Model orientation

Hi,

I made this statue in blender:

the up direction is along the (positive) Z axis, which how it's mostly done I presume

After converting to STL and uploading it to shapeways, the generated preview however displays the statue flat on its nose:
https://www.shapeways.com/model/2700/druplicon_statue.html

Is this expected (because I got my XYZ-axis wrong)? Is this because of the server side postprocessing? And will it be printed that way?

I added the foot (or should I call it pedestal?) at the bottom especially so that the drop shape could stand fixed (and could be printed without rolling around).

Thanks

Too bad you do not allow seeing your model, I don't know how to help you.

oh, sorry
I forgot to enable it as a public model
should be fixed now

thanks for your time

Hi saxofaan,

yeah, that's a result of our server processing - we'll be adding better controls for that in the near future. In the mean time, don't worry about the print result, our operators always manually re-orient each model for the best printing quality.

Cheers,

Bart

I was worried about that, so it is not the most economical orientation, then? For example, if I print a gear, it is printed flat like you draw it on paper?

Usually, yes. One of the things the printers need to do is keep the support structures to minimum. So a gear would be printed flat because that needs no support structure during the printing process.

As for the axis directions - the conventions of pretty much every 3D file model format is that X and Z form the horizontal plane with Y pointing upwards (unless it comes from the geospatial community, which then has Z up). So we don't do any processing on the coordinate axis because knowing what is "up" is impossible to determine automatically.

I use Blender for modeling and there the up direction is along positive Z.

I remade my model with up along positve Y, and now it is indeed rendered in the right position:
https://www.shapeways.com/model/2922/druplicon_statue_take_4. html

thanks

Thanks, I didn't think about that. Makes sense.

So, funny coincidence. Here I am sitting in a siggrah paper presentation titled: Upright orientation of Man-made Objects. Basically automating this problem of determing which way is up.

Well, apparently not.

I've printed a mutilated gear and it is printed in the least preferable orientation.

I can not make a picture of the gear because my camera just can't focus and can't see the details, but I've made an image to explain.

To get good results in gear printing I think the orientation is critical. I've built a router a few years ago (when I had little money and a lot of time) for about 1000 euro. The result of the milling is better than the printed gear. And that is not what I want (now I have more money and less time, I do not want to make them myself).

This single gear I've printed will probably work, I'll assemble it tomorrow. But then again, the final design I have in mind uses a lot of gears. And then I'm worried.

I'll probably order again to try out other things, but still...