Dear materialisers,

I would like to thank Alex for his hard work in initiating the i.materialise community and wish him well in the new studies he will be pursuing.  I’m very proud and happy to take the baton from his hands and become your new Community Manager. 

As your Community Manager, I hope to make your lives easier by helping you take your ideas and turn them into products. The next few months I will focus on making i.materialise an easier and more lively place to get things made. I will also be in charge of getting the word out and telling everyone about the great designs and products you make. At the same time I want to listen. I will call as many of you as I can to try to understand what it is that you need for us to be.

 I thrive on feedback, and hope to get lots of it from you. If you have any questions, complaints or ideas please email me. I want you to consider me your employee. I work for you, our community, and I am tasked with making you as happy as possible.

 Next to me of course we also have our Customer Services team of Karen, Vova and Vlad. They will continue to help you get any of your designs fixed and answer any of your questions about your orders. See me as the guy to contact regarding any other more general questions or issues with your entire i.materialise experience.

If you are a company that wants to work with us you can contact one of our three i.materialise Business Development people:  Michael for Germany, Hiro for Japan and our Business Development Manager Martijn for Djibouti (and the rest of the world besides). For any marketing, event & PR related matters;  for web development issues or suggestions for our production teams, feel free to contact me. I can be reached at joris (at) i.materialise (dot) com

In total the i.materialise team now consists of 17 people and I will introduce them all to you over the coming weeks.  Actually the team is much bigger because we are supported  by our mother company, Materialise.  It’s actually quite daunting to work for Materialise. It’s a bit nerve wracking to look across the lunch tables and see experts in their respective field’s everywhere, people with 15 or even 20 years experience in 3D printing. This company has unparalleled depth and breadth of expertise in 3D printing (as well as being the largest 3D printing facility in the world and market leader in 3D printing software). Our team at i.materialise is the youngest scion of this Materialise family. I hope our work can do justice to the collective knowledge and effort of all other Materialise employees, as well as the effort of you, our community.

I know that right now I have over 900 Materialise employees that both have my back and are at the same time looking over my shoulder. This inspires me with confidence and only makes me more driven to make this the best place in the world to turn your idea into your product.

We are at the cusp of a revolution in how many things are designed and manufactured. With a little luck and a lot of hard work we could make this revolution a reality.

 Let’s do this!

If you have not already done so you can follow us on Twitter here and fan us on Facebook here so we can keep you in the loop.  

As of today you will be hearing from Joris Peels quite often on this blog.

You might have heard of him before, as he is a well-known conversation partner in the on-line 3D printing community. Previously Joris was the Community Manager of Shapeways. He left the company end of June and we were happy to hear that he wanted to join us just a few weeks ago.

 We are very glad he now wants to combine his knowledge of community &3D printing with i.materialise & you.

Joris will be here to make your lives easier, keep you happy and grow our community significantly.

He will be in charge of improving:  our content, our marketing, PR, social media and most importantly in seeing to it that i.materialise is the best place for designers to get their products made.

If you have any suggestions & ideas you can email him at joris@i.materialise.com

Welcome to our team, welcome to our community.

We noticed that 3D printed multicolored models are most appealing to you,
but that users regularly have to compromise between price and color.

This is a pity, certainly now, when more and more 3D software packages are making it the designer easy to add colors or textures to the models, giving it the expression it deserves.

i.materialise is already offering a sharp price for specific architectural and bookend products in multicolor.
 

Now we are happy to announce that from today till the 30^th September we will extend this sharp pricing for multicolor material to all your designs.

Below you find an example of the difference in pricing between the old and new price for this lovely model.

Have fun and color your summer !

Using SketchUp is child's play !

It is so intuitive that a child that has never seen Google SketchUp before manages to draw a table with a pot in just 30 minutes, 'training' included.

When I started using Google SketchUp mid 2009, I found it so easy that I used to say to everyone that my daughter of 9 years old would be able to design something in SketchUp. 

Last month, somebody asked me : "why don't you try it ?"

 So I took the challenge and ...