New full-colour, multi-material 3D printing manufacturing services

These new manufacturing services are based on one of the world’s only full-colour, multi-material 3D printers: the Stratasys J750.

The companies are bringing the full potential of the Stratasys J750 3D printer to a broader market, including customers that otherwise wouldn’t be able to use the technology due to lack of expertise, barriers-to-access, or economics. The Stratasys J750 enables designers and engineers to build highly realistic prototypes with streamlined design-to-prototype workflows – decreasing both time-to-market and time-to-revenue.

“The vivid colours of the Stratasys J750 3D printer will enable the Shapeways community of designers, businesses, students, and artists to realise their brightest ideas and boldest ambitions in true physical form with full-colour, texture mapping and colour gradients. It’s exactly what our customers have been asking for,” said Greg Kress, CEO of Shapeways.

The Stratasys J750 3D printer offers more than 500,000 colour combinations, highly accurate colour-matching, transparent to opaque colour gradients, and advanced clear material with texture bringing to life even the finest, most delicate details. The PolyJet-driven solution creates parts that look, feel, and operate like finished products. Eliminating requirements for painting, assembly or heavy post-processing, the Stratasys J750 shrinks production cycles thanks to reliable and consistent printing – part-after-part.

Shapeways is perfectly positioned to wrap an entire workflow around Stratasys’ innovation. This includes helping design printable objects that fully utilise the printer’s capability, running the printers at scale, and delivering finished products that are ready to use or sell.

“Since its introduction, the Stratasys J750 has driven transformation across a number of industries,” said Pat Carey, Senior Vice President of Sales North America for Stratasys. “With Shapeways, the unmatched capabilities of the J750 will now be made available to an entirely new community of designers and creators.”

Biologic Models is one of the first Shapeways customers to have unprecedented access to the Stratasys J750 printer. The company visualises protein data and 3D prints it as highly detailed models that are millions of times larger than the protein’s actual size. These multi-coloured models help explain the nature of health and disease taking place on the molecular landscape and are a useful visual aid for educators explaining the properties of a specific protein.

“J750 is the best of both manufacturing worlds, full-colour 3D printing combined with high-quality transparent plastics. This is exactly what my customers want,” says Casey Steffen, Founder and Director of Operations of Biologic Models. 

“Transparency and colour coding are necessary features to create the highest quality and most durable models. The J750 tackles these design and manufacturing challenges head on.”