Hi, since i do not see a thread like this, i thought i may start making one this is for general discussion regarding shapeways 3d-printing. i guess we can talk about the workings of the shapeways site, how stuff works, software used, material choices, issues with shapeways, help out each other, talk about superfanart etc. i would avoid posting individual projects here unless you are looking for help; you can always post a new thread showcasing your creation which will prolly give you project more exposure than having your post buried in the thread and go unnoticed
so i will start first: have any of you shapeways artists noticed a sudden drop of print success rate with your models, and orders taking longer than expected to get printed and shipped? i personally have noticed an increase of models getting rejected and models failing to print - even though stuff have been printed successfully before. im wondering if shapeways suddenly became much more stringent with printability allowances. also, for the past 2 months my orders have been taking forever to print and ship, missing their estimated ship date mark. not sure if its because they have too many other orders to fulfill its starting to be a concern for me personally because the progress for my projects has been literally dragged for 2 whole months....i am starting to lose momentum, and to a smaller extent motivation
Lemme preface this by saying I use the NY offices. I haven't had any experience with models being rejected, and order times have actually been decreasing for me. In fact, a FUD order I just put in shipped in less than a week. I do notice when I mix larger orders or different materials things sometimes drag an extra few days, but that's likely just due to current shifting demand of certain materials. WSF seems to be the slowest when mixed with other material. And one of my order is tracking a few days behind for that very reason. Or it could all be dumb luck the way my orders pace out. One thing I do notice is a fluctuation in print quality depending on the day of the week in which my orders are printed. With weekends being the worst. Which strongly hints at certain employees being more apt at printer setup than others. Only times I've had missing pieces or bad prints has been on weekend prints as well.
thanks for your input in august i submit an order for WSF polished with lots of parts, with the smaller parts being held together by spruces. it wasn't until 4 weeks into the order when shapeways says oh we cant print it, we will refund you the money. its ok if my model is not printable but the fact that i had to wait a full 4 weeks to hear back from them (and it's only after i email them asking about my order) is abit disappointing this time its 3 different models with different materials, one of them simply a gun to be printed in dyed polished plastic (yellow), one of them 2 pieces in polished alumide, and one of them is WSF polished of maybe 10 random parts. i have been tracking the order daily, and i notice: - the alumide one got done quickly - the other 2 didnt go into "production" until a few days before the estimated ship date - the WSF batch got done in a few days - the yellow dyed gun is still under "production", and its not a few days past the estimate ship date in terms of print quality, for the most part they have been okay, but there was once where the quality was really off, and i ordered it near 4th of july. since then i avoid ordering when a major holiday is approaching.... and my orders are shipped from NY as well
As a potential customer on Shapeways, I have a question. Just how brittle is Frosted Ultra Detail? If I were to order, say, a hand or small gun for one of my figures, what are the chances of these sort of things breaking in the aforementioned material?
I have bought Frosted Ultra Detail for Head sculpts, to give maximum details. For a head, you don't need to worry about breakage really. For a gun, I have bought both normal and polished (not frosted or detail), and prefer the normal. If you get Normal Black (might be a bit more), I didn't even need to paint it, it looks great as is. With the polished, I have to paint it, cause they "polished" the black stuff making it a little less grainy, where grainy doesn't matter for a gun. In fact, I think material will stay stronger if you leave it normal. For a small transformer, normal offer most strength (which one of the makers recommended I go with), but it is grainy... You can go polished, but you may need to use a bit of "future floor polish" inside the ball joints if they are loose, as they do have to take material off to make it less grainy.
shapeways is going to change their prices for plastic printouts https://www.shapeways.com/materials/strong-and-flexible-plastic basically, the way i am seeing it is, shapeways will penalize you (with a higher cost) if you have 2+ objects in the same file and if you do not compress your stuff into a cubic volume. hopefully this issue can be minimized by connecting everything with spruces, but that is easier said than done with kits that have more than 10 parts. guess they have issues picking up or sorting out pieces
adjusting to their new pricing scheme is much trickier then i thought. sometimes simply adding spruces will not decrease the price and you will need to rearrange your pieces. i also notice that in many cases, if you offer an item which consists of a pair (or more) of the exact same model, you may be better off selling it as a single one and ask the seller to order 2 of the file instead. if the costs end up being very close i also suggest this method as well so the customer will not have to go through the hassle of cutting spruces. this of course will not work for something like hands where one is a mirror-ed image of the other and technically not exactly the same sometimes even shortening the spruce by a mere 2mm will also bring the cost further down by another 50 cents to 1 dollar, dang.... but other than that, there may be a little bit of savings that can be passed down to the customer....but this will be am extremely time-consuming process for us creators, and i wished shapeways didnt give us only a week to react to the new pricing scheme
MAJOR WARNING when the new pricing comes into effect next week, big density discounts will no longer be offered for plastics, no more 50% discount for one big packaged model this is a total setback IMHO for those (such as myself, and perhaps echoTF as well) who like to do full body upgrades and take advantage of the high volume discount to make our bundled kits more attractive in price
To those who ordered the sentinel prime (or optimus prime, if they are the same size) hands, could you give me the measurement of the radius for which the hands fit into the arms?
Being I was defending Shapeways a good bit before; just wanted to pop in and mention that they've actually messed up all three of my orders since then. I'm starting to feel what you went through with delayed ordered and mess ups on their part dragging out a project and causing a lack of motivation, Chroma.
do your delayed orders involve many multiple parts? i have had (first time) customers writing to me asking why some of my stuff are taking so long to ship (past the estimated ship date) i find it hard to defend shapeways with their slow turnover time, and more importantly their recent price changing fiasco which is literally taking a PR crapstorm in their forums right now. i can accept the new pricing if they give us more time to adjust, and offer a high-volume discount (even if we have to spruce everything together) im fine with a lack of motivation; i just concentrate my energy on other matters in life.......work, buying and researching a new car etc.....but i do feel bad for the very few people who may be expecting updates and i have nothing to show
One of the orders was delayed because of a down printer they said. Which is fine. But the two orders they messed up and now I have to wait for them to pass the buck around for several weeks until they decide to reprint the messed up/missing parts of the order. Then another two weeks for them to print and ship the replacements. They're good about fixing their mistakes (so far at least) but like you said, everything works at such a slow pace. I'll be modifying my mill to handle smaller molds next month so hopefully I don't have to rely on them as much in the future.
