What is the best way to prepare a Modo model for a successful X3D?. The model is watertight but errors were generated about wall thickness. It is a solid model. Should I freeze the geometry and then export the X3D? Thanks in advance. Trace
Can you post a screenshot from the wall thickness tool ? The test is usually too strict on small surface details and tapering edges, as it treats everything as an unsupported wall. If you get errors on what should be larger solid objects, perhaps your original mesh was not watertight after all and shapeways' automatic repair changed the geometry to something different from what you intended. Try checking your model with netfabb studio basic, or at least preview it in a vrml/x3d viewer such as view3dscene to make sure the exported data matches your expectations.
Then it is a problem in Modo's x3d export probably - in stl, the mesh is dumped as a straightforward list of vertex coordinates for all the triangles that make up the mesh (so there is lots of redundant coordinate data of vertices shared between triangles), while in x3d, a list of all unique vertex coordinates is followed by sets of indices into the list that define each triangle.
I am not sure if that follows from what I wrote ? I assume that you want to use x3d because you need colored prints - does Modo offer any other export format for this purpose, in particular DAE ("Collada") format ? Another option - if you do not need high-resolution texture maps, might be to load the stl into meshlab, use its "vertex painting" function to color parts as desired, and then re-export to vrml/x3d.
These are relatively simple holiday-themed shapes with no texture maps, just colors applied as materials. I was exporting as X3D because of colored prints needed, but I did notice that Modo will let me export in COLLADA 1.4.1 DAE format. Maybe I'll have better luck with that format...