This Tutorial Tuesday we’ll highlight some of this year’s 3D design tutorials that even the youngest (or oldest!) of your loved ones can use to make custom and personalized 3D prints in just a few minutes. Choose one of the tutorial introductions below and get started creating in no time!

Getting Started Quickly

Whatever your age or experience, you can jump right in with Tinkercad, a free in-browser design program that’s as easy to use as dragging and dropping shapes onto a workspace. If you want a 3D sandbox to play in, check out how to get started in Tutorial Tuesday 3: Beginner 3D Design With Tinkercad.

Quick Personalized Models

Ready for family D&D night? Create your own custom tabletop character pieces with Hero Forge. It’s easy to mix and match outfits, physical characteristics, and poses with Hero Forge’s intuitive interface. Learn how to get started quickly with Tutorial Tuesday 36: Quick Custom D&D Characters With Hero Forge.

Or, make a family portrait lithophane for your window using Cura. Cura is a “slicer” program for sending 3D models to a printer, but you can also use it to quickly turn photographs into translucent, light-up artwork, following the instructions in Tutorial Tuesday 38: Lightning-Fast Lithophanes With Cura.

If you were dreaming of a white Christmas but didn’t get any snow, make your own unique flakes with the Snowflake Machine. Designing your own custom snowflake is as easy as choosing a random seed and then modifying style parameters with sliders. To get started right away, check out Tutorial Tuesday 45: Make One Billion Snowflakes With the Snowflake Machine.

For the Kids

If the kids are tearing up the house and need something to do, let them have some screen time that actually teaches them something. Here are three design programs guaranteed to keep your kids busy and introduce them to the basics of 3D design. First, the Morphi app for iPad (or desktop version) is really fun to use and intuitive for kids to learn. Find out how to get set up with Morphi in our article Tutorial Tuesday 21: 3D Design Made Simple With Morphi and an iPad.

Second, BlocksCAD lets your kids use code to design simple models, much like the popular drag-and-drop visual coding language Scratch. If they’re learning Scratch at school then BlocksCAD will be second nature to them already. Get started with Tutorial Tuesday 24: Learn to Code in 3D With BlocksCAD.

Finally, let the kids smash things up with the fun design program 3D Slash, where you design by smashing and exploding blocks — with sound effects — to construct 3D objects. Get started in just a few minutes with Tutorial Tuesday 37: Quick 3D Design With 3D Slash.

Happy Holidays everyone, and Merry New Year!!

The post Tutorial Tuesday 48: Family Design Time appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Order deadlines might have passed, but you can still give them a passport to over 1,000,000 products by skilled independent designers. Plus more than 60 materials and finishes to help power their own 3D printed projects. We think that Shapeways Gift Cards might just be the ultimate gift.

A Gift Card can empower them to learn to 3D model, print that thing they’ve been dreaming of with a file they find online, or find a one-of-a-kind Valentine’s Day gift. Not to mention open them up to a community of other RPG / RC Car / Model Train / Paintball / Drone enthusiasts to bond with.

We’ve also expanded our Gift Card amounts on offer to give you options for people just getting started with Shapeways ($25 and $50), anyone who might be looking to get something special and shiny ($75, $100, and $300) and those who think beyond limits of size, finish, and complexity ($500).

So give them something that’s more than just store credit or a last-minute solution. Give them the power to bring their ideas to life.

The post Don’t Worry — There’s Still Time to Wow Them! appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Step 1:  Fire up the Snowflake Machine

From your web browser, go to the link for The Snowflake Machine:

From there, click on the button that says “Open in Customizer” (at this point you’ll have to sign up for a free Thingiverse account, if you haven’t done this already). This will open a new page that has controls on the left and an output view on the right. By setting the controls on the left you can control the 3D design shown on the right.

Step 2:  Seed and Style your Flake

The Snowflake Machine customizer uses a random number “seed” to decide where to place branches and plates of the snowflake design. All good children of the 80’s will of course start with the seed 8675309. We’re going to make a hanging ornament, so we set Loop to “Yes.” Under the “set-snowflake-style” menu are a lot of sliders. By pushing the sliders around you can control style parameters such as the lengths of the branches, the fuzziness of your flake, and so on. Here’s our stylized flake:

That’s it for the design phase! For more information on how the Snowflake Machine uses OpenSCAD code to generate snowflakes, and tips on printing snowflake designs in a variety of materials, check out our recent article Trim Your Tree With Mathemagical Snowflake Ornaments.

Step 3:  Download an STL of your snowflake from Thingiverse

To download the snowflake, click on the “Create Thing” button, and give your snowflake a name. After a couple of minutes click on your avatar icon in the top right of the screen, and from the dropdown menu choose “My Things”. From here you’ll be able to click on your completed design and download an STL file for printing.

Step 4:  Upload your snowflake STL to Shapeways

If you’ve got your own 3D printer, you can start printing your snowflake right now. If you want to make a fancy ornament on one of Shapeways’ SLS printers, then go to Shapeways and click “Upload”, then upload your STL file. After a minute or so you’ll see something like this:

There are a few things to notice here. First, the snowflake is pretty big: about 11 centimeters across! If you’d like it to be a different size then you can use the “Resize” button to scale your flake, or you can go back to the design phase and change your target size in the Snowflake Machine customizer. The second thing to notice is that, especially for such a large snowflake, this model is pretty cheap: only about $6 in White or White Polished Strong & Flexible plastic.

Step 5:  Fix any printability issues

The third thing to notice about our Shapeways snowflake model page is that there are some scary yellow caution icons saying telling us that there are issues with the model. If this happens to you, click on the “View Issues” button for the material you are most interested in. The issue is most likely “Wall Thickness”; if so, then click on that item in the left column menu. In the middle of the screen is a description of the thickness required for your chosen material. On the right you’ll see an image of your snowflake with yellow coloring the “Suspect” areas that are too thin. Note that in our model that’s the middle of the snowflake and some of the very tips of the branches:

Luckily, there’s an easy fix: Just press the “Fix Thin Walls” button! (If you don’t see that button, then make sure that the “Show Heatmap View” checkbox is un-checked.)  After a few minutes of computational time, your model should be repaired and printable. Its price might change slightly; for example our model somehow got five cents cheaper after the fix.

Step 6:  Print!

Here’s our model, ready to order and print:

Step 7:  Sell your snowflake design (optional)

If you want other people to be able to purchase your snowflake design on Shapeways, click the “Sell This Design button” at the top right of your design’s product page. Fill out a title and description, choose a category, select the materials you want to make available, set prices, and so on.

Don’t forget that the Snowflake Machine is under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non-Commercial – Share-Alike license that requires attribution, so if you do sell your model, you need to mention in your item description that you used the Snowflake Machine to create your design, and link back to the Snowflake Machine page on Thingiverse. We did exactly that in the Product Details section of the screenshot above.

The “Non-Commercial” part of the license means that you can’t use models you create with the Snowflake Machine for commercial purposes unless permission is given. The good news is that the author of this post is the creator of the Snowflake Machine, so she can give you permission right now. Here it is: If you just want to sell a few fun Snowflake-Machine-created snowflake designs on Shapeways then consider this my official permission for you to do that, with proper attribution. If you want to use the Snowflake Machine for more than that, just ask!

Here’s how our snowflake looks on its Shapeways product page. Notice that the Shapeways site has created a nice render image that shows approximately what the design might look like when printed:

Okay, that’s one snowflake made, but there are still over a billion more you could make, so get moving!

The post Tutorial Tuesday 45: Make One Billion Snowflakes With the Snowflake Machine appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Snowflakes are a classic and always-classy way to decorate the tree, and they’re festive throughout the winter. Snowflakes also happen to lend themselves well to parametric design, a method of creating around parameters that can turn one design into many.

Today, we’ll learn how to turn one design, a simple snowflake, into multiple products in a variety of shapes, sizes, and materials. We’ll start with simple low-res 3D prints and prototypes on desktop FDM machines, and eventually level up to printing in Nylon and Plated Rhodium at Shapeways. Along the way, we’ll have to consider ways to optimize for 3D printing on different types of machines, and how to print affordably with different types of materials. The snowflake design we’ll be working with was created with code in OpenSCAD, and can procedurally generate over a billion unique snowflakes. Let it snow!

3D Printing Snowflakes at Home

Each winter, we make a new 3D-printable snowflake design. Back in 2013, when we didn’t know very much, it was a set of simple Snowflake Ornaments created from extruded SVG images. In 2014 we leveled up to a customizable Snowflake Cutter that used symmetric image maps to mimic the way snowflakes are cut out of folded paper, and in 2015 it was a full-blown Snowflake Machine that uses OpenSCAD code to generate over a billion unique snowflakes in different styles from random seeds.

These flexible digital designs can create many different types of snowflake models, including large decorations, small ornaments, and even cookie cutters, all of which we initially printed on a consumer-level Ultimaker desktop 3D printer:

We’ll talk soon about how we converted these designs for printing in SLS Nylon and Metals at Shapeways, but first let’s talk about the parametric design itself.

How to Code a Blizzard

The Snowflake Machine was created in OpenSCAD, a free design program that allows you to use simple code to create and export 3D-printable STL meshes. The power of designing with OpenSCAD is that it is “parametric,” which means that you can construct your designs based on variables and parameters that control the behavior and features of your models.

In real life, snowflakes grow outwards from a core center as they fall through different temperatures, humidity levels, and other atmospheric conditions. These conditions add “plates” and “branches” of various sizes and configurations to the snowflake as it falls. The code for the Snowflake Machine mimics this process, using a random number seed to create many random number sequences that determine the algorithmic creation of plates and branches. Sizing and style parameters allow you to influence the random sequences to create snowflakes with more or fewer plates, fuller or sparser shapes, and so on.

You can make your own unique 3D-printable snowflake designs using the customizable interface of the Snowflake Machine that we uploaded to Thingiverse. Go to the link and click “Open in Customizer” to get started, then change the starting seed and style parameters until you get the snowflake you want. By clicking “Create Thing” you can download an STL of your custom snowflake and then 3D print it at home or by sending to Shapeways.

If you want to have more design flexibility with your snowflake models, then you can download and modify the “Snowflakerator” code from our Hello OpenSCAD one-page tutorial document. For more information on getting started with OpenSCAD, check out our recent Shapeways Tutorial Tuesday post Using OpenSCAD to Design With Code.

Printing Snowflake Ornaments in SLS Nylon

Last year, we decided it was time to level up and 3D print snowflakes on some big-girl machines, with fancy materials like SLS Nylon and even jewelry-quality silver. Of course we don’t have the equipment to do such things from home, so it was time to visit Shapeways!

Of course, printing with industrial-grade machines is different than printing with desktop filament-based machines, and the requirements for things like clearances or minimum thickness can be very different. For example, in SLS Nylon we can print much more detailed and delicate snowflakes then we had printed before. By changing parameters in our OpenSCAD code, we created two dozen new snowflakes optimized for printing at Shapeways in White Strong & Flexible material, a set of Small Snowflake Ornaments and a set of Large Snowflake Ornaments:

To save on per-part costs (which in White Strong & Flexible would be $1.50 for each disconnected piece of our print job), we used Tinkercad to arrange each dozen snowflakes on a thin rod, as shown in the pictures below. The rod can be easily snipped off after printing and shipping. Check out this past post for more tips on how to make models less costly. Tinkercad is a great tool for such simple modifications; for more on that see our Shapeways Tutorial Tuesday post Beginner 3D Design With Tinkercad. For more technical design tips on converting filament designs to SLS Nylon designs, check out our Hacktastic post From Prototype to Product: Snowflakes.

Printing Snowflake Earrings in Multiple Materials

Since holiday trees are only around for a little while but snowflakes can be fun all winter, we also decided to make some snowflake earrings. Earrings are basically just smaller ornaments, but if we simply scaled down our designs from above then their features would be too small, especially for printing in metals.

In the end, we decided to completely remake the flakes with different OpenSCAD parameters and seeds, and made six new designs. We tried to make them as delicate as possible while still having enough minimum thickness for printing in a wide variety of materials. The six designs we settled on were Flurry, Frost, Powder, Ice, Crystal, and Blizzard, shown here printed in six different materials:

Of course, we also need some hooks! After some experimenting we settled on what are called “Kidney wire” earring hooks, because the dangly snowflake prints can just slip around and onto the hooks without us having to deal with opening or closing any metal loops, as shown in the photo below left.

As a final step we altered our designs to be printable in metal; this involved closing up some of the smaller holes in each model so that it would pass the Shapeways Printability Checks for Precious Metals. With Shapeways’ new Variants feature, we were able to add new files to our existing product pages that would be used only when customers opted for printing in Precious Metals like Plated Rhodium.

Okay, that’s enough snowflakes for this winter! Let us know in the comments if you’ve used the Snowflake Machine to make any 3D-printable designs, or if you have questions about Variants, Printability Checks, design tips, or anything else. Or, leave a comment if you’ve ever turned one parametric model into a flurry of different prints and products; we’d love to see what you made.

The post Trim Your Tree With Mathemagical Snowflake Ornaments appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

So, from all of us at Shapeways, thank you. Thank you for testing new materials, creating new games (and new ways to play the games you love), bringing miniature worlds to life, taking RC cars to new heights (and speeds, and strengths…), and sharing your spectacular art and jewelry with the world.

We’ll continue to be here every step of the way, listening to your concerns, innovating in ways that will serve you and grow our community, and offering the highest-quality materials available anywhere. Here’s to a holiday season full of joy, discovery, and creativity. You are Shapeways, and we couldn’t do it without you.

The post Gratitude appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

There are a lot of holidays and observances in December, but of course, the big dog for shop owners is likely to be Christmas. Let’s look at everything that’s headed our way for that month (calendar thanks to www.timeanddate.com):

To order Shapeways products and have them delivered before Christmas, shoppers need to act early enough for those products to be 3D printed, processed, and packaged. The production time required varies by material. For example, Strong & Flexible nylon production time usually takes 4 business days, and can be rushed to ship in 2-3 days, but for large objects can take as many as 10 business days; most Sterling Silver jewelry-sized pieces can ship in 8 business days; and the printing, firing, and glazing process for Porcelain models takes 15 business days. Leaving room for shipping time, this means that for most designs, shoppers should place their orders in the first half of December.

Of course, as a shop owner you don’t want your products to become available at the last possible moment that people could order them in time for Christmas; you’ve got to be even earlier. How early? Let’s start with “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving, when lots of people start thinking about what they’d like to get for their friends and family (read more about getting ready for the big shopping days here). Ideally your products would be online and available for purchase by that date, which this year is November 24. It would be even better if your products had a chance to get “likes” or have orders already, or even to somehow get featured on the Shapeways site (or on Tutorial Tuesday!) before that, to optimize your products’ discoverability on the site. So we shop owners might shoot for having our products up on the site a week or two before Black Friday, let’s say by November 12. Let’s see what November looks like:

So, besides being World Pneumonia Day, let’s declare November 12 to be Shapeways Shop Owner Readiness Day! That’s the day to shoot for to get our products and shops ready for the holiday season. What does that mean for today? Well, working backwards on the calendar from November 12, we need time to perfect product descriptions and tags and to clean up our shops; and before that, some time to take good photographs of printed product examples.

But… to take photographs we have to have printed examples of our products ready and in our hands, and with production lead time… oh no, it turns out that today isn’t just Halloween, it’s Shapeways Shop Owner Start Your Engines Day, arghh!

Happy Halloween (and SSOSYE Day), everybody, and get to work!

Featured image at the top of this post taken from http://wittywomanwriting.com/time-will-tell/clock-ticking-down-time/

The post Tutorial Tuesday 41: Shop Owners, On Your Marks — Here Come the Holidays appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

A version of this piece was originally published by Savannah Peterson, the former Shapeways director of global community.

Take a deep breath. Look around at the products you’ve created. And get in the zone. We are entering the highest traffic time of the year here at Shapeways, and we want you to capture as much of it as possible, bringing excited new customers to your shops. We try hard to showcase the diversity of great products on Shapeways, but with millions of models uploaded, it’s impossible to feature everyone — so it’s important to put in the work to get the word out about your shop. Below is a guide for how you can optimize every day in the biggest holiday shopping weekend of the year.

Three Golden Rules:

• Schedule posts on your preferred social platforms: Shapeways shoppers come from around the world – you never know when they’re watching. Buffer is my favorite for this, and Tweetdeck and Hootsuite work great as well.  Both are free and work seamlessly with all your twitter accounts. This will help pace your content if you get caught up with a customer during the day.
• Respond to People Quickly: People are looking to buy between Black Friday-Cyber Monday more than any other time of the year.  This also means they’re looking to transact quickly. Be extra responsive to private messages, product comments, and engagement on social media. Showing people they matter goes a long way.
• Be Shameless: Yes, we all want to avoid being spammy. Telling people about something they want or would be interested in however, isn’t spammy. Include educational tips and designer scoop on how you make your creations, how we 3D Print them etc. and include a product in every post. By giving your audience something (awesome behind the curtains info) you appear as much like an educator as you do a business-oriented person. We’ll be looking to share your posts with the greater Shapie community, so keep ’em coming!

Three Important Days:

1. Black Friday: Historically the theme of Black Friday is “doorbusters” aka Early-Bird deals for shoppers. Take advantage of the buzz online by including #BlackFriday in your communications. Consider experimenting with lower prices on a few of your pieces early in the morning to see if you can increase demand. If you’re putting an item on Sale, be sure an indicate in the product descriptions so your shoppers know to take advantage of this special deal! Historically very popular in the US.
2. Small Business Saturday: A lovely day branded initially by AmericanExpress, #SmallBusinessSaturday is meant to celebrate the Independently owned businesses in our communities, both digital and IRL. Take the opportunity to tell people about your business, the collections you have available now, and the direction you would like to take it in the future. Though started in the US, it has spread across the globe. Take this day to tell your story through your products.
3. Cyber Monday: The mother of all online shopping days. A global phenomena that brings more people to e-commerce land than any other day. Schedule the most posts across the most networks on this day. We’ve got some great surprises in store on-site, so be sure and check it out. #CyberMonday is the tag to go with, and discounts are the currency. Don’t feel like you have to have a sale, however, as many of you are already so modest with your markups.

Cover image: Christmas Bauble 4 by Actual Factual Fiction. A previous version of this article originally appeared in Shapeways Magazine on November 21, 2014.

The post Own Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Thank you to our designers, for opening shops on our platform, creating microbrands, and for making our marketplace the world’s destination for the unique, wonderful things you can’t find anywhere else. And thank you to our shoppers for helping bring our designers’ visions to life by supporting their small businesses.

We know that there are a lot of options when it comes to holiday gifting. Thank you for choosing to make your gifts on a platform where craftsmanship, originality, and ingenuity are in our community’s DNA.

Together, we’re shaping and bringing these ideas to life, from 3D renders to amazing finished products — many of which would never have existed without digital manufacturing. Thank you for being there, every step of the way. We look forward to seeing all the incredible things you’ll make in 2017 and beyond.

The post Thanks to You appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

In addition to the products in our marketplace, there are other places you can find incredible 3D printed pieces and today we’re excited to tell you about one project we’ve had a hand in.

The Whitney Museum of American Art’s  “Frank Stella: A Retrospective” is now open and runs until February 7th. The exhibit features the most comprehensive presentation of Stella’s career to date, and showcases his work from the 1950s to present day. Paintings, reliefs, sculptures and more will all be on display in the 18,000 square foot gallery.

So what do we have to do with this? The Whitney Museum is now selling collectible ornaments based on Stella’s work that are all 3D printed by Shapeways!

The items are all printed in our Strong & Flexible Plastic and allow those who love Stella’s work the opportunity to own one of his designs. You can pick just one or even buy the full set of 7.

It’s always incredible to see these projects where 3D printing is used to honor amazing art. We’re thrilled to be a part of this history and help people own the art they love.

Click here for more information on the exhibit.

The post Collectible Frank Stella 3D Printed Ornaments appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Photos by Silas Pelsmaeker, whom I thank for being able to do this so last minute and so early in the morning. 

On Saturday, when our website unfortunately went down due to data center issues out of our control, I asked you all to share your #SWPaws. Dozens upon dozens of great animals photos streamed in through our social media channels, immediately turning our frowns upside down. One such photo, from our new friend Roel, featured Kai, the Reindeer and the “Boss” (Santa) wearing a Shapeways 3D Printed belt buckle and hat broach inspired by Kai.

Santa’s Kai Inspired 3D Printed Belt Buckle in Gold Matte Steel

Santa Models His 3D Printed Hat Broach in Gold Matte Steel

I was elated! This was unbelievable! I know more than most how delightful our community is, but even I never could have anticipated that we had printed swag for Santa and his Reindeer! I had to know more, so I asked Roel where they were located and how exactly this photo came to be.

Photo Roel Ruwaard posted to our Facebook Page for #SWPaws

Turns out, Roel, Santa and Kai all live only an hour away from our factory in Eindhoven, in The Netherlands! On top of that, Roel informed me that Kai is actually quite portable, and that they would love to come visit our factory sometime. Mind blown, I immediately reached out Ruud, a priceless member of our European team. He was just as astounded as I, and we immediately began plotting what had the potential to be the greatest Christmas miracle in Shapeways history.

We knew we had to act fast. It was now the wee hours of Sunday, December 21st and we knew Kai & Santa’s schedule’s had to be packed. After our initial attempts to get ahold of Roel failed, Ruud reached out personally on facebook and managed to schedule a call.  Tuesday morning Ruud and Roel connected, and in one fateful chat, the dreams of many Shapies came true. Turns out Santa and Kai were ecstatic about the invitation to the factory, and were willing to carve out two hours early this morning, make the drive, and come by to spread some Christmas cheer.

Santa Getting Ready for the Big Shoot at our Eindhoven, Netherlands Factory.

At 7am today, Ruud welcomed Santa and Kai to our factory. Kai was very comfortable around people and heavy machinery, not surprising given his work at Santa’s factory. In a rare inside look, Santa prepared for his big day in our distribution center, is there a more fitting place to get in the sleigh riding zone?

Santa Putting on the Finishing Touches to his Ensemble

They were then given the full tour, and did a VIP pickup of Shapeways holiday gifts. They even let us have this epic photo shoot in front of our biggest Strong & Flexible Plastic printers as they selectively laser sintered away. Has Santa ever been more high tech or hip?

Sleigh Packed to the Brim in Front of our Biggest 3D Printers

Ruud was nice enough to Skype me in for a chat with the big man, too!

On Skype with Santa, Kai and Ruud from Shapeways HQ in New York City – Can You Tell How Happy We Are?

Their special sleigh loaded to the brim, Santa and his reindeer slipped out the back and on to the rest of their Christmas Eve pickups, leaving a factory full of Shapeways employees simply enchanted. 

To think that this beautiful experience arose from unexpected site downtime is unreal. It is truly a testament to the incredible individuals that make up the Shapeways community. You, yes YOU, and Kai, and Roel, and everyone else our service and products touch, define the Shapeways spark. Christmas Eve is historically special for us all, as we wait to hear stories about the thousands of Shapeways powered packages under trees around the world. Today, however, is one we’ll never forget:

As we look to the sky,
Hoping to catch sight of Santa’s great sleigh,
We can turn to our loved ones,
And let them know where he started this day…

A admittedly misty eyed, very proud, Shapeways Global Community Manager here, hoping some of this same magic may reach you this holiday season.

From all of us at Shapeways,

Merry Christmas to All!

A very special Thank You to Roel Veldhuyzen for originally posting these one of a kind #SWPaws, Santa for following up and making the journey (also named Roel Ruwaard), Kai the Reindeer, Ruud, and entire Eindhoven team for being just as big of children as I inside and working hard to make this magic happen at the last Christmas minute. You can learn more about Kai and Roel’s awesome animal family (and how to meet them) here.

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