Hello, For a school assignment I need to have a small part printed. I designed it in 3D using Sketchup. On the tutorials section of the Shapeways website there are instructions for working with Sketchup models. I downloaded and installed Meshlab and Accutrans and followed the instructions. My model apparently has holes. It keeps having holes after redesigning several times. It has cost me many hours to redesign this thing over & over again. Then I found and followed the instructions on the tutorials website for fixing a 3D model for printing using Netfabb. That seemed to work well. I end up with a single shell with no holes and nothing in red. So I save. Here are the problems: re-importing the file back into Sketchup shows randomly huge dimensions (1000x as big as it should be). Importing the file in Accutrans shows thousands of holes. I am at a loss. I would really like to upload my design to Shapeways soon to get it printed in time. Would appreciate help with this. At this point I'm willing to pay a designer to get this done. Thanks for looking into this.
Hi, it sounds like you are having some of the same problems other Sketchup newbies have. Its not too hard once you know what to do. I use Sketchup exclusively for my designs and never need any other software like Netfabb, however there are a couple of free Sketchup plugins(addons) I can't do without. The first is Solid Inspector. Use this to find holes and other problems in your model. The second is SKP to STL. This allows you to export to STL directly from Sketchup. Use this if the DAE export from Sketchup doesn't work well with Shapeways. Here's a thread that you may find useful where I helped another Sketchup user fix his model. If you still want to pay someone to help you, feel free to PM me, and I'll get you fixed up in a jiffy! Good luck,
Hello Marcus, Thank you for the excellent explanation. It worked out perfectly. The plugins were easy to install & did their advertised functions well. I had no idea about those inverted faces. Thanks for that too. There were holes where I had performed a follow me move with a circle along a curved line. The line consisted of several elements, some straight some curved. At the joints of the line the follow me tool for some reason had problems. I had used the pull tool to close the gaps with nothing more than the screen as a visual aid. Didn't fit. I started over and now it's all solid. Accutrans says it's ok, so it must be fine. Will upload now. Thanks again!