We usually make incremental continual improvements to Shapeways. Mesh Medic represents something much more revolutionary. Mesh Medic is an automated 3D printing file repair system that will deal with many issues people have when trying to design for 3D printing. From now on when you upload files to Shapeways Mesh Medic will be there to help you. He will repair holes, invert your inverted normals so they’re normal, repair manifolds and generally make life a lot easier for you.
While Mesh Medic will not work for everyone and not work all the time, this is the most significant improvement to Shapeways so far. Please tell us what you think give us feedback on how to improve Mesh Medic on the Forum. It has never been easier for a designer to take a design that is your head and get it made into a physical object than today and every day after today. You can try Mesh Medic out right now by uploading your STL, x3D or Collada file here.
For Rhino users it will take away an extra step in checking and converting their models and everyone else shouldbenefit significantly also by having their workflow from file to 3D printed item reduced. Please do always check the uploaded model in the 3D view on Shapeways to make sure that the automatic repair filters didn’t repair something they should not have. Mesh Medic currently does work for VRML files but not for the color VRML files with textures and we will enable this as soon as we can.
Joris,
That is great news, a real time saver! I tried the upload with a rather mangled STL (“non-manifold”, “inverted normals”, “open edges”) and it uploaded without any problems.
Thanks for this major improvement
Oskar
A real time saver. Now we can focus more on creativity and let mesh medic make the cleaning job. I was pleasantly surprised to see that one of my files that I knew had non-manifold misbehavior, was accepted by shapeways and became printable. I had been searching for soooo!!! long for a program that would do that for me and never found it. Now I don’t have to search anymore.
Quote “For Rhino users it will take away an extra step in checking and converting their models” Are you accepting native rhino files without having to convert to stl?
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will this work for thickness issues?
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