This is a model that I would like to use to get feedback on model cleanup techniques. Being designed for animation rather than 3d printing, there are bunches of protruding triangles, self-intersecting triangles, possibly some faces oriented the wrong way, maybe holes too.

Share your techniques to allow mesh-newbies to making this (and other objects) printable.

For fun, I tried slicing and printing it, but skeinforge was complaining all the way. It actually printed fairly well considering - the main problem was that somewhere near the top skeinforge decided to stop creating infill, so the top of the back and hindquarters had no support as they were closing over.

Instructions

For those Shadow of the Colossus fans, the model was extracted from my PS2 SOTC disc using the Dormin tool, found at http://repo.or.cz/w/dormin.git, plus a patch to allow saving the model in STL format. I have a bunch of the colossi extracted in various poses that I would like to print for my personal use. For those who haven't played this fantastic game, the HD remake for PS3 is due out in about a week and you should treat yourself.

Things I have tried:
1) Using meshlab, selecting triangles that are obviously protruding with no backs and removing them. (the model you see here has had the worst of these removed)

2) Running through netfab cloud cleanup. Unfortunately, this resulted in an object that had much of the neck removed. There is probably something weird still going on in the interior, as skeinforge produced a couple of layers with basically no material.

Share your cleanup tips!

Update: I have just uploaded a couple more models for people to try out their techniques on.

Update: It turns out you can get a 30 day trial of the cadspan plugin AND it doesn't actually require sketchup (you can do the shrinkwrap stuff via a web UI) AND it does a pretty good job. Also, I have a clone of the dormin repo with the initial STL dump patch included. See the dump-stl branch of https://github.com/Lenbok/dormin