my multi-part redesigns will be just about matching the prices for assembled, hand finished models from elsewhere in Europe. It is beginning to look as if I might have to pull out of the 1/1250th market altogether.
     

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    Last edited: Jun 29, 2017
  20. MrNibbles
    MrNibbles Well-Known Member
    How are those models made? Conventional injection molded kits? Carved from other materials?