The advent of 3D printing has brought on a flood of innovative potential to multiple industries. Through 3D printing, an engineer can look directly at her potential product within hours of her designing it, a surgeon can put her hand on a replica of a human organ or bone before making the first cut and consumers can receive infinitely customizable plastic products prepared for almost any purpose. The variety of potential uses for 3D printers is bounded only by materials and imagination.

Over the years, 3D printing has become more accurate, producing more durable and more complex objects. It has also gotten cheaper: now everyday people can buy a 3D printer for their desktop at about the same price as an expensive flat screen TV.

Dutch-founded, New York-based startup and 3D printing marketplace Shapeways, Inc. delivers a service that uses 3D printing’s promise at its core: the ability to turn imagination into reality. Artists with skills in 3D modelling can produce a model, put it in the Shapeways marketplace, and other people can purchase the printed model.

To explain how Shapeways supports so many materials and so many possible 3D objects designed by modelers and sold to curious customers, the company made the infographic visible alongside this post.

First, Shapeways can use a process known as Material Jetting–much like how an inkjet printer works. With this technology, objects are printed layer-by-layer using a wax-supporting material that is photoreactive so it can be cured with UV light.

Next, there is a process called Binder Jetting that involves building an object layer-by-layer with gypsum powder deposited with a binding agent. According to the infographic, Shapeways uses a mix known as “sandstone” that can be printed in over 6 million colors. Looking through the catalog of the site, those colors can become quite vivid.

Powder Bed Fusion uses a high powered laser to melt small particles of material onto an object. Like the others, this is an additive layer-by-layer build but it can be used with an extremely wide variety of materials such as plastic, ceramic, metal, and glass.

Finally, sometimes a more traditional method is required to produce an object that is made of porcelain or metal. For industrial circumstances this means injection molding and that would seem to be exactly what 3D printing is meant to replace. However, 3D printing is still the answer: a 3D printer can make the mold that will then be used to make the final product.

With this wide variety of 3D printing technologies at its disposal, Shapeways has everything it needs to provide a marketplace for almost any 3D print need. Just scanning the site shows a variety of wares from designers and artists like from metal pendants to chassis for radio-controlled cars and even iPhone cases.

Featured image credit: via Shapeways, Inc.