Road To Major Fud Improvements Starts With Repricing

@PopeDesign user set orientation for FUD is not available yet. As of now we will continue to orient your parts ourselves with quality in mind, as we have for years. We will let everyone know when this feature is coming and share a timeline for the release

D*mn. The project I've been working on for several years has become unaffordable. Looks like it is killed by support material and machine space. Do I understand it correctly that this is footprint x hight? Seems ridiculous because only a very small part of many designs is relatively high. Can this be avoided by placing the tall items on a separate sprue?
Even if it is, I need to rework a lot of my designs. I guess small scale items are benefitting, for 1:35 it is a kick in the teeth for any design that is not very simple and small.

I have a question:
Currently the orientation tool is not available, yet.
Therefore orientation will be set manually. Same for moving parts to save machine space, reduce footprint...
The orientation I used in uploaded file is for best quality (yes!), spaces between parts are big - therefore it would take a lot of machine space and support material.
Question: How is the software (!) able to claculate the price while upload then? It will be changed afterwards by an engineer!
Or in other words: If the price is calculated based on the uploaded file - why an engineer needs to change anything?

I changed over 100 models, mostly adding sprues. That worked out really well.
As an example:
My N Scale Workshop Interior Details were initially set to increase by 16%, but after sprueing the set dropped a whopping 40% from the original price!
On average my prices dropped 16%.
83.5% of the products dropped, 16.5% rose in price.

@Ngineer thats great news, glad you did the extra effort to lower the cost with sprues.

@Alf14558 you're noting two different factors so I'll address them separately.

Machine space applies on a per part basis not per file, so where they are located in the model file doesn't matter. The visualization is going to line them up together and show you the largest 5 (if there is more than 5 we cannot currently show you since it will take up to much processing power)

adding onto what @AlanHudson sait- its worth noting that since it applies the price per model file it will only apply the same orientation for all parts. therefore you may want to separate model files if they should be oriented differently.

Almost all of my stuff increased in price considerably, and those few that decreased did so by pennies.
Goodbye, Shapeways, I'm out.

@Armand sorry to hear this! Looks like most of your costs are coming from having lots of parts in each file. if you attach them you can reduce costs considerably

There are suddenly items disappeared from my shop which were just still there? I have nothing deleted or changed .... what is going on?

Deago Greeble set 1 " From the shop disappeared"
Deago Greeble set 2 " From the shop disappeared"

I'll go crazy ...
I have no changes made only the file viewed without saving and it is gone.

Same issue here!

Many Thanks, Andrew and Alan, really helpful!
Also I have a lot of small pieces in my files (not "sprued", yet, up to 30 - now I know why the visualization shows just 5!)
Just one remainig question: Alan your first sentence:
"From your uploaded model we rotate the model in 6 directions[+x,-x,+y,-y,+z,-z] and calculate the cheapest orientation." - this really menas model (=file) right?
Tells me: add sprues (to reduce per part cost) and wait for the direction tool to be sure it will be printed as I want it to be printed ;-)
Many Thanks!

I am in despair!
From the name of my shop, Classic Airships, you will understand that my stock in trade is necessarily items that for any particular scale can be considered "large". Well my airships have just been blown out of the sky: have a look at this extract from my CSV file. It shows just one airship type, the "North Sea Class" of WW1, but the results are typical of all of the airships in my range....

North Sea Class NS 11 of WW1 1/350 scale Frosted Ultra Detail 59,24 200,35
North Sea Class NS 11 of WW1 1/350 scale Frosted Extreme Detail 98,10 362,98
North Sea Class NS11 1/700 scale Frosted Ultra Detail 16,34 30,69
North Sea Class NS11 1/700 scale Frosted Extreme Detail 24,47 49,27
North Sea Class NS11 of WW1 1/1250 scale Frosted Ultra Detail 8,42 9,22
North Sea Class NS11 of WW1 1/1250 scale Frosted Extreme Detail 10,86 12,56

Sorry for not managing to show the columns properly; the "before" and "after" figures are on the right - decimal points are commas on my system! My primary scale is 1/700th.

I have spent thousands of hours developing my range and have been bringing in quite respectable (I thought) revenues for Shapeways - Not for much longer though!

Derek
Classic Airships

ALL of my FUD/FXD prices dropped significantly. I am very, very happy with the results!

@Armand, sorry to hear about the old "black dog" of depression - it's all too common and very debilitating. Before you chuck it in, take of those lovely big merchant spaceship models and just try attaching the parts together with sprues, like in a plastic kit. I'm sure the prices will go down, and your customers won't mind a little extra work clipping parts and cleaning up sprue nubs. After all, gamers are used to doing that with plastic kits already! Your ships are too cool to remove from sale...

@ETS35, how much did a combo of set 1, 2A, & 3 cost under the old pricing? I make them £180 in the new scheme. Hard to see how to lower the heights, but you could shave a fraction in 2A by laying the cylinders down and maybe rotating the hull nose to reduce its height. Might be worth -£10 or so?

@Andrew, I seem to be one of the winners - only a few of my models went up, and not by much. But then most of my stuff is sprued/caged, and fits in the palm of your hand. I do have one large project in development that I might have to rethink due to pricing, but I'll probably upload several iterations to test the costings...

Despite the welcome lower prices, I still feel you dropped the ball on communication - announcing the re-pricing out of the blue as a fait-accompli and then not even having the updated CSV files available until the day the new structure goes live! Didn't SW learn anything from the WSF sh*t-storm? We the designers would be happy to work with SW on changes, but it's a two-way street - SW has to treat us as valued partners rather than as peasants to be told to lump it. I hope you can get that message through the skulls of SW management!

I used the "support material view" and liked what I saw for part orientation. I specifically lay out my parts to be printed exactly how it shows in the jpeg screen dump to avoid support material on my detailed surfaces.

This file has been successfully printed before about a year or so ago. But I can guarantee it was not printed in this orientation by where the support material and build lines showed up in the printed model.

So according to this new support material view, does this mean the print orientation you see now in the jpeg is how the file will be printed every time from now on?

A few of my models took a big price jump, but I do like the transparency -- hover over the price shown in the model edit screen and you get a breakdown of all the factors, and thus you can quickly see what's driving the cost. For a few of my models it's flat out machine space that is driving the cost-- not much to be done about that.

And, I do like the new support view tool, but I can't wait till I can fix some of the insane orientations -- the techs have in some cases picked literally the worst possible orientation (in some cases: how could they know?) -- so please please I hope the set orientation tool will follow on quickly.

wow. almost all my detailed items went up by at least 20%. Some things went 200%. I guess I'll have to rework everything. I can't even afford test models let alone sell anything. ):-(