I enjoy a good 3D print as much the next stark-raving mad 3D print fan, but there’s something cool about being able to upload a file to a faraway land via a slick interface, pay a fairly high price and get a freshly fabricated 3D print delivered to your front door.
One of the latest players in this field is Sculpteo.com. Hailing from the bustling suburb of Vanves, France (just southwest of Paris), they’re providing services for both artist needing a pretty print and professionals needing a better quality print.
I founded Sculpteo one year ago (september 2009), and we had our first version available in January 2010. Since then we are expanding regularly. We plan to add new materials next year. We are currently investigating new processes for doing this. We have the pro.sculpteo.com site available for all professionals need. This site is well perceived by engineers and all of our professionals customers. Many prototypes and functional parts are realized (mainly in white polyamide) with this site.
We put a strong effort on R&D, thus we are able to deploy rapidly new applications, and we have the best 3D file fixing tool available on the market. We also have the biggest list of supported format. Thank to this R&D we try to be the easiest way to perform 3D Printing for all, regardless of their 3D skills. – Clément Moreau, CEO and Co-Founder
Notice the cost. USD $1101.54. For a part like this, that is just a little higher than average. This part can be printed using ULTEM 9085, a heat resistant material for around $850. That material is also suitable for parts to be used in production.
Currently, Sculpteo can handle the following formats:
- OBJ (Wavefront)
- PLY (Standford)
- STL
- OFF
- SKP (Sketchup)
- KMZ (Google Earth)
- 3DS (3D Studio)
- AC3D
- ASE (3D Studio)
- DAE (Collada)
- MD2/MD3 (Quake)
- Q3O (Quick3D)
- COB (TrueSpace)
- DXF (AutoCAD)
- LWO (LightWave)
- IGES
- STEP (ISO 10303)
- VRML
- ZIP : a zip archive containing the 3D file, textures and possibly colours (ensures colours and textures are correctly uploaded to the site)
They also have some pretty sweet online tools to help you auto-create parts to print and a list of free 3D software that will spit out that geometry in a valid format for the print.
