Discuss Fine Detail Plastic In Clear Ultra & Gray

Hello Shapeways,

I just read your email about the new material options. Great to hear, but your email leaves a lot to be desired on a product change.

A few questions

1. Are fine and finest detail plastic going away?
2. When will the specs for the new materials be available?
   
3. Will you be checking existing products and flagging them as they need to be revised cause of the new materials?
4. For the gray plastic. Many of my products (40k shoulder pads) come up as the minimum 7.50 will you flag which items will now cost 5 versus maybe a new price?
5. giving your designers 5 days notice with no real supporting information really is bad form. I have over 600 products and I am worrying about needing to refactors old models and having items offline till I can do that.
6. Not sharing this on your forums as an announcement is not good

For those who didnt see this yet here is what was sent out

Shapeways continues soaring to new heights. As such, we’re excited to announce that we’ve expanded our Fine Detail Plastic offerings for your model and miniature 3D printing.



Our new Gray FIne Detail Plastic is an opaque material that shows exceptional contrast and detail. Our new Clear Ultra Fine Detail Plastic has an improved clarity and look. To help with the small parts advantage, we have reduced the minimums to $5 for Gray and $7.50 for Clear.



These new parts will be completely encapsulated in support material, providing a more consistent finish compared to the older materials (Smooth and Smoothest Fine Detail Plastic). As this increases the support material used, it will slightly impact the cost as well, which we have targeted to be close to the existing (Geometry Dependent)



For Marketplace Shop Owners: We recommend you review your markup and update as needed. For bulk updates, please use the Pricing CSV Wizard. As we know that adding materials to existing products is a manual process, we are adding both Ultra Clear and Gray to all live products that have Fine Detail already. We are using the same markup values which can be updated in bulk using the Pricing CSV Wizard.



For API or integration users: This update changes the base model price of your product. Because your customer-facing price can't be automatically updated, your markup will decrease as a result. We recommend you review and update your product pricing. Please use these resources on Etsy and Shopify if you have questions.



As we roll out these new materials, the cost of our existing Smooth and Smoothest Fine Detail Plastic will increase slightly on Tuesday, March 14th


If you have any questions about these new materials, reach out to VIP@shapeways.com for support.

Hi

good you mentioned it I missed the part with the new "Clear ..."

Yes, would be good to know what happens with fine and fine detailed ...
Also there's a significant price difference between clear and fine ...

The new grey at least is very much welcomed since it can be a real color alternative for a lot of models. (still looking forward for a black).

Woody64

I haven't got an email. Just realized there are new material options available but without further info.

And you will want to check your pricing now. Some of my items that in some materials (such as PA12) should have a $4-$5 profit have been raised to $12+, making an already pricy product even more.

Ah well, job security!

yeah I have been watching the pricing wizard since Tuesday. I already complained that letting us know with only a couple days notice was not good form. Then they ran late with pricing not showing till late last night (wednesday). So now its a mad dash to update prices (plus it might take a few tries as the 40k bits designer community is really saturated).

Also just got a first print email and there are more materials listed

• Clear Fine Detail Plastic
• Clear Ultra Fine Detail Plastic
• Gray Fine Detail Plastic
• Gray Ultra Fine Detail Plastic
• Smooth Fine Detail Plastic
• Smoothest Fine Detail Plastic

Just an FYI. I cannot find rhyme nor reason in which products had the new materials added. Some of mine did, and they were some for which the new materials were cheaper than Smooth Fine Detail Plastic. However, not all of my products had the materials added. In some cases, the Gray Fine Detail Plastic is cheaper. For some pieces, it wasn't. I have yet to find a piece that the Clear Ultra Fine Detail costs more than the Smoothest Fine Detail Plastic. I am trucking along, adding the materials to all my items; I think my customers will like the added choices.

Jean

Hi Jean,

Same here I have items with all four detail platics. I have some where smoothest was dropped. I even found some where I now had versatle plastic colors added (those are weird ones). I found prices were all over besides the new plastics they upped the price of smooth and smoothest. However not across the board. I have some where the prices changes some that it didint. Also I found all products with gray and clear added were left at the base price. Also I read that gray would have a lower price point. its no always the case in fact I have many where the smooth and the gray are equal and I have several where gray is more expensive than smooth.

All in all I just cant use the spread sheet cause I constantly had to switch to the edit pages and add / remove plastic options. So I figure while there just manually redo my prices.

Also another wrinkle is if you use size to handle qty options I found none of the gray and clear automatically had the model assigned so I had to manually set those as well.

Luckily I only have 700+ items. MY wife and I are about half way through.

try to do better next time shapeways :S

Hi Jeff,

Try nearly 3000 items! And I am finding a few places where the clear option is a bit more than the smoothest. However, some of our ships are cloaked, so I am adding that option anyway.

Best of luck! We have 60 pages; I am working on page 6. (I wear a lot of hats, including proofreading a new book we plan on releasing soon.)

Jean

AND NOW I HAVE IT ALL TO DO AGAIN!

Please stop messing with the prices of materials. PA 12 and Versatile plastic have all changed prices since March 16.

I understand from SW customer service there were some problems but they should be rectified by now. I'll wait a bit before changing stuff in my shop.

Thanks for sharing the link.

Yeah problems =P ......

already conveyed to shapeways product managers but here are the issues I went through. Luckily I currently have 750+ products and the misses was gracious enough to handle doing updates to each product manually.

1. Last minute announcement - sent on 8th was suppose to be executed on the 14th
2. No communication that they were having issues - target of the 14th still really not done
3. Repricing of smooth and smoothest happens after adding new plastics so had to redo.
   
4. Suppose to use pricing tool to import all updates easily. Import tool chunks inventory in 250 products
5. They were suppose to auto add two new plastics if you use smooth or smoothest - this was spotty at beast had to go through 750 + products and manually confirm all.
6. The base prices in the tool spread sheet were sometimes wrong and the materials assigned to a product were some time wrong
7. If you used variants like sizes to offer versions of you product the process didint work at all no prices and no new plastics.
8. Shapeways is guessing the new plastics will work with existing products. They said it was too lengthy to check all the products but they are confident they will all work.

Better luck next time

<sigh> And now they've increased prices on the other Fine Detail Plastics. Starting over, yet again...

Communication and execution on Shapeways side, (again) is highly unprofessional here. I also was already through 2/3 of my nearly 3000 items. Now i need to start again. I also have to manually re-render all items to get the pictures for Grey and Clear, otherwise they use the renders from Smooth Fine Detail Plastic. This is very slow and can't be done with the excel-sheets. They are useless anyway because they can only do 250 items at once and there is no way to sort it before downloading. So you get a wild mix of all the items in your shop.

Another issue is I default my products to the cheapest option. now I need to manually for that. I havent even checked the spreadsheet to make sure its listing correctly. when gray and clear were added I had options on products that didn't exist and vice versa.

Has anyone seen prints in these new materials yet? With the old stuff we oriented our prints "detail side up" to minimize the impact of wax support on the visible surfaces, but the new stuff is apparently completely enclosed in support material. Does that mean all of the surfaces are now FUBAR?

wen they first announced the materials I contacted support. For example were they going to check if all the models would conform to the specs of the new material. The support person said no but they should work the same. Also the orientation we submit models as doesn't matter. I have been told constantly the models placement/orientation/approval is up to the tech setting up the print. hence one month a model would be fine and next they flag it that they wanted the model revised. I have had a few items sold in the new material but have not seen anything from my customers yet.

I've seen one of my customers' photos of prints from the clear materials. They looked good, and my customer was happy. The grey must not have been cured as it was very malleable, and the customer was displeased. However, since he didn't contact Shapeways to complain, there isn't much I can do about it.