I sent shapeways an email with a question and they said I should ask her, I'll quote my question below. "Hello, I create puzzles similar to Rubik's cubes and to achieve a good price I always pack my parts to achieve a density of 10% to get the discount. Recently a program was created called PartStacker which automatically packs .stl files so you can easily get the density discount. When I used the program I uploaded the packed .stl file to shapeways and ordered the parts. I got an email (post-processing (apologies, I've lost the email)) stating there was something wrong with the geometry of the .stl files. So the same day I manually packed the parts within my 3D CAD program and then uploaded the file and ordered. Not only did it work and I'm expecting the order to finish printing tomorrow, but the price dropped by over $20. I'm currently designing something with 300-400+ parts and really don't want to have to pack that many parts manually. I spoke with another person who also uses this PartStacker program and he suspects it might be to do with a possible limit in the amount of bodies you can have in a single file. I look forward to hearing back from you! Thanks. - Jack "
Have you tried contacting the author of this program ? I assume you are talking about van der Zanden's code from tomvanderzanden.nl , not a shapeways tool (so posting this in "Bug reporting" is probably not warranted, as it outside shapeways' influence). Also from the website, this program appears to have a few parameters that influence the clearance between parts - I guess the most likely reason for rejection is that parts were too close together (likely to fuse during printing) or even overlapping. And last not least there is a big warning on that page that input files have to be in millimeter units for the calculation of clearances to work correctly.
Hi mkroeker, I know Shapeways has a minimum clearance, but does Shapeways actually have code automatically checking for this? For example, if I create a file with two bodies only 0.1mm apart they would definitely print fused. But would the automatic code checker find and reject the STL automatically to prevent me from printing it? If so, what would the rejection error message be? Regards, Brandon
No, the automatic checking would not return an error - though it might fuse the geometry (or even mangle it if it finds some other flaw in the same region that it tries to fix). As JackRTully wrote that his model got rejected after ordering, this must have been when a shapeways technician checked the file.
As said above, the automated checking does not (at this time) try to warn you about shells that are "too close together". For a bit of additional info, I'd suggest that you read thru this thread: https://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=msg&&th= 18169&goto=85246#msg_85246