Snapmaker Space: U1 Owners Can Now Earn Rewards For Sharing Their Designs

Snapmaker has launched its own 3D model platform. It is called Snapmaker Space, it lives at models.snapmaker.com, and it is in closed beta for U1 owners. Alongside it there is a points system and a run of contests, so uploading your own designs there now earns you something.

Prusa has Printables, Bambu Lab has MakerWorld, Creality has Creality Cloud. Snapmaker was the one major brand without this, which meant a U1 owner looking for a multi-colour model had to go to somebody else’s platform and do the colour and material setup themselves.

What you get

Models on the platform come with print profiles already built for the U1. Open a model page and the profile tells you the print time, total filament, nozzle size, plate count and a breakdown of how many grams of each colour the print needs. A Javan tree frog on the platform, for example, lists 17.1 hours, 233 g of filament, a 0.4 mm nozzle and four plates, then breaks the material down into 23 g, 72 g, 46 g, 32 g, 55 g and 4 g by colour.

From there you can download the 3MF, download the original files, or hit Open in Snapmaker Orca and send it to the machine.

Full Spectrum colour printing works directly from the platform too, and Snapmaker says the collection of Full Spectrum models is growing. Those are the ones where the U1 mixes far more colours than the four you have loaded, and having them pre-prepared means you are not setting up the colour mixing yourself.

The platform runs on the web, in Snapmaker Orca and in the Snapmaker app, and your favourites, likes and print history follow you across all three.

Snapmaker describes the catalogue as over 1,000 multi-colour and multi-material models. Rather than filling it with in-house test models, they have brought in designers who already publish on MakerWorld and Printables, so the featured section is finished work rather than brackets and calibration cubes.

What you get for uploading

This is the part worth paying attention to if you design.

There is a points system, and the earning rules are already live. Completing your profile is worth up to 20 points, uploading models up to 50, and uploading print profiles up to 15. Model Creation Rewards and Print Profile Rewards have no time limits and no earning caps. Points are spent in the platform’s own Points Store, and Snapmaker says the full creator programme will be published on its official website and community channels.

The contests are where the real money is. Beyond One Material closed to submissions on 25 August with 47 entries, and its prize structure is one grand prize of a 600 USD Snapmaker gift card, two second prizes of 400 USD and eight third prizes of 200 USD. Judging runs to 7 September with winners announced on 8 September, so nothing has been awarded yet. Forty-seven entries for 11 prizes is a good ratio if you have something that fits the theme.

The current one is a Cosplay and Costume Model Design Contest running to 8 October, with a U1 and VIP passes to LA Comic Con as the prize. Snapmaker accepts designs already published elsewhere, so entering does not mean pulling your work off any other platform.

Before you sell anything you print

Every model carries a licence, and Snapmaker offers nine of them, from CC0 through the Creative Commons set to two of its own. They do not all allow the same things and some do not permit selling the printed object at all. If you print to sell, read the licence box on the model page. We have written a full guide to what each one allows across Snapmaker Space, MakerWorld, Printables, Thingiverse and Cults3D.

Getting in

Access is rolling out in batches for U1 owners. Snapmaker widened the closed beta on 25 August, starting at around 1,000 users and expanding before an open beta, and has said the beta will run for months rather than weeks while they act on feedback. A launch campaign is scheduled for around 26 and 27 September, which is when the wider rollout and the full creator programme details are expected.

Sources

• • Snapmaker Space featured models
  • Snapmaker Space is ready for a bigger Closed Beta, Snapmaker forum
  • We Built a Model Site for U1. Come Break It., Snapmaker blog