I know nothing about meshes. Can somebody look at this model?

I agreed to try to print someone's art project. It is a shape made with algorithms to explore mathematical languages, and this is the first of several he has which he made with Blender. It can be opened and placed as an object in Craftware. The error I'm getting when I try to slice it is "EXCEPTION : unknown exception type".

Attachment 6352

The two things he did in the hopes of making it printable were: Checking for a volume to verify that it is "watertight", and manually fixing the "normals" for the faces, which he said can get reversed. He used Meshlab. From what he says, he doesn't have a lot of experience with this either.

As for me, I've only used solid modeling, so my knowledge is limited to references to Nettfab or Meshlab I've seen on Craftunique's forum. Is there some way to simplify the model maybe, or is something else wrong with it?

Thank you

The attachment applet isn't working for me, so excuse my random file hosting link. It asks for your email to send it. Sorry

http://www.filehosting.org/file/deta...Paraboloid.stl

I tried to open it in NetFabb. Even NetFabb didn't know what to do with the file. And that is the tool that a lot of people use to fix .STL files.
I think you have a bad file.

UPDATE: I did finally get it pulled into NetFabb. The mesh has many, many errors. I was able to fix some of the errors. But the mesh is so large that NetFabb runs out of memory. I wasn't able to even save the partially corrected part.

How is this object being generated? What ever the tools are that are generating it, I think you need to change things a little bit. You have self-intersecting triangles and you have surfaces that do not overlap properly.

Ok, thanks a lot for checking it out. I will relay this to the maker. I do not know exactly how it was generated. Any other things that I could tell him would be appreciated, like what basic criteria a mesh should meet in order to be printed. He is planning to make a lot more of these.

Well, the big thing is this: If you define two cubes that are 1 unit big on a side.... And then position 1 at (0,0,0) and position the other at (1,0,0) that is not legit for a .STL file. There has to be either a very real overlap or there has to be a very clear separation. You can't have edges in the same location. And that is what is (mostly) wrong with this object.