Check and repair a model on import

Before you start

You need a model on the plate: Your first print covers loading one. Nothing here is a step you perform. The repair runs by itself on import, and this guide is about reading what it reports.

Know what the repair does and in what order

Encrust runs three things on every STL, OBJ or 3MF it opens, always in this order.

• Weld. STL stores every triangle’s corners separately, so no two faces share a vertex and every edge looks open. Encrust first merges vertices closer than 0.00001 mm and drops any face that collapses to a line or a point. The other two depend on this, which is why it comes first.
• Orient. Encrust makes the faces of each connected piece agree on which way is outside, using the order the corners are listed in. It ignores the normals stored in the file, which exporters often get wrong. When two assignments would work, it flips the smaller group of faces. A closed piece that turns out to be wound inside out is flipped whole; a piece with a hole has no inside, so that last step skips it.
• Count. The mesh is inspected, not changed: open edges, edges where three or more faces meet, zero-area faces and duplicate faces.

Only the first two change the model. Holes, branching edges, duplicate faces and zero-area faces are counted and left as they are.

Read the mark on the model’s row

When the repair changed something or found a problem, a warning mark sits at the end of the model’s row in Plate contents. Click it to list what was found. A model that came in clean has no mark.

The lines starting “Repaired” are things Encrust already fixed:

• “Repaired N vertices merged”: the weld.
• “Repaired N faces removed”: faces the weld collapsed.
• “Repaired N faces flipped”: stray faces turned to match their neighbours.
• “Repaired N shells inverted”: whole closed pieces that were inside out.

These need nothing from you. The mark stays in its muted colour when the list holds only these.

The lines without that prefix are left open, and turn the mark to a warning colour:

• “N open edges”: the surface has holes or gaps.
• “N branching edges”: three or more faces share an edge.
• “N degenerate faces”: faces with no area.
• “N duplicate faces”: the same triangle stored twice.

Any of these also changes the model’s colour in the viewport while it isn’t selected, so you can spot it among sound ones.

Handle “No consistent orientation”

“No consistent orientation: slicing will be unreliable” turns the mark to the danger colour. It means no choice of face directions makes the surface agree with itself, as in a Möbius strip. Repair the model in the program that made it, or export it again, then open it anew.

Fix open and branching edges elsewhere

Encrust has no tool for filling holes or splitting branching edges, so these go back to a modelling or mesh-repair program. Fix them there, export, and open the new file.

To see the counts without opening the window, run encrust inspect model.stl. It calls branching edges “non-manifold edges”. inspect, slice, estimate and batch all take --strict, which makes them exit with code 3 when a model has defects or does not fit (CLI reference).

If something goes wrong

The row shows open edges and you want to know if it matters

Open edges mean a hole or gap somewhere, and the count doesn’t say where. Run encrust slice on the file: its report lists how many contours it had to close over a gap, which tells you whether slicing met the hole. Fix it in a mesh-repair program before you print.

The model arrives with fewer faces than the file had

The weld dropped faces that collapsed into lines or points, and the row says how many. Faces only vanish this way when their corners were within 0.00001 mm of each other, far below what a resin printer resolves.