Following up on our earlier article in which we sought out used 3D printers on eBay, we noticed that printers are not the only relevant 3D item you can find on eBay. We’ve located several instances of individuals selling print services via eBay, but we’d use them only if their price was less than… Continue reading Digging Through eBay for 3D
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Print 3D in 2D
A new 3D print service has launched, SnapilyPro, but it’s not what you think: they print 3D models in 2D. The service accepts 3D photoshop PSD files and uses lenticular printing to produce a flat surface image that appears to move when you rotate the image. Why would you use a 2D print… Continue reading Print 3D in 2D
Put Your 3D Printer To Work Today!
3D Printing “connecter” CloudFab has come out of private beta and is now accepted registrations from the general public. We wrote of CloudFab earlier when they were in the testing phase. What’s CloudFab? We term it a “connecter” because that’s precisely what it does: those who require 3D printing are connected to those who… Continue reading Put Your 3D Printer To Work Today!
WYSIWYG 3D Printing
Shapeways has taken a step to ease the design process by using Blender to render images of 3D models. This addition to their service permits users to have a reasonably close peek at what their printed object might look like after emerging from Shapeways fleet of 3D printers. The problem up till now has been… Continue reading WYSIWYG 3D Printing
The Doctor is In at Shapeways
That’s him in the image, Doctor Shapeways! Well, not exactly. Always an innovator, Shapeways has released another terrific feature for those submitting 3D models to their printing service: MeshMedic. MeshMedic automatically corrects very common mistakes made in 3D models that render the model unprintable. While the model might look tremendously beautiful on your 24… Continue reading The Doctor is In at Shapeways
OpenStructures
As the world slowly fills with advanced personal and commercial manufacturing equipment, we’re starting to see the emergence of systems to make the resulting manufactured objects fit together in organized ways. Projects such as SKDB and MakerBeam hope to help us locate and assemble independently designed objects. Another project in this area is OpenStructures: … Continue reading OpenStructures
Purple Platypus
As the 3D printer market grows, the sales model changes, too. At first we see manufacturers selling directly, but once established they expand their coverage by partnering with hardware resellers. Resellers are a very effective way to market products within a fixed geographical area because they can be much more attuned to local conditions and… Continue reading Purple Platypus
The Sculpteo 3D Printing Service
A new European 3D print service has emerged: Sculpteo. This friendly service appears to compete with Shapeways, as it offers not only a straightforward method of uploading your designs, but also has a “community gallery” from which you may choose pre-made designs. Once your design is set: You choose the material, the monochrome… Continue reading The Sculpteo 3D Printing Service
The .MGX Collection
Earlier this week we encountered iMaterialise’s .MGX collection at the Parallellepipeda Exhibition, and we wanted to learn more. iMaterialise, as we’ve written before, is one of the notable and larger 3D print services today. Like most 3D print services, they allow you to upload your own 3D design (and even help you do it successfully)… Continue reading The .MGX Collection
EuroPonoko!
As we suspected a short while ago, Ponoko has announced a new build location in Europe. The new hub will be located in Berlin, and joins the existing build hubs in San Francisco and New Zealand. This development means European makers or consumers will have significantly less shipping costs when using Ponoko: For example the… Continue reading EuroPonoko!
Inventables – The Material and Technology Marketplace
Tipster Zach points us at a new service: Inventables. Here’s the premise: Inventables exists to make it easy for vendors of materials and technologies to get an initial introduction to potential buyers. These buyers (engineers, designers, marketers) browse our online marketplace with the hope to find and work with vendors that manufacture materials and technologies… Continue reading Inventables – The Material and Technology Marketplace
Welcome to The Product Bay
The Pirate Bay may be fading away, eaten slowly by corporate legal teams, but their inspiration carries on – and not only for bigtime entertainment media. We’ve just bumped into “The Product Bay”, whose intention seems similar to the Pirates. They “want to take all of this to the next level … for real life… Continue reading Welcome to The Product Bay
Full Color 3D Printing
Yes, that’s right – Shapeways now offers full color 3D printing. They’ve scored a ZCorp 650 3D printer, which provides the color capability. The “Full Color Sandstone” material is able to handle color texture maps. It’s obviously more work to prepare color models. You must create a texture map in your 3D modelling software… Continue reading Full Color 3D Printing
The Blueprints
The Blueprints is: a website dedicated to collecting 3/4/5-view drawings, templates and blueprints for as many objects as possible. Ranging from humans to tanks and cars to mobile phones, the goal is to provide reference material for 3D modelers, scale modelers, replica builders etc. That’s right – a very large repository (37,000+) of… Continue reading The Blueprints
Prototek Manufacturing
CNBC and Fox Business News recently aired a segment of “21st Century Business” in which Prototek Sales Manager Dennis Rocheford explained a bit about his company. Originally in the sheet metal rapid prototyping prototyping business, they’ve been expanding their capability and now include stereolithography and 3D printing with ZCorp machinery. Prototek is a large rapid… Continue reading Prototek Manufacturing