Yes I think it only has price advantage over FUD when printing single-piece, high-detail items such as faces. I am not printing my shuttle kit with this for sure.

 

Planning on making some legends-scale kits too. Been working on an Omega Spreem. Its barely past the drawing stage but I can tell that only the head, hands and gun will be in this material. I'll have to make sure the rest is just blocky enough to sand it down.

 

now that it's been tested, could you use this material for the Aerial Guardian Arms?

 

you said this new material is able to be cut without shattering. Is it "sculptable", meaning can you shave down bits if you want to thin out a face, etc? If so I want to put your "blocky driller" face inside your "inquisitor" helmet and make a minerva for CW. Just shaving driller's chin a tad would be about perfect.

 

Have colour options been explored?

 

Is this material even available to the general public yet? There's quite a few things I'd love to buy in this material if it were offered for them.

 

holy shit... well that makes it official then. once this is more widely available im going shapeways crazy. so many sets i want to get now without it being hindered by the shitty grainy quality of the normal shapeways stuff!

 

Yeah, I really am curious to see how this develops. I too have ordered very little from Shapeways due to the material.

 

That looks amazing! Shame that they won't let you get away with sprues. Their reasoning seems kind of weak:

"Support structures are difficult to generate for models with sprues. Models may not be accepted if we cannot generate support structures. Additionally, there is a high chance of models breaking or supports being stuck to the model with sprues."

So are you not allowed to use sprues at all or are they just saying they reserve the right to reject models if the sprue tree prevents orienting it in a way that lends itself to support structures? From the statements in this thread, it kinda' sounds like they'll reject them for sprues no matter what.

I just ask because that's pretty much a deal breaker. It's $5 per part but $3 per cm^3 so if you need 5 parts that are .5cm^3 and you can sprue them with .5cm^3 of material, it would cost $8. If you have to do them separately, it's going to be ~$30. That's a world of difference. I've been slowly working on a 3d printed scratch build and I quickly realized when I tried to print out my first sample parts that it would be astronomically expensive if I didn't use sprues. This material would be great for all of the detailed sections where I don't want to lose detail to sanding, puttying, or acetone, but if I had to do each of those parts separately, the overall figure would go from somewhere around $100 (ballpark estimate) to somewhere around $300

 

Might as well buy your own printer at that point, the shapeways stuff has horriable shipping and they can take up to a month to do your order.

 

Wow, so glad to see that they have a real toy grade quality plastic now, but if the price isn't right and Shapeways isn't being cool about meeting people halfway, then someone is going to come along and steal their business at a more than competitive price.

 

Someones gonna probably do it cheaper and then make more money  

 

The material is available for sale now on Shapeways. Looks like with the price structure, FOR ONE-PART design, it is competitive and right in league with FUD. However for multi-part design the cost rises up per additional part. I have enabled most one-part design with this material.

 

Are the combat orbiter parts a viable option?

(Maybe as seperate pieces)

 

Great results from BHDA more? See:
Heavy/Scratch: - Combiner Wars Blast-Off custom (completed)