Road To Major Fud Improvements Starts With Repricing

I think that you have confused things a little Mitchell: I quoted the bounding box sizes as Shapeways publish them. How did you get the impression that I was asking for a bigger one for FXD?

Also, you have completely misunderstood the point I was making about GHQ etcetera. I was trying to explain why I think that the price decrease for smaller items is unnecessary ,inappropriate and even irresponsible of Shapeways. I don't understand how you read it the opposite way!

And finally, you casually admit that you and your colleagues have sat and watched a temporary/trial pricing regime in place since 2010 , almost run this material range into the ground, without doing anything about it. It beggars belief ! Professional? I don't think so.

Generally centrifugally cast in resin and l.m.p metals I believe... and I am talking about from the UK and from Germany by the way, not from Eastern Europe

Do you know Mark, I don't know where you are coming from.

You have just 11 items in FUD in your shop, all with very simple geometry and you think you can comment on how the price changes affect me. You could rework your designs within a few days if you had to, for me it will take months.

Try thinking about the question of whether or not it was actually reasonable of Shapeways to leave designers like me with reasonably sized and larger shops so very high and dry. Was it morally acceptable to inflict such high price rises on models that only a day before, had obeyed all of Shapeways own rules. Could they not have allowed existing models to be priced pegged such that the new pricing rules only came in to play say, when a file update was made? Could there not have been at least some consideration for designers such that they were given a reasonable time to optimise their designs before the new rules applied - bearing in mind as I said, that I and others like me have some dozens of designs to get to work on?

You probably saw Mitchell Jetten's admission that he and his colleagues had been sitting on an over simplistic pricing model for FD since 2010. And now they think it is acceptable to strike like white lightning to make good their own mistakes regardless of how it impacts on some of their paying customers. And you clearly do as well. But is this how a professional, commercially competent organisation should actually work?

I created this file and want the parts oriented this way so the top face gets the best detail resolution and the back/downward face gets the support material scarring.



When I preview the orientation in the FUD tools, I see this:


This is terrible since half the surfaces of the model will have support material scarring and the detail resolution will be poor. What do I need to do to get the part to print the way I drew it, that is more or less flat in the Z axis?

Simply put, as long as the preview indicates the part will be printed this way, I won't buy the part. Ever. I'd sooner find another vendor than waste my money and time trying to fix the print I'll receive from this orientation.

"END OF THE WEEK" IS NOW. BE A LITTLE RESPECTFUL WITH DESIGNERS AND SHOW YOUR "LOTS OF PROGRESS".

Yes I only have 11 models in my shop (actually there are more than 11 but some are variants so don't show up on the main shop page), but I have quite a few private models that I buy and then combine with other components and sell on so the shop count is misleading. Still, I'll happily admit you probably have more models to rework than me, and I never tried to claim otherwise, but I still have plenty of models to rework. I'm also well aware of the disruption a price change like this causes. When we had the WSF price change a few years ago, most of my models were printed in that material and all of them pretty much doubled in price. Unfortunately there was no sensible way of reworking the models to reduce the price, the result was that I was priced out of the market. I don't think I've sold a single one of those models since that price change, what I have done is branch out into other models (again some of them are private so you can't see them) that make use of multiple materials including FUD, raw brass, and stainless steel to target a slightly different market.

Sorry, but Shapeways is simply a service provider that you choose to use. No one forces you to print your models with Shapeways or to offer them for sale through Shapeways to others. You choose to use their service and at the same time they are free to change that service, there is no moral aspect to consider. Maybe more than 10 days warning would have been nice, certainly being able to see the new prices much earlier than the change actually occurred would also have been good, and I'm not disputing that. Suggesting, however, that existing models should have had a grace period is just laughable from an economics point of view; people with models like yours would have kept the old price as long as possible, anyone who saw a saving would have taken the new price as soon as they could, the result being a huge black hole in Shapeways accounts.

Having said that I think Shapeways messed up badly by not releasing print orientation at the same time as the new pricing formula. Not only can you not yet easily see how changes in orientation will affect price and quality, but you can now see that for some models the orientation currently picked is terrible, meaning that designs are being withdrawn or not put on sale. The sooner they get print orientation released the better; I've got models I've been waiting three years to put on sale now that rely on being able to specify a specific orientation!

Mark

I give up. You are on a different planet to me. Let me just say cheerio with a plea to you to be a little bit less passive and less of an apologist. In my book suppliers DO have a responsibility to paying customers

Well yes they do if there is a contract in place, but here the contract changes everytime you order, and so I can't see how you can expect one set of costs for existing designs and one for new designs.

I'm not an apologist for Shapeways either, as I said in my last message there are plenty of things they could have handled better. What I am is a realist and someone who believes in a fair playing field for everyone. The old pricing structure didn't represent the true costs and as such meant some people were paying a lot more than they should be while others were in the lucky position of paying less, possibly less than the actual production costs and hence having their purchases subsidised by other people. Where the blame for that lies is immaterial (although clearly Shapeways designed the original formula so......) but it was a situation that needed correcting in order to be fair to everyone. The fact that you have suffered badly, possibly worse than many, is unfortunate and I do feel sorry for you, but at the same time I feel sorry for all the people who have been overpaying for their models for years, and at the end of the day a fair pricing formula seems to be the best solution going forward. Yes your models are now more expensive and that may now price them out of the market and if so that is really unfortunate. However, if your models are unique then people might be willing to pay for them anyway, you never know.

Mark

Mark, the contract for Shop owners and SW as a supplier (manufacturer) lies within the material specs and the promises (tolerances, etc) made there, in addition to the fact that each sale provides part of their profit . All shop owners agreed to this percentage when we signed up. As such, shop owners have every right to expect SW to live up to those allowances for us and question when they do not (SW return policies). We also have the right as a partner to expect reasonable treatment (time, etc.) to comply with changes in SW policy and pricing. After all the shop owners and SW are in fact, PARTNERS.

The last point is where @Derek66 is coming from, I was affected similarly even though my designs fell easily within the allowances (size/multi-part) at the time, as did his.

I agree with him that a more courteous approach would have been a partnered, ramped timing approach to the roll out, but maybe the financial strain was just to great on them and they had to take drastic action. It matters not now though, as all of us must simply deal with the aftermath of the change.

Everyone who offers FUD products was affected good or bad and I think those on either side have a right to explain why they were hurt or helped without being criticized for their joy or worries.

You won't see any of my models in a shop as we print for prototyping, and then re-create in resin for production.

My last FUD print cost £969.94p, with the re-pricing structure it would now cost £368.66p.

The previous one cost £887.65 and would now cost: £844.26 (although re-working would chop off around £300.00+)

Previous to that £150.46p, now £90.25p

Needless to say, I am thoroughly delighted.

As promised, here's an update on orientation- we're very close to being ready to launch but still have a few outstanding technical issues to address. We don't want to release something to the public until its ready and fully usable, and so we need to make sure that we resolve these issues before we can share.

If we don't launch before next Friday I'll give you another update by the end of our day EST (New York time)

Any questions I can answer I'm happy to address below.

Thanks for the update Andrew, I think a lot of us are holding back on releasing new models until we have control of orientation.

Well, not as good as I'd hoped, I have 10 items I need in FUD and I have to get them by the end of the month. I might get lucky by ordering the stuff I need in WSF first and hope that orientation comes online before that order ships out but that's risky.

Try a Turn to Stop Printing on End

Ryan H,

Have you tried to turn the model in the drawing (as I call it)? Here is a quick diagram using the image you posted, to try to illustrate what I am saying:


Hopefully this will result in printing flat similar to what you have drawn. I am not sure it will be right-side up or down. If rendering upside down, a little flag pole can be added to the top of one of the sprues. Let me know what happens.

But if Shapeways will print the model any which-way anyhow, regardless of the support render, you may still not get what you need.

Perhaps Andrew Simon Thomas can tell us if Shapeways will print the way the support render shows?

Sorry it took me a bit to get this to you.

All the best,
Charles Sloane

To be honest, I don't understand what is so difficult there.

Taking in mind, that all the people talking about orientation know _exactly_ what they are talking about, what they want to make and achieve, and they can do it in 3D, the only thing you need is "optimised" position (what you have now - for those, who "doesn't know" or doesn't care) and some huge visible check button that says "don't rotate anything anywhere", that will take the geometry off all parts from STL file and will do what it says - "anything anywhere" and calculate price once again.

Instead of this simple thing, you are all the time talking about difficulties, multi-part models, orientation of different parts separately ... and and and ... something that nobody cares about.

I agree the "contract" lies in the material guidelines, but I believe they are subject to change without notice (part of the terms you agree to when you use shapeways) and that the only guarantee is that those guidelines are applied at the time a print is ordered, not when a design is uploaded. As such we have no guarantee that a model printed today will be printable next week. But, and I don't know how many times I have to say this, Shapeways is NOT a partner in our shops; they simply provide a service for us to use. Given this, while it would be nice to have more warning of changes Shapeways can simply change their terms or material guidelines at any point, without warning if they wish to, and we are free to use the service or take out models elsewhere.

I agree that everyone should be able to explain their feelings and I've never suggested otherwise. It was clear though that Derkek66 was going way beyond explaining the issue but was swearing (albeit disguised) about customer services and the lack of interest of shapeways CEO. I thought that was wrong, regardless of how he had been affected. My only suggestions was that after a period of calm reflection (something it was clear hadn't yet happened) he might be able to see that a pricing formula that better matched the costs of printing was fairer to everyone. Personally I think that was a very fair suggestion to make, but I got called a passive apologist instead.

I still can't see how anyone, even those who have been badly affected, can think that a pricing formula that doesn't reflect the cost of printing and means some people are subsidising other designers models is at all fair. Feel free to say you are upset or annoyed about the change, but trying to claim the change is unfair seems wrong to me when it's specifically designed to be as fair as possible to everyone.

I'll try and make that my last comment on this specific conversation as I think Derek66 and I will never agree on this unfortunately.

Mark

Shapeways should probably make it a habit to over-price materials from the start, and then lower prices in the future after how many years it takes them to determine more accurate production costs. That way everyone looks good and feels better when the prices are dropped.

- Good point, this is something we're thinking about. Note how we're rolling out HP

Charles,

Your idea of a flagpole is what I used. I came up with a figure that can only be printed in one orientation in the bounding box and connected it to the sprue linking all the parts:


Edit: I give up. I used the bounding box dimensions to make the figure just fit and it still turns the part sideways.

Ryan,

It is easier to do than describe I think. In my CAD drawing program; I would select the whole model drawing then pick the rotate command set for the X-Y plane, and rotate everything 45 deg in the X-Y plane, save the drawing and upload it to Shapeways. (I have left things out particular to the way I work.)

You should drop the axis poles, I suspect they will only cost you money.

Sorry I am not describing it better,
Charles Sloane