We recently made a huge improvements to our renderings. To do this we used Blender. If you want to read all about how we used Blender you can check out a great article on the BlenderNation blog here.

We love Blender and we’re giving you the Blender files so that you can do the scenes at home and play with them at your leisure. We’re releasing the files under a Creative Commons, Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. You can download them below.

Shapeways-Renderer-V1.0.zip

We’re also holding a special contest for all you Blender Ninja’s out there. The “Have I seen the best scene” contest. Can you use the files above to create the most realistic scene? Can you take Suzanne and put her in the kitchen, the garden, anywhere? To enter the contest just post your scenes here on the forum.

The winner wins $150 in 3D printing from Shapeways!

Some tips from the pros: “Feel free to change anything you want, except for
the camera position and orientation. We need these to be fixed because
of the way the auto-scaling script works (see the ‘shoe-box’ in layer 2
– each object is squeezed inside).
Also, be gentle with the rendering times. Remember
that we need to render hundreds of objects per day, so don’t go crazy
on ‘expensive’ rendering features. Using the node editor is fine.
Finally, we spent quite a bit of time on the White, Strong & Flexible
material, so please make sure that remains the same, too. Of course, if
you can substantially improve it, we won’t complain ;-)”