I was just informed by a customer PM that their keychain order was cancelled because of the following: Reason: Multiple Parts in a Model Description: The model is composed of several shells that are not joined together. The model cannot be printed unless the file is modified. These keychains have been printed many times and this a recent development. I have not modified the model in over a year. Looking back on my sales report, it seems another order in Dec also failed - I have the yippee email but the report does not reflect that it was completed and shipped. What's changed? Also, I never received an email about either cancellation! That's a problem as well!
Interjecting a guess here. It's my feeling that the customization done on the product page is just a preliminary thing done for speed, and that a second regeneration of the customization is done later, either automatically or by a human, and that this step can be messed up in a variety of ways. I think that's what happened to one of my personal customized orders. There's also a potential problem for people who have set up their customization to have multiple text line capability (which I think has not officially been released although it is available for use). Someone posted an example of a lot of junk being generated behind a multiple text line customization, which could explain the multiple shell problem. On the other hand, it's a huge mystery as to what they are actually doing!
Could be useful to know which text was entered for the customization - perhaps there is something special about its length, or a character hits a bug in the font file used (if scaled to the size required for this particular item) ? As far as I know, the multiline text bug (which seems to be fixed ?) made the customization completely unusable, as all you saw embedded in the preview was a stream of markup commands for font and color selection.
Customer service told me that the text is floating. There are no special characters involved, single line of 11 characters. Very disturbing since this keychain had been successfully ordered and printed dozens of times over the past year, up til a problem in Dec (which I never received a notice about). I'm pretty sure I never altered the text box either, since doing it the first time was a challenge to get it just right and I did not want to go thru that again.
An update: After several emails with customer service, I was told last Friday a change was made to the custommaker software this fall as follows: For text and image to emboss correctly, the emboss height has to be slightly less than the wall thickness. usually, this means about 90-95% of the wall thickness. The CustomMaker setting for these have the emboss height equal to wall thickness (1mm), so the text is not touching the base model. It is possible that our early versions of shapejs was able to handle equal values between emboss and wall thickness. This is what’s causing the failures after a year’s worth of successes. This was quite a major change in functionality without notice! Checking back on the documentation for using custommaker, there is nothing in there to indicate this. Customer service asked for a list of keychains that printed successfully and I gave them a list w/ dozens of entries. Although I “think” development is working on the issue, it would be nice to know for sure and when they expect an update to be issued. One customer who ordered a failed model still wants to reorder once the problem is fixed. Yesterday I received another email from a different customer service person who suggested I order another keychain to see if a fix was made! I don’t think letting me know when the problem is fixed is too much to ask.
Does the same apply to engraving? Their text fonts are often placed so close together that it's difficult to call any such material between letters as being a wall of any meaningful thickness. Maybe they need to add a design rule checking ability for customized models so people can get more meaningful feedback prior to ordering. I"m pretty sure I have a lot of engraving/embossing heights set to 1mm but I'm not about to go through everything and change things. At the very least they need a meaningful list of rules or formulas posted relating to the CustomMaker set-up with regards to allowable embossing/engraving heights as a function of font sizes.
I think they mean the wall thickness on which the characters are built. The flat base part my keychain model is 1mm thick (which meets the min for steel) and the embossing is 1 mm high. The result is floating letters, not attached to the base.
That seems like a bug they need to fix. There's no reason why minimum material thicknesses shouldn't be allowed under customization. Again, an up to date rule list would be nice to let us know about such things.
Another update... Last week I received notice the problem was fixed. Sadly, my customer never reordered so I ordered one of each of my keychains to make sure all was okay. The "amazing" one is at the printers but the shorter one is still processing, for some reason. I'm guessing all is back to normal w/ custommaker, which is good. No info on my email problem though.