Shapeways “fine detail” Plastics

The Shapeways storefront

In addition to printing services, Shapeways maintains a storefront service that’s ideal for hobbyists. Using this system an amateur designer can produce a set of models, publish them, and make them available to a wider public. Shapeways will then process, print, and ship the 3D print orders to customers on behalf of the designers – in exchange for a hefty cut, of course!

This storefront fulfilment or marketplace model has been quite successful for many years. It means that garage and amateur designers have been able to produce a wide range of models for fellow hobbyists to use. Models that would never sell in sufficient volume to be profitable for a commercial operation to make, but which satisfies various niche demands. Superdetailing parts for plastic model kits is one example. Unusual model railway vehicles or dollhouse details and furniture are others.

Why Shapeways?

The market for commercial printing services aimed at the consumer has arguably been in decline for some years. First, more and more users - hobbyists and corporations - can afford good-quality 3D printers, and so the services offered by Shapeways are less unique and appealing than they once were. And second, the pricing for Shapeways products, both in terms of materials/labour for processing/capital amortization and shipping costs, have increased year by year, making the service even less attractive to end users.

It's a shame, because it was an interesting model for a long time. The storefront system was a way for small hobbyist designers to at least break even and cover costs, and in some cases to generate a small amount of profit. Some small makers even based their businesses around the model, lacking the capital required to purchase and feed their own industrial printers.

I've maintained a small Shapeways store – the Age of Plastic – for some years. It's never been particularly profitable, but until recently it has covered my expenses and produced a small overhead I can use for ordering test prints, etc. And, unlike selling 3D designs as STLs, you don't have the problem of people stealing and reselling your work.

Nonetheless, from a hobbyist end user perspective, Shapeways still has some value despite their rising costs. Not everyone wants to buy and maintain their own 3D printer. It's a lot of work to do so, and ends up being a time-sink hobby in itself. And Shapeways has certain products, such as the wax-supported resin prints described on this page, which are not available to users of desktop printers.

Print materials

Shapeways offer a bewildering variety of different print materials and processes. You can get jewellery made in solid silver, via a lost wax procedure. Or you can make watertight sculpted plastic vases. Or make steel printed objects to test factory prototypes. Or high-resolution plastic prints for model making. The range of choice really is quite remarkable.

And from a model making perspective (model cars, trains, spaceships, airplanes, doll house accessories, etc), it's the stuff sold under the name "Fine Detail" that's the most useful.

Some people use the "Versatile" plastic range, because it's so much cheaper, but I dislike "Versatile" because it's a powder-based process (SLS, or selective laser sintering) that results in a roughly textured object, sort of like a sugarcube. The plastic is not only rough and unable to hold detail, but it doesn't sand very well. A similar rough-textured material is "MJF" or "Multi Jet Fusion", which uses HP's PA12 nylon powder process. If you're making a finely detailed component for your model car or dollhouse or railway then these powder-based print processes are simply too rough looking to be useful. Resin prints are always your best bet.

Shapeways also offers stereolithography (SLA) printing using liquid resin, but they have chosen to use expensive polymers aimed at commercial prototyping. Accordingly their SLA offerings are more expensive than most hobbyists are willing to pay. My guess is that they know that the labour costs associated with processing SLA prints make them uncompetitive with the much lower printing costs associated with home printers, where labour and shipping are free!

This page focuses on the Shapeways “fine detail” product line.

Fine Detail Plastic

When it comes to producing high-resolution prints, Shapeways' best option has long been “fine detail” plastic. This is a resin based process, and currently uses ProJet industrial printers built by 3DSystems. These printers are frequently categorized as MJP or multi-jet printing machines. This is because the machines can print using both plastic resins and a soft wax material.

Shapeways call these machines "material jetting" rather than SLA/stereolithography. Although both material jetting and stereolithography printers use ultraviolet light to harden a liquid plastic resin, they differ in terms of the way the objects are built up. The MJP printers have moving print heads, a bit like an inkjet printer. SLA printers typically use lasers with moving mirrors or LCD panes to image the points of hardened plastic in one plane.

Note that material jetting is not the same thing as multijet fusion, which is HP's powder printing process.

Wax on, wax off

So what's the point of being able to print wax? Well, it comes down to the matter of supporting the print while it hardens.

When you print an object using liquid resin you're converting a gloopy fluid into hard solid plastic. The UV lasers or diodes which harden the resin do so via a polymerization process that's rapid, but not instant. So, as the machine goes along, you may end up with sections of your print that can't support themselves against the power of gravity while they're in a floppy non-hardened state.

Types of fine detail plastic

Shapeways have iterated over different types of resin over the years, marketing them under a sometimes confusing set of names, though mostly under the “fine detail” umbrella.

Frosted Detail

The earliest high resolution print process. Discontinued in 2015.

Frosted Ultra Detail/FUD

In 2011 Shapeways announced a new resin type and print resolution. They introduced translucent resin printing using 29 micron (0.029mm) layers, and sold it under the “frosted ultra detail” name. This had a minimum wall thickness of 0.5mm. It appears this may have used VisiJet M3 Crystal resin. Renamed in 2018.

Frosted Extreme Detail/FXD

Introduced in 2015. These prints used the same translucent resin as “ultra”, only printed using 16 micron (0.016mm) layers, and priced higher accordingly. They also had a minimum wall thickness of 0.3mm. Renamed in 2018.

Smooth and Smoothest

In 2018 Shapeways decided that the “ultra” and “extreme” names were too confusing, and so renamed them to - “smooth” and “smoothest”. This was supposed to convey a sense of plastic resolution, but the names were misleading and kind of stupid. Prints using FXD weren't any smoother, necessarily, just slightly higher resolution. Discontinued in 2023.

Grey and Clear

In 2022 Shapeways announced that, because their old printers were obsolete, discontinued, and impossible to service owing to a lack of parts, they were switching to new ProJet printer models and thus different resins. They kept the “fine detail plastic” name, but added the material colour/type.

The new resin types were “grey” and “clear” fine detail. From a technical point of view, VisiJet M2R-GRY1 is “grey” and VisiJet M2R-CL1 is “clear”.

They no longer offered two resolution options, but went for a single resolution of 32 microns (0.032mm), which was basically the same as “frosted ultra detail”. Grey plastic was discontinued in 2022.

Tan

Later in 2022 Shapeways silently changed the “grey” plastic to a new resin, “tan” or VisiJet M2R-TN1.

This is unfortunate, because the new “tan” resin is actually a dirty yellow in colour. The yellow is annoying to paint over if you intend to paint with white, since the yellow cast tends to shine through (unlike with colour-neutral translucent, clear, and grey plastic).

But Shapeways say they made the switch to tan because of tremendous production problems with the grey. Specifically the grey resin isn't as resistant to high temperatures as the tan, which made heat-cleaning the wax problematic. They had a lot of reported problems with the grey resin distorting and warping.

If you take a look at 3DSystems' own material data sheet, you'll notice that the tan material is in fact rated as being more temperature resistant than the grey, though it's also rated as being more brittle (less durable).

As of 2024, tan and clear are the current Shapeways “fine detail” plastics.

Revised design specifications

In January 2024 or so, Shapeways silently altered the design guidelines for the two “fine detail” plastic resins. These are the specific rules that people who want to print using Shapeways must follow. The rules state how thin a wall may be in an object, for example.

(While referred to as guidelines, they aren't optional. A designer may choose the “print it anyway” option and ask Shapeways to print out a model which violates the guidelines just to see what happens, but Shapeways will never reprint such a model if it fails, nor permit it to be sold in a Shapeways store.)

Shapeways later stated that the change was necessary, because the new M2R resins were found to be more brittle than the previous generation of materials, and thus high print failure rates were being seen. Reprint costs obviously sharply undermine a given material's profitability.

This is a serious problem, so I've got a section below on the matter.

Are “Fine Detail” prints as good as SLA prints?

The surface quality of “fine detail” is quite good. But it's also actually lower than that of a good SLA resin print, such as a print produced by a Formlabs desktop printer. There are a number of reasons why, related to the nature of the wax component to the multijet print process.

Making things worse, the aforementioned print specification changes mean you can't have details as small as you once could, limiting the quality of very small and superdetailed objects.

The problems with wax supports

As awesome as wax supports are, there are four main problems that continually plague ProJet prints using this mixed-media process: wax residue, wax-related texturing, visible lines and surface crystallization. None of these problems occur with your typical SLA resin printer.

Wax residue

Shapeways clean the prints before shipping them to you, but nonetheless you'll probably see traces of oily wax residue on your finished prints. You'll then have to spend additional time cleaning the prints before you can paint or glue them. I ended up buying an ultrasonic cleaner to clean my prints, though to be honest the most effective technique is brushing the print under hot water using a medium-bristle brush. In some cases a bit of isopropyl alcohol could be spot-applied with a brush, though too much exposure to alcohol can cause the plastic to get damaged.

Wax-related texturing

A bigger problem is that of a slight texturing on finished surfaces where the wax touches. The wax material isn't completely smooth, so you end up with a slightly rough texture to the finished plastic, even when the wax is washed away.

This problem was really pronounced with the earlier translucent FUD/FXD/smooth/smoothest resins. It appears to be less problematic, though still present, with the tan and clear resins.

Basically the process used for clear/tan/grey encases the whole print in wax, rather than just the underside as with FUD/FXD/smooth/smoothest. This uses more wax, but results in a somewhat more consistent texture - you don't get the problem of a horizontal cylinder having a smooth upper half and a rougher lower half - and fortunately the new wax formulation doesn't create as rough as a surface as the previous translucent print process. It's still, there, though. You'll notice that the top and buttom surfaces of tan and clear prints will be fairly shiny and smooth, but all vertical surfaces will be slightly textured and more matt textured.

In the past Shapeways permitted designers to specify the orientation of their prints (which way would be treated as up in the printer), which was useful since you could control which surface was most affected by the wax. Sadly this functionality appears to have been removed, even though there are still legitimate reasons why a designer might want one surface to be up (as noted, the sides of a tan/clear print will be rougher than tops and bottoms)

In my experience the only way to sort the problem of wax-related textures is careful mechanical action. In other words, you need to use a superfine X-acto or similar knife, and gently scrape the afflicted surface using the side of the blade. You will then need to sand the scraped areas lightly to avoid marked-out lines where the blade tip may have dug in slightly. This is time-consuming and error-prone work.

Visible lines

This is a problem that seems to affect the ProJet processes, but not the SLA printers that I've used. Basically surfaces in one plane (vertical, I think) will be marred by faint parallel lines in the surface of the print.

These lines are not at the resolution of the printer - they're somewhere around 0.25mm in terms of their spacing - so they're not print lines, the way they are with filament/FDM printers. They're too prominent to be concealed convincingly by primer paint (unless you really pile it on, of course). They can also be highly visible on flat surfaces that are tilted to non-90º angles. They're also really noticeable on clear prints.

Check out the clear print below. This is a model I designed that has a huge amount of detail to it, and is quite small - it's a mere 42mm/1.67" wide. Note how the console surface has a bunch of fine horizontal lines running across it. Those are the line artefacts I mean.