I've been recently experiencing an issue where my older models seem to grow drastically in size when printed. They appear to be the correct size in my modeling software. I output them as STL and uploaded them sometimes years ago and they looked fine on upload then. I've tested prints of some of them not long after upload and they were the correct size. Now though when a customer orders one they come out approximately 40% larger than intended. When I download the STL from shapeways the model size has clearly changed compared to the legacy copy of the STL I created back in 2010. What I'm trying to figure out is two fold. First when is this happening to the model and second how can I identify and fix what models it has happened to. Does anyone have a similar issue or ideas on how to track it down.
If you use the Shapeways system to scale your model the system does not change the size of the model that is stored. In other words if you rescale a model and then download it it remains the original size. It looks to me like they rescale the object on the fly when they assemble the tray. (At least that's how things seemed to work. It may have changed over the last few weeks or months.) Even when they had the file history the history did not show what scale factor(s) was applied to the model. The history would simply show the name of the original file again as if it were just another upload. In your case one possibility is that you did somehow upload a new resized file. Another is that somehow SW replaced model with one of a different size. The bottom line is that without a history to look at you couldn't possibly figure things out for yourself. The only option you have is to contact customer service, assuming they can access the model history.
Interesting, I was afraid it was something I couldn't easily figure out myself. I've reached out to customer support but wondered if anyone else has experienced this. The models I'm dealing with have not been rescaled using Shapeway's scaling options under the modeling tools. At least not by me. In fact most of them predate the existence of those tools having been uploaded between 2009 and 2012. There is no chance I've uploaded a new file as it appears to be affecting over a thousand files. I would have noticed that much work. I suspect that there was some form of trans-coding used during one of the many site updates that rescaled the models by a fraction or converted their unit measurements from millimeters to something else.
That's interesting. There's also a units mismatch fix where they assume what size a model should be if it comes in ridiculously large or small when the design software settings don't match the upload units choice. In my case the fix seemed to always get the model to the correct size (for some reason coming from direct Tinkercad API uploads from that same time period). It's possible that some recent changes messed up that coding or changed default units somehow. Many things are possible!
Uhoh, we are looking into this guys! Our dev team is aware and confirms that something is going on (caused by using the scale function,, either recently or years ago ) We'll have this fixed ASAP!
Is this fixed yet? I just discovered some of my models are way too small, too small to print even! They were fine when I uploaded files and printed them, last year I think.
Glad I stumbled on this thread, I ve found a number of my models have rescaled to daft sizes, too large now to print! I thought I'd managed to mess up in the past but luckily it seems now.