Work in progress: 'Solving Shapeways Upload Issues'

HI everyone,

I have a model that is showing as error-free in Netfabb Pro and Mini Magics, but it isn't passing the upload checks. It's under 1 million triangles, just under the max size for WSF, and I have managed to get 4 other files through the system recently so I don't know what is different about this one.

Christel and one of her colleagues in Customer Service both looked at it, and neither of them can figure out the problem. I have spent about two weeks on it eliminating every thin wall I can find, but I'm wondering if it really is a wall thickness issue, as often tiny thin walls are only caught later. There was some bad geometry created when I booleaned out a cylinder at the back, but I thought I had deleted it all.

Does anyone have a moment to take a look and try to figure out what's going wrong?

(I know it looks very fragmented, but like I said I've spent a lot of time checking every small area for anything that breaks the design rules, including any bad internal geometry, and can't see the issue.)

Thanks so much!

Sophie

The upload process (to my knowledge) won't fail/stop on thin walls. Your model looks fine to me. It seems to fit within the bounding box for WSF, it would fill most of the "floor space" and rise to about 1/2 of the build volume.

One thing I see.. many areas of your model are hollow. Did you include drain holes for the trapped material?

If you do have drain holes, it's going to price out at about $1000 to print in WSF.. if not, then it's going to be a good bit more because Mesh Medic will remove the interior voids.

Thanks everyone!

stonysmith, it does have quite a few drain holes (I hide them as much as I can!) They should be between 3 and 4mm.

Mitchell, thanks for looking into it. I get those errors in Netfabb too sometimes when trying to boolean together, remove self-intersections etc. Taking down the poly count helps me - If you need me to provide a file with the poly count reduced yet again, I'm happy to do that.

Hi again Mitchell -

I seem to have solved the problem by reducing the poly count by about 10%, to about 47000 triangles. I also removed self-intersections one more time, so there should be no issues with unification. Seems like this was a file size issue rather than a problem with the file itself. If I have any further trouble in the process I will get back in touch!

OBJ format sometimes loose polygons on the road, 3ds format is more reliable IMHO. Will it be supported?

Hello.

I've encountered problems uploading model updates, meshes that are already in my models section. It happens since the Shapeways "Hold On" to renew the website. I can't upload anything -a mesh update or a new model; nothing goes up-.

Thing goes like that:

-I choose a model to edit.
-I've choosen an mesh update,; I'm not uploading a new model.
-After choosing the new mesh and setting that the size is in mm, the upload starts (1%, 5%, 50%...).
-The upload finish but the page doesn't show the final model in 3D, the materials printability check, etc. It stays indefinitely with the timer on...

What's happening?
My models are OK.

I'm totally stalled with your website problems.

Thanks

I've tried with a model update and a new upload. This same thing is happening to me. Hopefully they are aware of the issue and are working to resolve it.

Yeah.... upload has some problems today.... so it seems.
STL goes up.... then it remains stuck on printability check and no 3D or anything shows up