This Shapeways tutorial on "Prepping Blender Files for 3D Printing" is not only useful for 3D printers, it is a treasure-trove of 3D printing jargon. If you have a model created from several objects or meshes, first make sure that each individual mesh is manifold (water-tight) You can tell this by going into edit mode, pressing A (once if any vertices are selected or twice otherwise) to select none, then hit ctrl-alt-shift-M (on a Mac it's ctrl-opt-shift-M) Any vertices that get selected when you press that key combination are non-manifold vertices that have to be fixed. Often, fixing these is just a matter of creating new faces (F key) out of sets of 3 or 4 vertices. Sometimes these are stray vertices that are unattached to anything, or are attached to just one vertex by an edge. These can usually be deleted, unless they are intentional (such as those vertices uses to affect the shape while using a subsurf modifier), in which case you want to wait until after you've applied your
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