Print It Anyway: Want to Experiment More with 3D Printing? Tell us to PIA!

Man I get that, it's a nice theory but that has very little in common with the page set up for the PIA pilot. Have you read it? And the last piece I got would've been utterly useless for a photo shoot, I would have been better off painting it in photoshop from scratch.

Man, I'm not sure what folks are talking about here. I've been using PIA since it started and have order many pieces using PIA. Just to illustrate here are images of the shipment (all PIA parts) that I recieved today. Some of them turned out perfectly some had some anticipated issues but nothing I couldn't fix.

This is PIA in extreme detail 1:32 scale. The barrel threw some issues so I used PIA... Printed out Great! No broken parts.

This is PIA extreme detail 1:64 scale a set of 2 nudes. Now, despite the report I recieved after printing these two figures are just fine. The only irritation is that they think they are not and won't print them again.

This is PIA White Strong Flexible. The stand was too thin according to initial tests.Even the handles came out.

I did not expect any of the plumbing to print out on this back head. The pipe at the top is the only broken piece. It was originally a huge curved rod going in to the enjector. Odly enough, I ordered this in White strong flexible polished. They charged me for WSF polished, but it is not polished. That's OK with me because I mistakenly selected polished and did not want it polished.

PIA WSF. One broken window. I was surprised the grab irons didn't break off. This is a 1:20 scale cab printed in hole with 4 loose shells. I think it turned out pretty darn good all things considered.
My thought is that if you are going to test the limits of wire and wall thickness you should be prepared to accept the possibility it might break at some point in the production process.
I've got another order of 3 PIA parts coming soon. Followed by 3 more. I have confidence that I will not be surprised by which parts make it and which parts don't.

Oh,,, almost forgot this bust PIA.

1:10th scale full color sand stone print. The ears and tassels issued warnings during the initial tests. This is PIA. One tassle broken. That actually was my fault having neglected to connect the support under the tassle completely to the jacket.

How thick is the window part that broke?

1.3mm I knew better but tried anyway.

It looks rectangular, so 1.3 * something bigger or 1.3 * something smaller?

Hi, on Print it Anyway can I send files that are larger than 64MB? thanks!

Limits on file complexity are the same, it is just that they will let models pass the checks even if they have a high risk of breaking, and they will ship broken parts. Try zip-compressing your file for uploading, or switch from ascii to binary STL format if possible. Decimate your mesh (using meshlab or meshmixer if your design software does not have such an option) if it has significantly more than one million triangles.

Since there is a lull in the conversation - here is something that I have been thinking about. It comes from extremely limited tinkering with a locally assembled FDM printer that I own, so forgive the noobishness. I essentially want to be able to take the PIA option a step backwards...

A PIA option would really make a lot of sense if couple with a visual output of the slicing process. In my (again limited) experience, sometimes you can get fantastic prints even with meshes that are not watertight etc. The slicer output usually tells the story.

If I've been confusing, I'm trying to summarise:

1) Do not use the auto repair (on mesh upload) for PIA
2) Provide a slicer output (too resource intensive or can this somehow be offloaded to the user's CPU/GPU instead of Shapeways'?)
3) Do a PIA if happy with the slicer output

Can this be a feasible path for PIA?

Not doing autorepair would mean that files with trivial errors would get rejected although they would normally print without any apparent problems. Slicer output would probably have to be tailored to each material/printer, and I suspect would not help where any form of post-processing (even just cleaning and packing) plays a role.
I seem to remember shapeways once funded or otherwise supported a project by some applied mathematics group from New York University (?) who were developing an efficient stress-strain prediction algorithm for parts printed in strong&flexible. Not sure what became of that - I think there was a SIGGRAPH presentation by one of the researchers (chinese-sounding name) some three years ago and at the time there were hints that they would make their code available at a later date.

Load the model into Netfabb Basic. It has a couple of different views (including slicer view) that will let you see the layers.

Thanks for your replies!

The question is how do I stop Shapeways from making its "automatic repairs"?

Upload only models that do not have errors in the mesh definition. (Or more to the point, as stonysmith suggests, use netfabb studio basic - the freeware version of what shapeways uses internally - to inspect your models before uploading. It should highlight all the little things that the "automatic repairs" take care of for you)