Spring & Wonder

The new destination for customizable jewelry, Spring & Wonder lets you select the shape, size, message, and material of a whole range of high-quality pieces, from necklaces to rings and earrings.  

Ciphering

This app creates a ring with a sentimental surprise – built into the physical form of each ring is an encoded number of your choosing, which is only revealed when you shine light or look through it at the right angle.

Twine

Twine interlocks two names of your choosing into a chic necklace pendant, connecting loved ones forever.

Cookie Caster

Buying a present for the baker in your life? Make standard cookies a thing of the past with Cookie Caster, the app that allows you to draw and 3D print your own unique cookie cutter.

Our creators apps are for everyone, helping new as well as experienced 3D designers create their own perfect piece in a breeze. So skip the holiday rush this year and use Shapeways to create timeless gifts that show your loved ones exactly how well you know them.

The post Design and Customize the Perfect Presents with Our Creator Apps appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

…a 3D printed house made for la dolce vita

Architect Massimiliano Locatelli has been uploading tantalizing Instagrams of his 3D printed house for months. Unlike other 3D printed houses so far, this one looks to bridge the gap between technology and luxury — in true Milanese style.

The brass fixtures are on point. The lighting is stunning. 3D printed structures are often considered low-cost housing solutions. But Massimiliano Locatelli is opening up the art form to include aspirational architecture for the dolce vita set.

…chairs like nothing created before

Robotics and 3D printing company Nagami (with help from Zaha Hadid Architects and other designers) has teased some groundbreaking chairs. They confound expectations of what chairs look like, pushing aside preconceived notions — and making the most of digital manufacturing’s possibilities.

Image credit: Zaha Hadid Architects

…garden furniture that will weather any storm

Designer Philipp Aduatz worked with incremental3D to create a monumental concrete chaise longue that could be left on the patio for centuries without falling apart. Of course, it’s also incredibly beautiful. Watch this incredibly satisfying video of the chair being printed:

…and some that’s designed to survive on the moon

Iconic Italian furniture brand Driade teamed up with design group Studio Nucleo and writer Gianluigi Ricuperati to create 3D printed versions of some their classic designs. The design brief was not as simple as it sounds. These pieces have to survive on the moon. We’re sorry to miss this one in person, but it’s still the kind of thing that will keep us dreaming of the possibilities for months to come.

A piece of Driade furniture designed for our future lunar settlements

print your own furniture designs

The post Milan Design Week is here! Don’t miss these stunning 3D printed designs appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

It’s part of our tutorial series on Vectary, a design tool that’s free and 100% online. Check out this video for an introduction, and read on to learn how to make your own contemporary cacti.

Here are three simple tutorials that will allow you to practice the basic functions of free online 3D modeling tool Vectary while creating monochrome and minimalist succulents that look gorgeous when printed.

Let’s start with customizing a ready-made template. The possibility to customize and personalize a ready-made model is one of Vectary’s greatest perks, providing you with endless sources of inspiration that you can easily make your own.

already have a design? print it now

Twirly Shape

Creating a spiral shape is a great exercise to get comfortable with the basic Marquee tool (for selection) and Rotate tool from the Gizmo, which is what Vectary calls its transformation tool. The Gizmo is a collection of arrows, curves, and cubes.

try it now

Open Vectary template of a small succulent. Click on the Customize button to open the editor.

Turn off Smoothing by clicking on the icon in the left toolbar.

Now you see the template in low poly geometry. Click on the arrow next to Snapping to expand the menu, and toggle Snap Angle to 15 degrees. This will allow you to control how much you rotate the shape.

To start, we want to select polygons. Click on Select Faces in the top panel to switch from selecting lines to selecting polygons.

Click on Marquee tool and select the plant. Polygons you select will be shaded yellow.

Drag the blue curve on the gizmo to rotate the selection.

Now we want to deselect the bottom level of faces. Hover your mouse over the Marquee tool and select Marquee Subtract. Look at the other side of the cactus to make sure you have deselected all faces on the bottom.

Drag the blue curve on the gizmo to rotate the selection again.

Continue deselecting one level of faces at a time and rotating to the very top so a nice twirl is created.

Now we can add a bevel to the edge of the twirl, so it will be nicely defined after smoothing:

Switch to Select Lines in the top panel. Click on a line on the edge under the top star shape of the cactus. Then double-click the line to bring up the Selection jog and pick Loop Selection to select all vertical lines. You can click and select lines manually, but with Loop Selection it’s much faster. Repeat the action on each hump of the twirl. Finally, manually select all the lines on the top star shape.

Select the Bevel icon, and a blue tool with arrows will appear. You can drag lines to add offset manually, but if you want to be precise it’s better to use dimensions: Click on the handler, then select Offset and type 0.2mm to add thin polygons along the edges.

Click on Smoothing and see how nicely the twirl is defined.

Now let’s order a 3D print of your creation. Go to +Add Plugin and select the Shapeways plugin. Check the geometry, select the material. We recommend White Strong & Flexible, but you can have it 3D printed in Porcelain or other Shapeways materials.

If you don’t want to do all that work, Vectary has also posted the finished model of the spiral cactus. Feel free to customize that and order via Vectary’s Shapeways plugin.

design your cactus

Low Poly Shape

Low poly shapes can be easily created by using basic selection and the Collapse tool. If you want the edges of your shape nicely rounded, don’t forget about Bevel and Smoothing.

Open this Vectary template of a bigger succulent. Click on Customize button to open the editor.

First, click on Select Lines in the top panel and start selecting lines on the plant. It’s up to you which lines you select, and how many.

In our example, we are selecting every second horizontal line. If you also want to select every second line, choose Loop Selection from the Selection jog in the top panel. Select one line, then hold the Control Key on a PC, or Command on Mac, skip a line and click on the one after (on the same level). Vectary will automatically then select every other horizontal line.

Select Collapse in the left toolbar. Each line will shrink into a single point, creating a crystalline shape.

For smoother edges, click on the Marquee tool, select all lines, and Bevel. Click on the blue tool, then select Offset and type in 0.01mm to add very thin polygons along the edges.

Switch on Smoothing and you’re done.

Go to +Add Plugin and select the Shapeways plugin. Check the geometry, select the material. We recommend White Strong & Flexible, but you can have it 3D printed in Porcelain or other Shapeways materials.

If you don’t want to do all that work, Vectary has also posted a finished model of the low poly cactus. Feel free to customize that and order via Vectary’s Shapeways plugin.

start designing

Spiky Shape

Open this Vectary template of a bigger succulent — the same one we used for the low-poly cactus. Click on the Customize button to open the editor.

To make a spiky cactus, we want to change the rectangle faces to triangles. Click on Mesh Tools and select Triangulate to transform rectangle faces into triangles.

Click on Select Faces in the top panel.

Now you can add faces in the middle of each triangle polygon. Click on the Bevel tool icon on the left panel. Drag the blue tool to add offset.

Now you can extrude the selected faces. Click on Extrude icon and drag the blue arrow. Finally, click the Collapse tool icon to shrink all the faces into one point and create a spike.

Go to +Add Plugin and select the Shapeways plugin. Check the geometry, select the material. We recommend White Strong & Flexible, but you can have it 3D printed in Porcelain or other Shapeways materials.

If you don’t want to do all that work, Vectary has also posted a finished model of the spiky cactus. Feel free to customize that and order via Vectary’s Shapeways plugin.

Now that you know how to create some basic 3D structures, you can combine them to create your own original shape and apply this principle to anything from jewelry to a vase to your own RC car.

Ready to make your own succulent family? Just click the button below.

make your own

A version of this post appeared in Shapeways Magazine in September of 2017.

The post Create a Minimalist Desert-Chic 3D Printed Cactus appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

“The reason I recently started making jewelry is actually the freedom it gives. Because the sole purpose of a piece of jewelry is that it must be beautiful and inspiring.”

We’ve noticed that product designers in particular thrive on a few things: artistic freedom, an efficient means of moving from concept to object, and finished products of the best quality. 3D printing has given Stockholm-based designer and product developer Gustav Rosén all three — along with the flexibility to branch out and find new ways to express his love of his craft. But his process begins, of course, with inspiration.

“I am a fan of Eileen Gray. She was a pioneer of the Modernism movement in architecture and also designed a lot of beautiful objects. Danish furniture brand Woud recently launched a hook that I designed and named after her as an homage. And I actually first 3D printed the hook at Shapeways,” Rosén told us.

Eileen Hooks for Woud

Though he’s best known as a furniture and lighting designer for brands like Woud, Maze, and K-FAB, 3D printing has allowed Rosén to have a second life as a jewelry designer. His eponymous line, available exclusively at Shapeways, was born from past explorations. He had a “library of shapes left over” from furniture designs, until, “I realized that I could try to make jewelry of them, with the help of Shapeways.” Shapeways might have been the way to get there, but he told us, “the reason I recently started making jewelry is actually the freedom it gives. Because the sole purpose of a piece of jewelry is that it must be beautiful and inspiring.”

The Ringmärkt

While his work as a furniture designer was inspired by Eileen Gray, he’s approached jewelry design a little differently. When it comes to this new creative expression, “I would probably say that I was influenced by everything, except maybe other jewelry,” he remembers. After printing some of his beautiful, minimalist rings and pendants as gifts for his wife (stylist and photographer Ida Rosén), her reaction to the designs convinced Rosén to open a shop.

The Zig Zag pendant

Beyond his fully 3D printed jewelry, Rosén’s lighting and furniture is generally produced using traditional manufacturing. But 3D printing is a vital part of the design process. “It’s a great tool both for showing the essence, shape, and overall impression of a concept, but also to test technically complex components in a cost-effective way,” he finds.

Rosén has created 3D printed models of almost every product that’s been put into production, usually on a small scale. The designer recommends choosing a single scale and sticking to it — for practical and fun reasons: “I almost always use the same scale of 1:6 for furniture items that I scale down. It’s fun to have a small set of items of the same scale next to each other, like in a dollhouse.”

The Muskö lighting series for K-FAB

Not all of his furniture designs are printed in tiny dollhouse scale, though. “Many times, I also make full-scale prototypes, because at Shapeways you can print really big geometries,” Rosén said. These strong 3D printed prototypes help him get to a final product much faster than traditionally made versions: “I’ve used 3D prints to quickly and at low cost test features and geometries of different versions of components. Once the component has been verified via the 3D model, you can safely order using conventional methods.”

“3D printing has been a powerful tool on many levels in my works as a designer and engineer. A printed model is a great way to see if an idea is as beautiful and functional in reality. And of course, it is a great way to convey the vision of a product to clients,” he added. You can see the results of this process in his Pythagorus Bracket System, designed for Maze Interior:

We always want to understand why designers use Shapeways 3D printing vs. other companies or methods. For Rosén, it’s all about quality prints — and materials: “I have tested other 3D printing companies and also printed in my studio. But for me quality is crucial. I know the results will be good because Shapeways specializes in this area and always delivers good products. In addition, it saves a lot of time to hand over the printing process, rather than doing it at home. And at Shapeways a lot of different materials are available.”

The Lyktstolpe table lamp for K-FAB

We’re always finding new ways in which 3D printing can support the design process. What will it help you create?

3D print your work

The post The Second Life of Product Designer Gustav Rosén appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Nervous System: “Growing” Art

Arboreal Lamp, Hyphae Collection, Nervous System

Think about the first time you looked at the structure of a plant through a microscope. Do you remember what seemed like infinite cells in a totally randomized, yet somehow coherent order? Did you marvel at the complexity of it all? Well, Jessica Rosenkrantz did. And using algorithmic design, she’s created 3D models that mimic how natural processes work, essentially “growing” organic-looking sculptures, jewelry, and clothing of incredibly intricate detail and complexity. Creating objects like these by hand could take years (or be impossible altogether). But 3D printing allows her to create them in days — and to create just enough to meet demand.

Timothy Belliveau’s Venture Into Metal and Glass

3D Printed Bronze Mold (w/ Blown Vessels), Timothy Belliveau

Using molds with glass blowing has been around for centuries. Using 3D printing, Artist Timothy Belliveau has created a project of his own that celebrates this technique. He designed and printed a full-size bronze mold to create his own unique glass vessels modeled after an ancient Roman style that inspired him. The costs of creating such a mold himself would have been prohibitive, so he turned to Shapeways to bring his project to life.

Shane Hope’s Impossible Molecular Abstractionism

Nano-Nonobjective-Oriented Ontograph No. 2, Shane Hope

From far away, Shane Hope’s work appears to be a manic pastiche of abstract forms. Chaotic patterns weave in and out, with no single cohesive element, or uniformity of brushstroke. That is, however, until you move in to get a closer look. Then you realize that those dozens of shapes… have height. Depth. And detail! Such intricate detail. Using 3D printed models created from nanomolecular design software, Hope merges science and art in dozens of mesmerizing ways.

Ashley Zelinskie: Art for the Singularity

Platonic Solids, Ashley Zelinskie

The singularity is something a lot of us joke about. After all, a single word that can describe the moment human beings become inferior to machines is a real life fear for an increasing number of us, but not for Ashley Zelinskie. No, she’s embracing the future in which both of us, humans and machines, can enjoy art.

To that end, she has used 3D printing to take the base hexadecimal and binary code of an object, work of art, or in one particularly interesting instance, a box of Brillo pads as the structure of the subject itself. “What kind of 3D printer can even handle that,” you ask? Perhaps it’s better if Ashley answers this one for herself:

On the Horizon

Artists are working with 3D printing because it helps them cut material costs, increase the number of works they can produce, and most importantly, give shape to things that would be difficult or impossible to create with other techniques. And as 3D printing continues to improve, we believe we’re only at the beginning of what the medium can do.

3D print your work

The post Why 3D Printing Is Art’s Secret Weapon appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Not only do they look great, they can be easily DIY’d — whether you’re making them from scratch or replacing the legs on existing furniture. Mike Montgomery from Modern Builds is an expert at it, and now, he’s figured out a way to make hairpin legs even better using 3D printing. See how he created a beautiful coffee table, then added a Shapeways-printed accessory to protect floors from those pretty, pointy hairpin legs.

So now the choice is yours: get Modern Builds hairpin leg floor protectors here, or…

DESIGN YOUR OWN

The post Try This Easy 3D Printed Hack for Your Modernist Decor appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Pinhole #3 lamp by Studio Jelle

The pieces he creates as Studio Jelle seem to glow even when switched off. And the texture of these Pinhole Lamps recall a motif that was huge in midcentury modern decor: basket-weave, or caning. Up close, however, the 21st-century difference is clear: there’s no braided grass here. It’s a single piece of laser-sintered nylon. The resulting fixtures remain perfectly contemporary and minimal while giving off a warm, diffuse light. The effect is playful and futuristic — with a nod to the pre-digital past.

Pinhole #4 by Studio Jelle

The material he used is a favorite among our home decor and accessories designers for its strength, flexibility, resilience — and slight translucence. What will you make with it?

create your own decor

The post The Illuminating 3D Printed Decor of Jelle de Vries appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Nicetrails creates unique personal trophies for mountain explorers, automatically generated from GPS track data. The result is a custom 3D printed terrain map with each user’s unique trail. It allows you to choose from a gallery of world-famous trails like Mount Fuji, Everest Base Camp, the Grand Canyon — or upload a .gpx of your own trail. Nicetrails also connects directly to Strava, which makes the whole process practically effortless.

Take a look at some examples, but most important, play around with your own maps! And when it comes to finding an incredibly personalized gift, Nicetrails are perfect for the snowboarder, hiker, trail runner, and every adventurer in your life.

try it now

The post Bring this to the Winter Games: The app that turns your best ski runs into trophies appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Welcome to Tutorial Tuesday! This week we’ll discuss three methods for modifying 3D meshes with the free software MeshLab. When you export a 3D file to STL format, what you’re doing is creating a file that describes the surface of an object with a mesh of tiny triangles. Sometimes there are problems with that mesh that cause printability issues, and MeshLab can help you fix most of those issues to make your files ready for printing.

We’ll focus on the top three issues that can arise with meshes: having too many triangles (too fine a mesh), having triangles that are oriented incorrectly or inconsistently, and having triangles that intersect with bad geometry. MeshLab has a dizzying array of menu items with long names, but if you know just which ones to choose then you can repair these three types of issues very quickly. Let us know in the comments if you have other mesh-repair techniques to share!

Reducing Triangle Count

Shapeways can accept 3D models with up to one million triangles, but it’s surprisingly easy to go over that threshold, especially if you’re working with 3D scans or a sculpting program. To reduce the overall number of triangles in your model, open the model in MeshLab and from the Filters menu select “Remeshing, Simplification, and Reconstruction” and then “Simplification: Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation.” For more detailed information, see the Shapeways Tutorial Polygon Reduction with MeshLab as well as Mister P.’s video Mesh Processing: Decimation.

P. S. to MeshLab veterans: Good news! MeshLab updated to a long-awaited new version in late 2016, and in the new version you can perform “QECD” multiple times in a row without crashing the program! There’s still no “undo” in MeshLab though, alas. :/

Orienting Normals

If some of your model appears “inside out” (like the black area in the image below), then you should select and flip any reversed normals using the method outlined in the recipe Using MeshLab for fixing normals in the 3D Printing with RepRap Cookbook.

Or, try a quick overall fix in MeshLab by selecting “Normals, Curvature, and Orientation” from the Filters menu, then choosing the “Re-orient all faces coherently” tool.

Removing Non-Manifold Edges

If the mesh of your model has faces that meet together in geometrically unpleasant ways, then you’ll need to repair it before 3D printing; see the Shapeways article Fixing Non-Manifold Models. “Non-manifold” edges and vertices look those like the ones shown below from Martin Sälzle at PCL Developer’s Blog.

You can identify and select non-manifold elements from the Filter/Selection menu in MeshLab; look at the bottom of the view window for a count of the number of bad faces. To repair any bad geometry, use the method from the MakerHome article Shrinking and Remeshing the Fidget Cube: from the Filters menu, choose “Cleaning and Repairing”, and then try some combination of the tools “Remove Duplicate Faces”, “Remove Duplicated Vertex”, “Remove Faces From Non Manifold Edges”, and/or “Remove T-Vertices by Edge Flip”.

What are your favorite fast fixes for repairing and simplifying meshes? Let us know in the comments so we can all learn how to handle mesh problems quickly and get back to designing and creating!

The post The Best of Tutorial Tuesday: Quick Fixes With MeshLab appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

This week, Tutorial Tuesday is for beginners. If you’ve never designed a 3D model before, then this post will show you how to get started. We’ll start with showing you how to design simple 3D models with a free program called Tinkercad, and then how to send those models to Shapeways for 3D printing. It’s easier than you might think! Get a cup of coffee and join us. You’ll have designed and ordered your first 3D design before you’re done with your coffee.

First steps

If you’re completely new to 3D printing, then one of the best ways to get started is with Tinkercad, a free 3D modeling program that runs right in your web browser. The Tinkercad user interface is extremely intuitive — just drag, drop, modify, and combine 3D shapes to create a 3D design which can be exported for 3D printing. To use Tinkercad, you’ll have to set up an Autodesk account, which is free and only takes a minute. Go to www.tinkercad.com and sign up now before reading any further, so you can play along.

OK, let’s get started!

When you log into Tinkercad for the first time, you’ll start inside the Learning the Moves Tinkercad Lesson, which teaches you how to navigate around and move 3D objects. If you’re an absolute beginner, we recommend working through this and other Tinkercad Lessons to learn the basics. Click on the step arrows in the upper left for instructions within each Lesson, and to move ahead to the next Lesson.

There are a LOT of Tinkercad Lessons, and some of them are more technical than others. Don’t feel like you have to complete them all right now. When you’re ready to exit the lessons and make your own design, click on the multicolored Tinkercad logo to go to your main Designs page, and click on “Create New Design.”

Designing a Model

To jump in right away, simply drag objects from the right sidebar in Tinkercad onto the blue Workplane, then use the “handle dots” on your objects to change their size or shape. For detailed instructions and tips on how to do this, watch Tinkercad’s beginner-friendly video Introduction to Tinkercad Beta.

Tinkercad switched to a new ground-up redeveloped Beta version last year, and there are lots of new features that make designing in Tinkercad even easier than it was before. If you’re already a Tinkercad pro and just want to know what’s different in the new Beta that came out this year, check out the Tinkercad video Updates: TinkerTour and Tinkercad Beta or the Tinkercad Beta Participant Guide. If you’re completely new to Tinkercad, the video Tinkercad Beta – New Features: Shape Controls is a good place to get started learning about the powerful new Beta features.

For a comprehensive one-stop-shop introduction to Tinkercad, including beginner and intermediate videos, links to 3D models and projects made with Tinkercad, check out the Tinkercad Jumpstart resource page on Thingiverse.  While you’re there, be sure to learn about the key Tinkercad tools Align, Ruler, Workplane, Group, and Hole — they are the secret to creating interesting Tinkercad designs.

Tinkercad models on Shapeways

Tinkercad seems like a simple program, and it is, but you can still use it to make beautiful 3D models. Here are three products on Shapeways that were made with Tinkercad: on the left, a metal Shapeways Keychain made by Shapeways user The Void; in the middle, a simple but elegant Y Ring made by moyer; and on the right, a practical Hario Skerton Coffee Grinder Bottom Bracket made by erin.io.

So, how do you get your Tinkercad models to Shapeways for 3D printing, or even to sell in the marketplace? First, click the Export button in the upper right of your Tinkercad window, then export your model as an .STL file. Then, open a new browser window and navigate to the Shapeways upload page, and click “Upload a 3D model” to get started.

Pay close attention to the size of your model — its size will have a big impact on the cost and printability of your design. Large objects cost more to print, and models with very small design features may not print reliably. You can use the “Ruler” tool in Tinkercad to measure and scale your object before exporting, or, after exporting, use the Scale button on your model’s Shapeways page to change the size of your model. You should be able to order a small physical 3D print of your first Tinkercad model in Strong & Flexible nylon plastic for less than five dollars!

Share your work and join the discussion

We love to hear from you, and we’re here to answer any design/printing questions you have. Want some advice on aligning objects? Exporting to Minecraft? Importing 2D images into your designs? Let us know in the comments.

What’s more, if you make your Tinkercad design public, then you can share it with others. Click on the “list” icon that is third from the left in the top menu bar, then click on the “gear” icon near your design and select “Public.” Then, just copy the URL for your design and share it in the comments below to show off your design.

Better yet, you can easily make your design public on Shapeways so that your friends and fans can order prints of their own. If you’d like to do this, go to your model page on Shapeways and choose “Edit product with this model”, then check “Offer for sale to others” and “Display to the public,” and fill in category and pricing information. Share the URL in the comments, and maybe you’ll get your first customer!

print your 3d model

The post The Best of Tutorial Tuesday: Beginner 3D Design With Tinkercad appeared first on Shapeways Blog.