Full Color Sandstone upload Fail

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by 100814_deleted, Oct 3, 2012.

  1. This is incredibly annoying.

    I'm trying to upload a model to print in Full Color Sandstone.

    I save a .Wrl from 3dMax and a .jpg from Photoshop.

    Zip them together (both in the same windows folder) and upload. I've done this four or five times before.

    And almost immediately I get some painfully inaccurate message from shapeways telling me "uh oh, you need to give your model more love" and that I've failed to include the texture.

    Well I havent!

    Its right there in the zip file. A 256x256 8 bit jpeg.

    So I've tried various different configurations, i've resized the texture, but nothing seems to work. I keep getting this infuriating "oh oh" message. (It wouldnt be so annoying if it was correct, why do they have to include such inane language???). Shapeways for some reason cant extract the files from my Zip file.

    Can someone PLEASE tell me how to fix this?

    Thanks!

     
    Last edited: Oct 3, 2012
  2. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    Well, does your WRL file alone upload correctly ? If so, does it when you zip it (without adding a texture file) ?
    That should help clarify if it is something about the model, or some zip format or option issue. (Which zip software
    are you using - perhaps it is using some fairly new compression algorithm that the extractor on the shapeways side
    cannot handle ?)
     
  3. Youknowwho4eva
    Youknowwho4eva Well-Known Member
    I'd try emailing service to see if they can figure out what's going on. They should be able to troubleshoot what's going on, on the SW side, and get the messaged fixed seeing there is definitely a flaw in the message.
     
  4. Yup. Its the inaccurate message that makes it impossible to fix the problem. Except just trying random changes. And there's nothing about texture sizes or bit depths in the tutorials.

    I sent a message to Service as well.
     

  5. I think it uploads correctly by itself... but if I Zip it and upload without a texture I get the "uh oh" message (because there's no texture.)

    If I upload it unzipped as a lone .wrl file it says there's problems but doesn't specify what. (.wrl files have to be zipped?)

    If I upload the model as a .stl file its fine and shows up in my account which means the model is okay.


     
  6. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    WRL should work fine without zipping. Either the wrl version of your model contains some bug that is
    not in the stl (you are not using the ancient vrml 1.0 variant by any chance ?), or the model is so complex
    that the converter times out. (And that uh-oh thinggy is just a "something went wrong but we cannot tell
    exactly what" default message.)
    Anyway, now that CS is involved, it should be resolved soon.
     
  7. stonysmith
    stonysmith Well-Known Member Moderator
    Some programs that write out WRLs include the full path of the JPG in the file name.
    One of the tutorials discusses this. WRL (VRML) is simply a text file.. open the file with Notepad or some other text editor, and find the reference to the JPG. Make sure that the file name does not include a path such as c:\users\whaterver\documents\...\texture.jpg but rather that it only refers to texture.jpg

    Save the WRL and put it and the JPG into the same Zip file together.. see if that will upload correctly.
     
  8. Thank you! And thanks to all who responded.

    I opened the .wrl in Notepad and immediately found it still referring to the original .psd rather then the .jpg, so i went back to max, changed the file and re-exported the .wrl and its fine and working now.

    Thanks!
     
    Last edited: Oct 3, 2012
  9. MitchellJetten
    MitchellJetten Shapeways Employee CS Team
    Hi Mike,

    Seems that my reply on your email is a bit too late :)

    Stony explained already what was going on :)

    Your model was looking for this:

    "texture ImageTexture {
    url "../maps/texture1.psd"

    Instead of:

    texture ImageTexture {
    url "chi_logo_texture.jpg" (not sure if that was the correct name:p )
     
  10. AlanHudson
    AlanHudson Shapeways Employee Dev Team
    I wanted to tell you about a change I'm making to the texture file handling which I hope helps.

    Currently if the vrml file has a full path in with c:\ it will fail with an exit code 2 which is Invalid Format. VRML doesn't allow DOS style slashes in its URLs. If I detect those I'm going to just strip the whole path and only leave the texture name. So if it was: c:\mymodel\fish.jpg it will be fish.jpg This won't help if you didn't actually include the texture of course. I've seen enough cases where this would of fixed things that I'll make the change.

    I'm also working on getting the exact missing texture name out to the emails as well but that won't make it in next weeks release. Ideally it would list all missing textures at once but it's likely I'll only be able to print the first failing as we stop processing the file then.
     
  11. Nice. Thanks. That will certainly help in the future

    Of course now i'm aware of the prob... i can avoid it.