While nothing beats photos of your products to create beautiful, effective product listings we think it should be easier to visualize how your designs will look prior to printing them in one of our many materials. That’s why we’re introducing 3D Viewer. You can see the new feature in your 3D renders on any product page. Now you and customers can view product renders in the selected material from multiple angles, zoom in and out in the 3D space and generally get a much better idea of how the design will look before the print is made. Material selection is now simpler than ever. Which products will be affected? All products will have this capability. This feature is part of a staged rollout. As such we are also experimenting with server capacity for features like 3D viewer. If you do not see the 3D Viewer button it could be for one of two reasons. Reason one is some materials will not be renderable in which case we will disable 3D Viewer for those materials. Reason two is on occasion 3D Viewer will not be available if our servers are operating at capacity. Will 3D Viewer work on mobile? Currently 3D Viewer does not work on mobile. Will my model designs be secure? Yes - the 3D Viewer on the product page is IP-safe.
Has anyone tried screen grabbing a bunch of images from this viewer and running it through a tool like 123D Catch to see if a design can be captured? How much rotation is available in the viewer?
I haven't tried it but in theory its possible. You'd miss any internal geometry below the surface of course which could be important to the objects function. So good for replication simple objects but likely not for most objects. Let's just say its harder to steal from this then webGL but nothing is perfect.
I only mentioned this because as I recall it was one of the reasons to stick with the existing 3D viewer in previous discussions since the view angles are limited to a specific number. Of course objects could also be scanned after a purchase, but hey, at least you might get one purchase before a design escaped into the wild. I hope this doesn't cause designers to camoflauge their designs with extraneous cages or other methods to frustrate image reconstructs. The viewer does not appear to be active yet so it's difficult to get an idea of what might be possible.
I have found the viewer to be active on older models.. It will likely take a bit of time before it is available on all. When looking at the "old" 3d viewer.. look for this icon:
Well that's certainly a better 3D viewer than what's in the 3D tools set. Full and complete viewing angles. Someone really needs to try 3D catching a model or two to see if this is a potential shop killer. Folks have already removed their stores from a competitor as a result of not having their models being protected sufficiently.
Maybe it would be good to use soma kind of overlayed watermark. 3D catching sw probably couldn't overcome this. But I see the model shown actually isn't the model uploaded ... it is somehow "voxelized" (so it shows stepping that will be more or less on final product) - so in the end the shown model in viewer has lower quality then the one that was uploaded. Question is, if it is secure enough.
It's a little laggy when changing materials and first time loading. The metals with color are not rendering properly. Overall I like this version compared to the other, just needs to be a little more responsive so when people go to drag their mouse they immediately see something happening in the viewport. If someone stole one of my designs that would be great! Becuase if I find out about it I am going to make them pay me the fines for doing such.
Was surprised finding the icon and after touching it really was working cool for the most of my materials. Woody64
As I recall Gary Larson said that in the 90's. Now his work is everywhere, including on Pinterest. Granted 3D files are not as widely circulated as 2D images, but it's also not the year 2035.
Can you explain the metals with color not rendering properly comment or provide me a url and material that's not rendering correctly?
The model your viewing is rendered in ShapeJS which converts your triangle model to a distance function and then applies material specific transforms to account for the printing process. Ie the SLS materials(white strong flexible) get's 0.1mm print lines, the stainless steel gets polished with some noise, porcelain gets some glaze height etc. We are trying to stay physically correct to the process so it's as accurate as possible. In terms of scraping the models I view this as a low reward activity. The material visualization will introduce surface artifacts into their stolen model. They will also lose all internal geometry such that everything will become a solid model. So its really only useful in stealing solid type models. Computationally it's also very expensive to convert a bunch of images into a 3d model. Ie I viewed this as much harder then scraping the geometry from a WebGL model. If shopowners are concerned we could offer an opt-in or opt-out options for models. I've been hoping that's not necessary but we'll provide if folks are still concerned. The tradeoff as usual is we could be adding another feature to site if we don't need this feature. Our hope is that the plusses of having a high quality render for shoppers to view the object will outweigh any negatives. We'll be watching the dashboards closely to see how this affects sales with the hope that it helps them greatly.
I don't think my models have all that much value so I'm not terribly concerned about it. It would seem that running the latest version of the autodesk software on a PC requires a computer with capabilities and memory that far exceed those of my old antique unless you pay to do it online. But I still think someone should try it just so the discussion is less hypothetical. Once the horse is out of the barn, well you know, it's out of the barn. There are a lot of models that don't have intricate interiors such as jewelry or mathematical models that might be easier to copy with photogrammetry and smooth or post process for improved appearance than to recreate them from scratch. On the other hand I will be uploading a copy of the software to my iPad so I can hopefully create an exceptionally fine digitized likeness of my glorious MrNibbles body (but not for the new mature shopping category, sorry).
I would say that he is just lackadaisical about it or is not willing to pay lawyers to have everything taken down and to use subpoenaing power to find out who any repeat offenders are so further actions can be taken.
The 14k gold and 18k gold appeared to be highly washed out. The 14k rose gold doesn't appear washed out so much but has the wrong hue.
Hey Alen, check out the Lagoa API found here. Shapeways might be able to use something like this someday. I couldn't get any of their samples to work until I turned off Google Chrome hardware acceleration. When I came back to Shapeways and used the viewer again I found that with the hardware acceleration deactivated the materials load nearly instantly, so the lag issue is now 100% corrected.
I don't think that's quite the way to describe it. In addition to lawyers from Farworks, Inc. and Creators Syndicate that apparently still try to keep things tamped down even Gary Larson himself has made a personal request that I was not aware of. "Larson has persuaded people not to use Far Side cartoons on the internet, writing a widely distributed letter in which he explains the "emotional cost" to him of people displaying his cartoons on their websites and asks them to stop doing so." https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/7458# There was a time not long ago that even Google image search didn't reveal many cartoons but now they are there in abundance. Did Larson and his lawyers finally throw in the towel? Did Google get better at locating them? Have the images moved to offshore servers? Maybe Gary Larson uses Shapeways and can chime in himself about his 20+ year effort to control his work on the web! But I'm pretty sure that if someone lifts a fishing lure from my shop it's not going to be worth stopping anyone with lawyers. In fact burdening them with the design and having them try to sell it to make money would be enough sweet justice in itself.
Well, when it comes to myself I assure you no one is going to get way with it if they are under the jurisdiction of the law that my copyrights apply to. I've spent money on a lawyer once before for sending out a C&D order and I'll do it again. But what I'm waiting for is a copyright violation that is not digital related where DMCA can help infringers squirm out of it. If that ever happens I'll come down hard on them and I won't give up until I'm paid.
Ok, I see the models in BHDA (maybe in 3D less crisper then i reality), WSF ... but 3D doesn't work for FUD/FXD. I can see its not so easy to present them "physically correct and as accurate as possible" due to their translucent nature ... but still, is it something planned - never do 3D for FUD, or just temporary state while the setting for FUD is still not balanced to your satisfaction? If it should be permanent state, that would be pity, as many of scale models are in FUD only ...
There seems to be a small glitch - I cannot be sure if it comes from the variants system, or the new viewer but I suspect it is the introduction of the latter: when you take e.g. Bathsheba's well known Ora Pendant https://www.shapeways.com/product/VZF4W56EZ/ora-pendant and cycle through the list of materials, the "Digital preview - not a photo" is only sometimes shown overlayed on the render while the cursor still hovers over the open menu. Once a material is chosen, the overlay goes away even if the image is almost certainly computer-generated, and in all cases the caption underneath invariably switches to the name of the default ("Polished bronze steel" in this case) rather than the selected material.