What I'm trying to do is replicate pixel sprites as flat full-color sandstone objects. I'm doing that by writing a small chunk of PHP that reads in an image file and outputs an X3D file that represents each pixel as a small box, appropriately colored and translated into position.
The first thing I noticed is that Shapeways was defaulting to inches as the unit, not meters as per the model troubleshooting page. This was true regardless of whatever unit I chose when uploading.
So I scaled my model to inches and at first things worked fine, but when the model starts having much more than 1600 wee boxes, I get import errors, namely:
We're unable to process this file. Check your file for errors and click 'Update File' to upload a new version.
- Rescale from meter to inch.
It's as if, at some point, the import decides to use a different default unit of measurement and tries to scale that to inches, and then chokes on it.
However, it's not based on the bounding box of the object.
I've been able to consistently view the models in an X3D viewer as well as have them pass a validator.
The smaller models that successfully imported are in the process of being printed, so they passed whatever additional internal checks Shapeways uses.
Has anyone had similar issues?