In order to give the customers the right advices and perhaps refuse some orders because I won’t be able to print them, I would like to know how do you do to verify the ability to print a STL?
I am on Mac OS X, have a Replicator2 (so use Makerware) and saw that Meshmixer has this ability.
I saw that 3DHubs use netfabb to do some checks… but in fact, I don’t know which checks are made.
For example, is the submitted file printable on my printer? How do I know?
the checks in NetFabb are for watertightness. We also do a check to see if the model fits the bounding box of the printer. Apart from that we also notify customers if their model is too small to print, but this is only a warning. It’s up to the Hub to make the final decision whether he/she can print it or not.
Thanks for the info… Just to let you know, I had a model which was provided in inches on 3DHubs which was not intention of the customer. Perhaps it is just an error when creating the file… but I thought you should know about that issue.
Unit conversion is always a tricky part in the ordering process. Customers have to specify the units they modeled the part in and as a result we convert those measurements into cm, because that’s our standard unit. So 50mm will become 5cm.
Another handy webiste when it comes to verifying files for printability is:
