Shapeways is in the middle of a lot of changes:

  1. On the good side, the HP materials have finally been released for non-designers to buy. On the bad side, they left the price pegged at 2x WSF price, which is IMHO overcharging (why would the per-part price be double WSF, for instance?). We can only hope that they lower their prices as the volume picks up. They've renamed the HP materials "Professional Plastic". It still has great strength and durability (especially for larger models), but I was hoping the price would drop to somewhere in between WSF and FUD.
  2. They've renamed the Strong and Flexible materials (such as WSF -- White, Strong, and Flexible) to "Versatile Plastic".
  3. They've renamed FUD and FXD to "Fine Detail Plastic" ("smooth" and "smoothest").
  4. They've come out with a matte version of full-color sandstone, which is good for a small number of models (like ground units and scenery).
  5. They killed off Black Acrylate and a few other materials.
  6. They've removed all the equations and descriptions of how their pricing is done, which has a lot of designers concerned. (How can we design for good pricing if we don't know how things are priced?) It only took a few days before designers had put together models that allow you to reverse-engineer the pricing, though. :-)


I haven't yet gone through all my models and checked for availability in the new materials -- that will be an exercise for the weekend. I expect it will take a while for most designers to catch up. Everywhere I used the terms "WSF" and "FUD" in the picture captions and product descriptions will need to be changed. *sigh*