the official ownage blog

We get a lot of emails from people asking how they can use Ownage. And at the end of those emails comes the catch, "Oh I don't know how to use any 3D programs."

Give a fish or teach a man to fish you know?

Actually, Ownage was built around the idea that anyone should be able to build gorgeous action figures just by pressing a few buttons. It should be as easy as getting up in the morning and putting on some clothes (hope you're the clothes wearing type).

We'll be helping you guys with this soon.

In the meanwhile, here's how you can help yourself.

1) Pick up a intuitive 3d drawing program like ZBrush. ZBrush is an amazing technology. It's more than a program. It makes sculpting in 3D as easy as drawing on a piece of paper. The community is great and you will find me on www.zbrushcentral.com as Desmoda. Send me a hello. Hello!

2) Work with a famous 3D artist. We know a lot of talented Da Vinci's in the making that would love to work with you to make your dreams come true. You do the thinking, they do the drawing.  We'll set you two up (they charge their own rates).  When you're done, come back to ownage and get your idea made!

For the time being, Ownage is the most helpful for:

1) 3D artists who want to make their work real.

2) Indie artists and people who want to make short-run cold-cast resin kits, designer vinyl toys, or PVC figures. Now you can skip the whole $2000 sculpt out of clay step. Glob together a body in a 3d program. Stick on some eyes. And we can make it for you for peanuts (less than $99 sometimes). We got toy factories to make your copies. It's so much easier to make stuff now.

3) Game companies that want to turn their character lineups into an army of awesome collectible toys. We can even mass produce them if you end up wanting to turn it into a real product and sell it to your fans.

That's it for now. Thanks for all the great feedback guys.

It's about time I make this official. We've NEVER charged someone $299 for their print (unless we upgraded them massively or done a ton of free printing).

Why? Because we can.

So starting now, we officially announce that the old pricing is dead and we are MASSIVELY dropping prices for you guys. You can print in any size now and we will only quote+charge you for the cost of manufacture.

This does not affect existing customers because it's still the same system, we've never charged more than necessary to get the print out, so its all fair game.

The price for painted models might fluctuate in the future but not by much unless we're suddenly inundated with impossible requests.

If you print less than 100mm, we won't do it for now until we have our Desktop Gaming Printing System down pat. Please be patient, it's about perfect quality.

Read about it here:

http://www.ownage.com/official/wiki/Pricing/

Thanks guys!

I recently started a series of articles on my personal blog revealing Rapid Prototyping insider information. Here are the first two articles if you are interested.

Secrets of ZCorp:
http://desmoda.posterous.com/behind-the-scenes-using-zcorp

The Real Cost of 3D Printing:
http://desmoda.posterous.com/the-real-cost-of-rapid-prototyping

Thanks Rafael and Grampa for selling us out!  Haha just kidding.  But seriously!  What did you guys get us into?  We're gonna get you back!  >=D

To be continued...

     

Click here to download:

more_mesmo_ownage.zip (419 KB)

Or if you're in China, "the hermit has come down the mountain."

Rafael Grampá recently posted some work Grassetti and I did for him.  Grampá is an Eisner award winning comic artist (the academy awards of illustration) who is famous for his work called Mesmo Delivery.  It's a work in progress and we can't say much about what is going on behind the scenes but you can already see him hinting about the possibilities of Ownage in the comments.  I'll translate for you, "Ownage is in China.  Imagine what's going to happen."

To clarify, Ownage is a multinational company with manufacturing operations in China founded in the US but incorporated on an island in the middle of the Atlantic with people working on it from 4-5 different countries. 

So if you're a design, toy, or comic company.  Or maybe you're just an indie artist trying to make something cool.  We're building something here that's going to change the game for you.

If you're a gamer, oh... I want to tell you guys!!!  But stay tuned.

A lot of people are having upload problems on the website.  We're looking at it!  In the meanwhile, to get something made, upload at the anonymous FTP server (ftp://www.ownage.com) and send us an email at support@ownage.com.  The FTP is upload only, so people can't download your files.  This is a temporary workaround, we're setting up private user FTPs soon.

Thanks guys!

Hey all.  We've recently made a decision to pull Full Color Paints as an available offering for the next two or three weeks while we retool the factory and retrain the workers.  It will be back! 

This is good for us because we can focus on unpainted and simple metallic finishes (bronze, pewter, chrome, etc) and spit those out fast (< 2-3 days) and we can already do those grade A. 

This is good for you, because we'll be using this time to make sure we can do fully painted models perfectly, repeatably, and FAST.

So, keep those models coming.  We'd love to do your primered or metallic (bronze, etc) models.  This doesn't apply to our partners and beta testers, you guys can still get paints in.

Hi Guys.  Desmoda here~

I've been kicked off the official blog which is now reserved for company news and feature announcements.  If you want to find my personal postings and read about the day-in and day-out of running a factory or tech startup, check me out at http://desmoda.posterous.com

later

Many of you wondered, "where are the updates?  what's happening with Ownage?"

We suffered a little downtime the last 2 weeks of January due to Chinese New Year.  AKA the Spring Festival.  AKA factories just shut down and tumbleweeds start blowing through the empty streets.

But we're back.  First thing is that we've moved to Posterous from Tumblr as a blogging engine.  Great thing about Posterous?  Email a blog post to post@posterous.com and it takes care of everything for you.

The king is dead, long live the king.  Huzzah!  And happy Year of the Cow.  Mooo!