Kraftwurx,

I've never seen a service like yours available to individuals like me who would like to buy and sell items of this nature. I always thought a service like this was reserved for big business. It's exciting!

I'm eager to give it a shot. My primary focus is to make objects I've designed in 3D be available as physical objects. Virtual demonstrations of an object and it's capabilities are fine, but I still find touching a physical prototype of an item to be more appropriate when introducing it to a company or reseller.

Masks are among the few things that interest me. Among your guidelines it states that a 3d shape must be water tight. The model should be one entire object with all vertices, and edges seamless? A mask, or face structure can be extruded to provide density to the object. Would the design of a mask that covers only the front of the face cause problems when printing the shape?

Textures, and mesh resolution are another concern of mine. Can provided textures exceed 2048 by 2048? To provide detail I can either include displacement maps, or the mesh itself. If the mesh I provide has detail, is there any other way I can provide that detail without sending an object that has more than 1 million polygons? Files like this tend to take up a lot of space.

I can provide images that illustrate what I mean if my description is not accurate enough.

After becoming familiar with the process and browsing other sites I think I can successfully create what I want. This really is an interesting process.

I've also downloaded the basic version of Netfabb which is free. It will allow me to find inconsistencies and errors in non-manifold geometry.

I'm also reading that a preferred limit of 1,000,000 (one million) polygons (quads) is feasible. I will need to provide a support structure for the masks.

Textures, or full color also seems to be available only for sandstone models. Any hard or flexible plastics will need to be coated in something to protect them from UV light, and I will need to paint colors into any plastics.

I haven't found full color for any plastic or nylon material yet.

Hello, awesome idea to 3d print masks.
No need to model a support structure for the mask. If the mask is 3d printed in the flexible tango materials like, tango black, tango grey or tango clear. These Objet materials automatically print with their own support structures which are washed away with water after 3d printing in complete. All of the Objet tango materials can be painted with acrylics.

The masks would need to be no less 2mm thin to ensure strength. Thick areas could be as thick as 6mm and still be easily flexed. Currently there is only one full color 3d printing process, the rigid sandstone like material. So that won't do for flexible masks.

Let me know if you have any other questions etc.

This sounds cool. I'd like to see photos of these masks.