Is this more like the "smooth fine detail plastic" (great details, but brittle) or more like "white natural versatile" (high strength/resiliency, but poor details...usually)?
If you are looking into this, would you set the colors for a ship, for example, or could you allow those choices to be made by the purchaser?
Firstly, the minimum wall or wire thickness are 2-4 times larger than natural versatile plastic. I have enough trouble keeping my models within spec for versatile plastic.
Next, it requires textures, which is a massive additional undertaking. I can't even begin to imagine the workload to map textures to my models. That answers your question about setting the colors. No, this would have to be on the model side. Even if I were to distribute texture files (just an image) and allowed customers to re-color as they saw fit, I don't think that Shapeways has any way for the customer to upload a custom texture file.
If someone were to want to try texturing one of my models I'll be happy to work with them and give it a shot, but I'm not confident that it will be fruitful.
Firstly, the minimum wall or wire thickness are 2-4 times larger than natural versatile plastic. I have enough trouble keeping my models within spec for versatile plastic.
Next, it requires textures, which is a massive additional undertaking. I can't even begin to imagine the workload to map textures to my models. That answers your question about setting the colors. No, this would have to be on the model side. Even if I were to distribute texture files (just an image) and allowed customers to re-color as they saw fit, I don't think that Shapeways has any way for the customer to upload a custom texture file.
If someone were to want to try texturing one of my models I'll be happy to work with them and give it a shot, but I'm not confident that it will be fruitful.
And not cheep, mid $30 for a mid to large size ship.
There was a colored sand stone. The detail wasn't horrible but were a bit grainer than WSF. Also, I didn't set up the colors right so they were all off. And there was a lot of color bleed through.
I am sure that this new material will work much better. But I already have a hard enough keeping my ships printable with Shapeways ever increasing pickiness. Stuff that I uploaded years ago are now getting rejected. I can only imagine what I will have to do to get stuff printed in this new material.