Do you hear me, fabulous! I found Shapeways, the online marketplace for 3D objects and models, rocking a booth full of little things their community had designed. This service is really cool, and if you’re a crafty type or decent in Maya or Blender, you should check it out. There are a couple options for materials, and the sort of amber-colored hard plastic, as you see with the face-bowl, looks beautiful when polished (plus it’s super strong). Unfortunately they don’t polish it for you, but you got two good hands, why don’t you use ‘em?
There’s no real news here, just a couple pictures of the little objects you can cause to be made.
Wow. That’s an amazing site! It’s strange – most of the prices seem pretty reasonable for something custom fabricated, but others are ridiculously expensive. Maybe I haven’t explored enough to see what the differences are.
I can really see using this.
I know that their prices are per volume of used material. So a solid small object will be more expensive than a hollow larger object.
This info (and prices) be found on http://www.shapeways.com/about/material-options where in the tutorials section there is a lot of information how to optimize the object for printing (eg hollowing out to reduce used material volume).
Found more Shapeways images: http://www.zookfind.com/searchme.php?query=shapeways&type=image