Shapeways Magazine

If you want to make an organic-looking sculpted character head or body, and you want to do it for free, then you’ll want to know how to use Sculptris. Sculptris is a free beginner 3D digital sculpting program made available by Pixologic, the company that produces the professional-grade sculpting software ZBrush. It’s like pushing, pulling, and stretching a digital ball of clay… // Column at Shapeways

What design software should I use to create a 3D model? The answer: Everything you can. Each program has its own unique personality, and different programs are good at different parts of the design process. While creating one 3D model, you might utilize multiple programs, depending on what you need at various stages. Let’s look at five designs that use multiple programs… // Column at Shapeways

Today, we’ll learn how to turn one snowflake design 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. This design was created with code in OpenSCAD, and can procedurally generate over a billion unique snowflakes.. // Guest post at Shapeways

One of the most powerful things about 3D printing is the ability to create customized, one-of-a-kind objects. You could choose to make many different personalized jewelry pieces from one ring or pendant design by making modifications on a case-by-case basis in your own design software. Or, you can use Shapeways’ CustomMaker tool to add text, images, and personalization… // Column at Shapeways

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. We’ll focus on the top three issues that can arise with meshes: having too many triangles, badly oriented triangles, or badly intersecting triangles… // Column at Shapeways

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… // Column at Shapeways

Welcome to the second Tutorial Tuesday! There’s a lot of 3D printing and design information on the internet, and it’s our job to sort it out. We’ll pick up where we left off last time, with a second round of Shapeways design and printing tutorials. This time we’ll get technical, focusing on some of the more specialized issues that arise when designing, exporting, and printing designs for 3D printing… // Column at Shapeways