If you've been in the business of 3D printing for more than a few years, you probably do not appreciate the advantages that real-time manufacturability checks can give you. You've been typically working with engineers, who provided you with high-quality ready-to-print STL files. Using your experience with additive manufacturing, your main contribution to the task would be to orient the object in the print bed so to optimize its mechanical properties and avoid having support structures created in difficult spots, generate the tool-path with the software bundled with the printer and run the print.Newly-founded 3D print bureaus do not always have the luxury of working with skilled engineers. Most of the growth of the 3D printing industry is being generated by small- and medium-sized enterprises and the so-called creative professional, who are starting now to appreciate the advantages and value of this technology. This market segment has not been traditionally involved in the design of 3D-printable models and is approaching the issues involved with 3D design & printing for the first time.Checking the manufacturability of 3D meshes can be difficult and time-consuming. The main possible defects of 3D meshes are the following:Holes To be printable, a 3D mesh must be watertight. Holes make it impossible to uniquely tell the inside from the outside of a mesh and the tool-path generating software won't work until this problem is solved.Non-manifold edges and self-intersecting surfaces: These mesh features of a 3D model cannot be translated into a physical object because they simply do not make sense in our physical world. Some slicers and tool-path generator ignore these defects, but others will halt and require the mesh to be corrected. In all cases, the resulting tool-path might end up having unexpected features. For example, removing self-intersecting surfaces might result in unexpected changes of the surface of the model.Thin walls: The minimum thickness that can can be printed is different for each printer and material. Trying to print thinner walls and features might result in a failure of the print process, distorted or very fragile objects. Thin wall are very offer caused by re-sizing CAD design without reminding the fact that all design parts are being shrunk. Locating thin walls in complex meshes can be a time-consuming and frustrating job.Shapeways has recently launched a tool to automatically locate and color-code thin walls. It seems that Shapeways' developers needed 4 years to develop this tool. When Shapeways announced its thin-wall detection tool, our development team at Fabnami was finalizing and testing our own mesh-defect analysis tools that detects and color-codes all the mesh defect I mentioned above. Here is an example:Color-coded thin walls (cyan), self-intersecting surfaces (green) and holes (bordered in red).No non-manifold edges are present.Better check this one before feeding it to your slicer.Thin walls, non-manifold edges, self-intersecting surfaces are marked in different colors.It took to us much less then 4 years to develop such a tool. Having a PhD-only development team is probably giving us some competitive advantage over Shapeways. The color-coding is available as web API and is being integrated into Fabnami's e-shop.Fabnami is an e-commerce solution for 3D print bureaus. You can read about if on 3ders.org, 3D Printing Industry and on the CTI-Entrepreneurship Newsletter (in German).Contact us at info@fabnami.com
