360 LIVE: Deep Dive into the New Parametric Mesh Editing and Reverse Engineering Tools

hello everyone and welcome back to another fusion 360 live stream i'm going to be your host today jason lichtman and we are going to get to talk about meshes in particular this is going to be a deep dive into the all-new completely overhauled parametric mesh tools in fusion 360. we have on the keyboard today answering any questions we have brad talis so if you have any questions please feel free to ask them brad will do his best to answer them during the live stream and if there's anything he can't answer i'm happy to answer afterwards we have a packed agenda for today so let me just show you exactly what we're going to be covering we are going to start by talking a little bit about why autodesk is overhauling or did overhaul the mesh tools we're going to talk a little bit about the basics of what is a mesh and i know for many of you that might be a little too basic but from the questions that i've been seeing on the facebook forums i have the feeling that it's going to be beneficial to quite a few different people out there then we're going to be talking a little bit about the differences between meshes and b reps if you haven't heard that term before i'll explain what that means and all the differences between them why working with meshes has traditionally been difficult and then we're going to get into the really good stuff the bulk of today's session is going to be covering the actual new tools i'm going to go over what those new tools are how they work how to use them and some tips and tricks on how to get the most out of them i think this is going to be the very first comprehensive video on the new mesh workspace and it's only a week after all of this came live so this all went live july 6 of 2021 is about a week later and we're going to be covering all of those tools in detail those tools are fantastic but they do not cover absolutely everything that you might try to use them for i'm also going to talk a little bit about what those current limitations are and keep in mind that those are current limitations those are not forever so that's the agenda and just a little sneak peek into what those new tools are because i know all of you are very excited this is a huge list i mean we have a lot of new stuff in the new mesh workspace and i think you're going to love these new tools so let's talk about why autodesk is actually doing all of this so when you're designing something you're going to have a lot of different tools at your disposal for turning that idea into a real product typically engineers use solid modeling sometimes use surface modeling sometimes use sheet metal tools sometimes they use subdivisional modeling tools but there are a lot of different tools out there and depending on the application that you're working on you might end up finding yourself working with meshes on a regular basis and meshes have traditionally been hard to work with and we see that as an industry more and more people are using those meshes for defining their geometry and in many cases they're starting with meshes they could be starting with mesh files from scan data they could also be starting with meshes from websites like thingiverse regardless of where those meshes are coming from people often ask how do i take this downloaded model that's an stl and how do i convert it into something that's editable or how do i actually just edit it and more often than not the answer is well you should just redraw it from scratch and that at least to us at autodesk is not a great answer when we could do a whole lot more so what we're trying to do here with the new mesh tools is to be able to give you way more capability than you've ever seen before both from autodesk and also from any competitor software you might be using currently and so these new mesh tools are going to allow you to be able to interweave between meshes solids surfaces and everything in between to be able to turn your ideas into great products if you haven't seen it before autodesk tagline is make anything and we're trying to be able to give you the software so that you could do exactly that so that you can make anything so let's start with the basics we're going to talk about what is a mesh and why are they actually difficult to work with let's share my screen here and let's talk a little bit about what a mesh is so on my screen at the moment you can see an example of a mesh file and this is pretty traditional the key here is all the triangles you see on this particular file the triangles are really just ways to represent this file really if you think about it you're just trying to show what is this thing and the mesh is actually doing it by a series of different points that are all connected via these triangles there are however other types of meshes as well and so here's another example this is what's called a quad mesh this is actually the same exact file just shown as a quad mesh i'll admit this one's a little bit of an ugly quad mesh but it's still a quad mesh it's a series of points but this time instead of connected by triangles it's connected by squares or quads as you could see here but when working with these files you're going to find that they can be difficult because the software that typically works with these meshes is really just meant for meshes and the software that does engineering type stuff like fusion 360 inventor solidworks creo they're typically meant for a different type of file and the way that i like to talk about it is by starting with a comparison of just something really basic that you're used to seeing so here you can see two autodesk logos and the one on the left is what's called a raster or a bitmap the one on the right is called a vector and on first glance they look exactly the same but in reality they're defined in different ways so the one on the left is defined by pixels or dots just like an image would be that you take on your iphone or your android phone and the one on the right is defined by vectors which is really a mathematical formula for the shape and the result is exactly the same at least on first glance but when you start to look at the details you're going to see that the one on the left when you start to look in like zoomed in it's going to be a little bit more blurry the one on the right is going to stay nice and crisp if you look even further this is going to be even more exaggerated so there's a difference between the end result even though in first glance they look the same there are different softwares to edit images that are rasters or bitmaps versus images that are vectors so some software that i like to use i use adobe cloud products and adobe photoshop is a great image editing program it's meant for raster or bitmap images whereas adobe illustrator is a vector editing program and it's meant for editing vectors or creating them of course so the interesting thing is that you can actually bring in vectors into photoshop and you could bring in images or raster images into illustrator but you're limited in each case and what you can actually do inside those programs and to make it more interesting one of these directions is actually easier than the other if you take a vector and you want to convert it into a bitmap it's really fast and really accurate but if you want to take that raster or bitmap image and turn it into a vector you can do it adobe illustrator has a conversion that's essentially a tracing function but one of the things you're going to find is that that vector tends to have a lot of inaccuracies to say the very least it's not nearly as crisp as a vector that was created from scratch or not nearly as crisp as the bitmap image that's created starting from that vector now why am i talking about 2d images when we're really trying to talk about meshes well in my opinion this is very similar to what's happening in the 3d world so let's look at ways to represent a 3d model this is called a boundary representational surface or a boundary representational solid this is the traditional way that engineering programs like solidworks inventor creo fusion360 defined geometry in my opinion this is like a 3d vector this will scale up or down absolutely perfectly every single time but when we start talking about meshes made of triangles i want you to think of those triangles like pixels but 3d and so the conversion from that boundary representational solid to the polygon triangular mesh is absolutely perfect just like taking that vector and turning it into that raster image is really good really fast really crisp when you're trying to go the other way around from this triangular mesh into the b rep it's a whole nother story and that's why you have people asking all the time why can't i just edit the mesh and most people just say actually you should just recreate it from scratch because typically converting from that mesh into something like this that's fully editable is near impossible not totally impossible but very difficult and can be very costly but fusion 360's new mesh tools are going to completely change the way that you think about all of this because you're going to be able to do this much better than ever before right but just wanted to explain why working with meshes is difficult and just to repeat myself one last time typically an engineering program is meant to work with these b-rep solids or surfaces and mesh editing tools or polygon editors are meant to work with meshes can you bring in a mesh into fusion 360 or at least could you absolutely you did have tools at your disposal but you were limited in what you could do because it wasn't a b wrap solid it wasn't a b rep surface but with these new tools you're going to be able to interchange between these different file types pretty quickly and i think you're going to find that you're going to be able to do a whole lot more than you ever thought was possible so that's why working with meshes is difficult so are you ready to get into the really fun stuff i have the feeling you are so let's actually get to it so we're going to jump into fusion 360. and i'm going to start by talking about actually let's go to that list real quick make sure we're covering everything at the same time all right so first thing we should talk about is newly supported mesh file types if you've worked with meshes in the past you're already probably familiar with stl files and obj files they have a lot in common they're both mesh file types they also are both unitless so a one inch by one inch cube is exactly the same as a one inch sorry a one millimeter by one millimeter cube as an stl or an obj file they're really just a one by one cube which is why i always recommend doing the insert mesh function in fusion 360 because it will ask you what units it was created in and if it's a one inch by one inch cube you tell it inches if it's a one millimeter by one millimeter cube you tell a millimeter and then it will come in in the correct size if you just upload that file it typically expects that it's centimeters which more often than not is not what you wanted and then you'll have to scale it later anyway obj and stl files are unitless mesh files there is a difference between them as well stl files cannot contain color or texture information obj files however can indeed contain color and or texture information however when you brought those obj files that have color in them in diffusion 360 you aren't going to see any of their color or at least you haven't in the past that is another thing that's going to be different and you'll see that in a few minutes 3mf files are a new file type that's also a mesh file type it however has the benefits of the obj it can also contain color and texture information but it also contains units so when you bring in a 3mf file you never have to worry about what units it was created in because it will automatically come in correctly and now in fusion 360 you can bring in for 3mf files you can also export 3mf files in my opinion the 3mf file type is superior to both the stl and obj file types however not every piece of software out there accepts 3mf files so you might end up still having to work with obj and stl files also if you're downloading stl or if you're downloading mesh files in general from websites like thingiverse chances are they will be in stl or obj form because those file types have been around for a long time 3mf is very much a new file type and it's also new to fusion360. you can also know that we can now accept that color information from obj files and also from 3mf files and i'm going to show you that live because i think this is going to be important so let's go into fusion 360. let's actually start a brand new document here and i want to point out that the mesh tab now shows up whether you have parametric modeling on or off in fusion 360. if you watch any of our older videos you'll have seen that the mesh tab will only show up if the history is turned off or if you said create mesh or insert mesh but now mesh is actually parametric we're going to talk about that in more detail in just a little bit but know that the mesh tab will show up regardless of whether you have the history on or if you have the history off mesh will always show up the tools will be slightly different you will see a little bit more information about that shortly but the mesh tab in general will always show up now the best way to bring in a mesh as i said earlier is to go to insert mesh and choose a mesh from your computer i'm going to go and grab a gearbox cover this is a 3mf file you'll notice on the top here it is not asking me for the units i'm going to go and say okay and here's my 3mf file if however i did the same thing with an obj or an stl file let's go and do that here's an obj same file gearbox cover you're going to see in the top it's going to ask me what the units are because again obj and stl files are unitless so if you don't tell it what units to use it doesn't know so in this case i'll go and choose inches actually and we'll go and hit ok now you'll notice for this particular obj file i have color so color is definitely one of those new things new features in the new mesh workspace this particular file is meant to look like steel with some rust on it and it looks pretty darn cool but i do want to point out that if you bring in any mesh files and it's supposed to have color and you don't see color in your file there are a couple of things that you should check the very first one is your display settings on the very bottom of the screen so under display settings you'll see mesh display and there's an option here for face groups when face groups is on you're going to see face groups instead of seeing the color in the original file i'll go and turn mine on just for a second so you can see what i'm talking about it takes about a moment for it to change and now you're seeing what i would call a pastel color all of the face groups happen to be pastel colors and they're somewhat random right now it happens to be pink but it could be green or blue or whatever but the point is that i'm not seeing the original color in the file when the face groups is turned on alright so just keep that in mind there is another setting that you will want to check to make sure that your color is going to show up in your file so if you go into your picture in the top right corner or your initials and you go to your preferences there is a preference for your new document settings for material in particular so here i am under material and this is where i define my default material and i 3d print on this makerbot method x carbon right here and i do a lot of printing in nylon so i usually have this set to nylon but i'll tell you that if you ever choose this apply a different appearance so that your part can look a little bit more like carbon fiber or whatever else you might be using this checkbox does override the appearance from your your part and therefore will override the color in your obj or your 3mf file that should have contained color so i'm going to uncheck that and actually i'll just hit cancel but again if you bring in a file that has color make sure the face groups is turned off and you should see the color i'll show you just a couple of other examples because i think this is important just to show you what is possible so let's go back and i have here this one is actually a result from an fva study this is the displacement map on this gearbox cover and it shows up in the stl file itself and then i'll go and delete that and i'll show you just one more and this one here is actually the stress also from an fea study and here you can see quite a bit of color now there's such a thing as color and also texture so let's go and take a look at some properties under my bodies folder you're going to see i have mesh body 2 i can right click on it and go to properties and you're going to notice that this is actually a little bit different than before so the first thing to note is that in the past mesh files did not have mass now you're going to have the ability to have mass based on whatever material you've set the part to and then you also have a special mesh properties tab and a mesh analysis tab both are very important the mesh anal sorry the standard mesh properties tab is going to tell you your facet count your vertex count the number of face groups which may not even make sense to you right now because you might not know what face groups are i'm going to tell you a little bit more about that in a little bit but just know that we'll tell you how many there are here and also shell account that one actually i have to define right away so you're used to looking at bodies in this bodies folder here and however many objects you have show up as bodies body one body two or mesh body one mesh body two mesh body three and so on cells in in meshes are essentially sub bodies i'm gonna say that again sub bodies so think of them as closed shapes but you could have multiple of these closed shapes or sub bodies within a body so for example i'm going to be showing you this jaguar here in a moment and in the jaguar file let's actually go and pull that up in the jaguar file you're going to see that i have one body but in reality i actually have 900 and something different shells let's go and take a look at that zoom out here there's another obj file by the way came in with color we're going to be showing you how to do the how to create the hood ornament on the very front of this particular car but if you look at the properties here you're going to see under mesh that i have a shell count of 941 they're actually 941 different sub bodies inside this mesh body and those are called shells and this is not to be confused with the shell command or the shell feature that we have in the mesh tab i'll cover that in just a little bit but shells are again closed bodies or actually they don't have to be close they're just bodies within the body all right so let's go back to our properties we're going to go back one more time here we are so you're going to see a whole bunch of information here including texture and color so this particular file has no texture and no color let's go back to this one over here and actually let's bring in the one that definitely had color so we don't have to what's with this all right so this is the one that had color and when we go and look at our properties here this one says yes to color and yes to texture but in other cases like let's say that stress map let's go and do that too i'm going to insert this file we'll bring in the stress map version we'll go and look at our properties just like before and this one is going to tell us that we have no color but we do have a texture so this is going to get really interesting you know really the texture and the color comes from the file that's imported just know that we could bring in color and we could also bring in texture sometimes what looks like color is actually a texture sometimes what looks like a texture is actually a color just know that we can bring in both now and they're going to be very useful in my opinion they're going to be useful for you going forward all right so other properties that i think are important actually so let's go back in here so in addition to showing you that there's also the mesh analysis tab this is going to tell you some important information about the mesh and whether or not it's closed whether or not it's been oriented and whether or not it has a positive volume if the mesh is not closed it will not have a positive volume and if it doesn't have a positive volume it will also not have a mass so the fact that i see a mass here is also a good indicator that these are going to say yes also if you're going to be 3d printing your part you are going to want this to be a closed volume that has a positive volume you're going to want those things if you bring in a file that does not have those things you're going to get these saying no and you'll also get warnings in your file as well so let's close these i'll bring in a new mesh and i'll show you what that would look like that's pretty good let's go and start with a new design i'll go to the mesh tab insert mesh and we're going to bring in one that has some import errors there it is so in first glance it looks fine until i rotate around and i'm seeing what look like missing areas and this one actually doesn't exactly look missing but i have the feeling that it's flipped so there is a setting in fusion 360 that'll show you whether or not surface normals are flipped in a mesh right i already showed you how to look for face groups under mesh display and those material properties for the override i'm going to show you another preference that i think is important so let's go into our preferences here and we're going to go and find not under mesh believe it or not but you're going to find this under let's see here if i got this right i think it might even be under design and i should have i guess i should have practiced this beforehand let's do a little double check it's not there oh that's right i believe it's under graphics yes it is under graphics so under graphics there's a disable surface normal display by default it's unchecked and that will mean that half well the one side of your mesh is going to be one color and the other side or the back side is going to be another color typically gold if you check this box and hit the apply or ok button now it's just going to look all uniform which sometimes is actually helpful but when it comes to repairing a mesh or checking a mesh not helpful at all so i do encourage you to leave that unchecked again go to your preferences go to graphics and then i'm going to uncheck disable surface normal display and then it'll help me be able to see those problems it's a lot easier to see these holes when i see the gold in the background if i go to my bodies folder i already see that there is a warning telling me that i have some issues with this model it's not closed it's not oriented and it does not have a positive bond i would also see those things under the properties for mesh analysis and that's helpful if i want to go and fix this you're going to find the fixing tool or repair tool under prepare it's right over here and you'll notice that it also by default is right here at the top really easy for you to access if you do however see the yellow triangle warning you can also click on the warning to also invoke that same command and if you're not familiar with this command or you haven't seen it before this is actually coming from autodesk netfabb so autodesk netfab is a slicer for 3d printing but it does a whole lot more than that and one of the things that it does that is absolutely fantastic is the way that it repairs meshes so we've taken that technology and put it right into fusion 360. so now you can go and repair your mesh right here there are going to be four different rebuild types or sorry repair types closed holes and stitch and remove are the ones i personally use most often but it doesn't mean that the other ones don't have their purpose i do want to point out that if you hover over these it'll tell you exactly what it's going to do to repair your mesh and it even has in parentheses at the end how long it takes to actually compute right so close holes is definitely going to be the fastest stitch and remove is going to also be fast it's doing additional things in addition to close holes wrap is going to be doing even more it's going to take a little bit more time and then rebuild is going to be the slowest of the bunch and i also want to point out that if you do choose the rebuild option the rebuild type shows up and there are four additional options for rebuild type within the rebuild drop down so essentially there are one two three and then another four options so there are seven different repair methods that you could be using in total i'll also point out that there is a preview button so if you check the preview button in fact actually all of the new mesh tools now have a preview button so you can preview the results before you hit the ok button but this is going to show you what it would look like when it's done when you hit ok of course it finishes the repair now i can right click on this and go to properties and i'll see that i now have a closed oriented and positive volume mesh so perfect for 3d printing but there are some additional tools in there that i skipped over that i think you might want to see so let's go and edit our repair and the fact that i can edit the repair is in itself remarkable because everything in the mesh tools that you see here is all parametric so you can go back and edit anything or change the order you could also suppress features you could do all sorts of things that you would do with solid bodies or surface bodies or sheet metal bodies or even form bodies but we're going to go and edit this repair i'm going to uncheck the preview for a second and i want to point out this analyze defects analyze defects is also coming from netfabb this however is a preview feature so not the same as this kind of preview when we say a preview feature we're talking about like a public beta test so you can currently use it is not in production officially yet but hopefully it will be soon so you are going to have to turn this on if you would like to use it before i show you how it works let me show you how to turn it on i'll go and hit cancel under my name or initials i'll go to preferences i'll go to preview features in the bottom left hand corner over here and you can see let's turn off all my hidden stuff here i have mesh repair analysis this is what's called a public preview so any one of you can go and use this and turn it on check this box hit ok and now you're going to have these extra repair features let's go and show you what they do because they're really cool so analyze defects is going to do a full analysis on your part so i hit the analyze button it's going to find all of the different problem areas and it's going to define them in different categories so open boundaries of which there are two non-manifold i don't have any small shells i don't have any by the way the small shell threshold is down here at the bottom you can change this threshold to whatever you'd like we also have degenerate edge and degenerate triangles and we do have a separate degenerate threshold here as well that you can mess with and then also self intersections more often than not when i do see errors i see open boundaries i see non-manifold and i see self intersections but i want to repair all of those things so this is telling me what i have in front of me that's actually visible when i check the preview button which really cool is that the analysis will also show you a preview so to speak and so now that i hit the preview button it's telling me that it's going to fix all of these problems and the mesh sanity check is also going to be fulfilled so it's going to be closed oriented and also have a positive volume that's exactly what i was hoping for i'll go and hit the ok button and now i have a repaired mesh all right these these tools again might not be as cool or as fun as some of the other tools i'm going to show you in a few minutes but these are equally if not more important because if you bring in a mesh from somewhere else and you are starting with errors anything that you do to work on that mesh is likely to contain those same errors i think it's important to be able to go and fix them now let's talk about the mesh tools themselves so so far we use the insert tool we use the repair tool i skipped over these face groups because i'm going to cover them momentarily let's talk about the modifiers this is what you are used to seeing in the past in the mesh workspace but i'll note that a couple of the features you might be used to seeing appear to be missing they are not well they're just somewhere else i'll show you that in a moment and then you'll also see new tools here as well so for anyone that was wondering i'm going to be especially clear on this autodesk did not remove any functionality from the mesh tools that already existed we have only added new tools we did not take anything away from you we have made your life better right so with that clear let's talk about what those tools are so the new tools let's start with that spell is a new tool and shell is going to hollow the interior of a mesh and this is a little bit different than the shell command that you might be used to from the solid environment but it is more or less the same right so it's intended to hollow but one thing to note is that when you are using this tool you're gonna see that the shell command works on the body that you pick whereas if you're in the solid environment and i go and i use that same shell command it actually asks me for faces or body so you can hollow out a part or you could also select faces and it will remove that face and also hollow the part at the same time that is not currently available in the mesh tools it will only hollow the body itself and it actually makes sense because when you look at these tools you're going to see that all of these tools work on bodies or face groups not faces and that's important because in the new parametric mesh workspace whenever you select the mesh you're either selecting the body or you're selecting face groups let's actually define face groups for a second because it otherwise won't make any sense this is a mesh of the same exact part let's go and show our face groups let's go and turn that on here for a second and when i do you're going to see more of those pastel colors that i talked about these face groups are essentially groups of faces that have something in common in this particular case you're going to notice that anything that's supposed to be flat is showing oh apparently brad is calling me and i already know what brad is calling me about he must be calling me because i am not showing my screen and that's a big problem let's fix that all right let's start again i'm going to rewind about 10 seconds this is the gearbox cover just like you saw before but now you're seeing the face groups that i've already assigned when you import meshes in some cases they can actually already have face groups assigned i've done that manually but you could see these face groups and the face groups are groups of faces that have something in common such as this one which is a flat face this one which is an arc another one here that's an arc and over here this one is a cylindrical face right so that's a super important they're grouped together and you can generate these face groups yourself which is actually what i've done here but once you have them you're going to see that you can select it and it's basically like a selection set and so when i select this group this area of the mesh it automatically selects everything that's common that would be part of that same arc so it's exactly what i would want and when i'm in these mesh tools you're either going to be able to choose a body or you're going to be able to choose a face group that's always going to be the case you are not in the parametric mode going to be able to select individual triangles like you might have done in the past with the mesh workspace but as i mentioned earlier we are not taking away any features we are simply adding features so the way that you would get to those individual triangles is by using what i would call well actually not i would call what autodesk calls direct editing or a base feature so at the very bottom of my screen here you can see i have two features i have the mesh base feature and then i have this face group creation tool if i right click on the mesh tool and i say edit feature you're going to notice that it changes my tools to direct mesh editing when i'm in direct mesh editing that's when i get to choose individual triangles and be able to do things with those triangles and any of those tools that we had that essentially only worked on groups of individual triangles those are only going to be found in the direct mesh editing drop down so erase and fill does not show up under the parametric mesh drop down but very much does show up when you're in direct mesh editing so even this tool was not removed it's not gone it's just in a different place based on the way the tools have to be organized for them to function and if i did want to erase and fill this particular area i would select that tool and hit ok this would actually come in really weird looking so i'm not going to bother with that but i think you guys get the idea there are actually two ways to get to the direct editing so one is to right click on the mesh and choose direct edit or edit feature in that case the other way is under modify you are going to see on the drop down a direct edit ability as well and i'll show you that once fusion 360 stops thinking i'm happy to actually show you that but in general the key is base groups are going to be collections of different individual triangles you can generate them in fusion 360. i am very much going to show you that shortly and then if you want to do something that's related to individual triangles more specifically you are going to have to be in the direct mesh editing tools so that's a little bit about the the modifiers but actually i haven't finished there's still quite a bit more now since this is thinking and i don't want us to wait too long i do have a backup plan that i've kind of set up for myself so let's go to my cloud pc for a moment and let's go and grab let's do another modifier this is actually a perfect example so here is another stl this one is of course very different than what i've shown you before not only is it a dental scan and not like a gear an industrial gearbox cover but it's also scan data itself right so if i look at something like this and i go to my properties the number of triangles that i'm going to have here is going to be astronomically bigger 221 000 in this case versus probably like 50 000 on the other model and let's say for a moment that i want to 3d print this if i want to 3d print this on my makerbot method x i would just send it to the printer and i'm done but if i'm using maybe a form 3 from formlabs or any other sla printer i might want to hollow this out to be able to save on resin and also to be able to save on printing time so i want you to know that under mesh one of the other new modifiers here we already already told you about it let's actually go and use the shell command i'm going to go in actually first before we do let's get some other stats here i already know that it's 221 000 triangles but i also want to point out that it's a mass of about 50 grams not a lot but it's going to be important to be able to compare let's go and use that shell command i'll choose my mesh i'm going to go with a thickness of let's say a millimeter here and hit okay and now it is hollow and that happened really fast actually so um let's verify that this actually happened first way you could verify is you can go back to your properties and you'll see that this is now roughly half the weight it's about 27 grams if you do want to see this visually you can also do a section analysis that would be one way to go and see inside the mesh the other thing you could do is you could change your opacity control to something like 50 percent and now when i zoom in i'll be able to see that inside this is actually hollow and has a wall thickness that's approximately a millimeter a couple of things to note about the shell command is again it only works on bodies not individual faces or face groups so it is going to work on you know hollow the inside so to speak if you need access to the inside you might need to poke additional holes using some of the other commands i'm going to show you shortly the other thing to note is that the wall thickness is not going to be perfectly uniform it does its best based on the number of facets to be able to get you that uniform wall thickness but it is not perfect but one of the real advantages of being able to do the shell command to a mesh is the fact that you could actually hollow out very very complex parts very quickly whereas if you had this as a b rep solid chances are would fail and i'll tell you right now if i used the solid shell command on a part like this there's pretty much no chance that this would actually ever hollow but if i want to convert this into a mesh i could actually hollow it instantly so that's pretty cool the other modifier that i want to point out is going to be combine and combine is exactly what it sounds like it's the same kind of combined command that you would have in the solid tab but now this is going to work on meshes and that makes it incredibly useful so let's go and show you an example for the combine command now that everything finished let's switch back to my other fusion and let's look at a subwoofer example actually [Music] let's see nope i'll just bring in a new one i thought i had it ready that's fine so i go into my mesh tab actually i do actually have it ready let's go and grab speaker with grill there it is all right so this particular file is from thingiverse actually and let's show you what this one is because this one's fantastic so this is an isobaric subwoofer made by someone named guppy k you download a whole bunch of different parts and you can 3d print it it comes with different sizes for different things but you might need to make changes to it remember that very first question we talked about but i downloaded an stl file and i need to make changes how do i do it well let's say the change you want to make is you want to combine these two different parts together i now have two different bodies i have the grill and this upper portion under mesh i could go and use the combine tool i choose the target so which of these is like the main body that i want to keep or at least keep the name from it use the tool which could be the grill itself and i have a variety of different operators that i could use join is going to join them together cut is going to use the tool as a cutting tool intersect will keep the intersection between the two and there's a new one here called merge that's also very cool i'll show you that in a moment first let's go to join i'm going to hit the ok button and you're going to see that my two different mesh bodies have turned into a single mesh body and then i can 3d print this as a single part really that easy awesome remember earlier i showed you how my jaguar the 1963 jaguar at 941 different shells within the body those sub bodies within the body you can create those from fusion 360 if you would like that's what that merge command does so in this case we'll go and right click and we'll edit the feature remember this is parametric so i could do that and i'll change this to merge i'm going to go and hit ok and now you're going to see one body but in reality this one actually has two shells inside it we can go and verify from those properties and you can see i have a shell count of two so you can also create those if you have a file that already has all of those different shells in it and you want to split it up in this case i would go to separate and you're going to see separate now has the ability to separate by face groups and also mesh shells so now i can select this body which has two shells in it hit okay and i'm gonna be back to having two separate complete bodies from it each one with one shell by the way i know that some of the terminology can get confusing but i thank you for bearing with me don't forget you could always slow my video down and you could also re-watch this however many times you need so combine and shell are my two favorite new tools within the mesh environment there are also though two others that i want to point out and i'm going to show you them in more detail later but i want to point them out now the first one is going to be tessellate tessellate is going to turn a normal solid like a b rep solid into a mesh so let's actually go and take a look at that real quick let's take actually let's just design something really easy for now we'll go and make a quick cylinder and if i wanted to convert this to a mesh in the past i would right click here and say save as stl choose somewhere on my computer and then go and say insert mesh and bring it back into the file in fusion 360's new mesh environment instead of save as stl it now says save as mesh which allows you to save it as an stl or a 3mf file so you have more options than before but this is the same command you can also send this to a 3d print utility if you would like keep in mind of course that fusion 360 has a built-in slicer for fdm printing and sla printing and a whole lot more so also feel free to use our slicer if you would like but now you also have the ability to tessellate and keep that mesh within the file so if you use the tessellate command you choose your body choose your refinement method and you hit ok and now you have a mesh with face groups automatically created for you which is pretty awesome and this is parametric so if it turns out that you change the size of your cylinder don't do that right now i hit the ok button and my mesh updates as well this is already better than saving as an stl and bringing that file back in because now if i make changes to that original cylinder everything is going to update that's going to help you quite a bit the other thing to note is that you also have the ability under mesh to convert the mesh you can convert the mesh into a solid in a variety of different methods and we're going to go over this in more detail shortly but i'll just give you an overview right now you have the ability to make this parametric or not base feature is the like direct editing version so without the history i primarily use parametric and then within parametric you're going to see faceted which is going to convert every single triangle into a face on the new solid and then prismatic which is going to try its best to convert it into a b wrap with nice beautiful faces if you use faceted i'll actually show you what it looks like it'll look just like the original but with bolder edges you used to be able to do this in fusion 360. you can still do this now one of the important notes though is that the 50 000 triangle limit is no longer a limit if you would like to convert something that is a hundred thousand or three hundred thousand polygons that's perfectly fine but just keep in mind that your limitation is going to be hardware not software and the more triangles you have the more your performance is going to be slowed down so if you were trying to convert something that's 5 million polygons unless you're running the absolute best computer you can buy chances are you're going to have some very serious performance hits but if you do have a totally awesome computer and you would like to convert something that has a couple million or multiple hundred thousand polygons by all means you can do that however the convert with the prismatic option is my favorite when you choose prismatic it's going to use the face groups to convert your object into a normal b ramp and that to me is absolutely amazing i know it might not be impressive to you right now with a cylinder so let's show you an example project that i think you're going to like more than that so let's go back to let's say thingiverse for a second and in thingiverse you can download all sorts of different things in this case we're talking about a super tweeter for subaru wrx for a certain type of speaker maybe you have that type of speaker you go and you download this bracket and you import it into fusion 360 and that question that is going to be in your head is how do i go and edit it i'll show you let's clear out some of these extra files and let's go and bring that in and it'll all make sense so i'm going to open a new design we'll insert my mesh and we're going to go and grab that subaru tweeter and here it is it's an stl file so i'm going to choose the units and hit ok right and it comes in with what would be one face group so everything is all just lumped together if you would like to make changes to this the way that you used to do it would be to convert this mesh into a solid using what's essentially this faceted approach it would end up looking something like this and if you've watched any of my old videos you would know that if you select one of these faces that should be flat and hit the delete key it will do its best to replace that face with a single face it works great on flat surfaces like these and this one over here and the one on the bottom of course and the ones over here but it does not work so well on cylindrical faces or arcs things like that so if i wanted to change let's say the height of this not that big of a deal i would maybe just do an extrusion and maybe add a millimeter and be happy actually in this case it yelled at me but the general idea is you can make changes to your model you want to make a hole bigger you could go and draw a circle using different points here i just align the circle to the original now i know exactly where that original is then i could go and draw a new circle in the same location put a dimension on that my scale is apparently giant i should have chosen millimeters but let's leave this where it is and i'll go and extrude this and just show you the idea behind it of you being able to make those changes so that's what you used to do in the past but if you wanted to maybe grow this bigger there's a little bit more work involved so let me show you the other method because i think you guys are going to like this a lot let's delete everything that i've done here and let's delete the conversion as well let's start from scratch generate face groups is going to figure out how to create which of these triangles should be grouped together you select your body you choose a method there's fast and also accurate now i don't want the verbage to confuse you fast and accurate are not like resolutions like one isn't just better quality than the other they're actually different methods the fast method uses an angle threshold and the accurate method uses a boundary tolerance they're very different if your goal is to use like to have a lower resolution so to speak you could use the fast method or the accurate method just change like the tolerance like if you put this as 0.1 it would be very fast for example i'm going to go and use the accurate and let's set it to 0.001 that's what i use the most often i'll go and hit ok and it's going to go and figure out which of these faces it thinks should be flat which of these it thinks should be an arc and which of these it thinks it should be cylinders and based on that you could see these groupings right so i can select this you can see it's the top and it's flat i have this it's a cylinder this is an arc this is a cylinder again and so on and if it did not do a good job you can always go back and edit your feature and change the resolution you can make it higher or you can make it lower as needed and let it recalculate because remember this is all parametric the other thing you could do is you could group things together manually so if for whatever reason you're seeing things are not grouped together and they should be you can combine face groups by selecting any two face groups that are adjacent to one another and hit okay and now you'll see that this is actually grouped together in this particular case i'll admit i don't want to do that because it was actually good already but if you're bringing in a model that is not good that's a great way to be able to fix it and i will show you a more detailed example in a moment that we'll actually have to do that but the original face group creation was looking good so i'm going to go and leave that then i'm going to go and choose convert mesh we're going to use parametric and prismatic i'm going to select the body and hit ok and just like that it is a solid let's go and verify i have my solid that's looking good and now i can make changes if i want to for example make the diameter smaller i can select this and using my press pull command or q on my keyboard i could go and make this whatever size i want and hit ok if i want to add fillets to the model i could go and add fillets whatever size i want because after all this is a solid right this is a remarkable way to be able to make changes to a mesh that you've imported i'll go and also take this actually let's make this bigger maybe i printed this and it was a little bit too small so i'll go and take this and we'll make this a little bigger maybe half a millimeter bigger actually based on my units being funny let's make this a lot bigger here we are and then i can also go and move this as well so i'll go and select my faces including this one behind here and then i can go and use my translate i can even choose a direction of my choosing oh not that one this one and i can drag this wherever i need it to be so the point simply being that there are a lot of ways to be able to make changes to your model starting with the mesh all right let's take this even further let's uh close this model out here for a second i don't think we need that one either here's another example this is also from that speaker that subwoofer enclosure this one is much more complicated and you can see i've already generated the face groups i'm not going to do that with you on the live stream this one takes about three minutes and i don't want you to wait i know you don't want to wait you could see all of those pastel colors are different face groups already identified from this very complex geometry all of these different faces then i go to my mesh tab convert mesh i'll choose my prismatic option and hit ok in just a few seconds i'm going to be left with a solid just like this and i can take that solid and make any change i'd like i want to get rid of fillets i can hit the delete key i want to get rid of holes i could do the same i want to make holes bigger i can go and make those holes bigger or smaller this is editable when you're done just like any other solid you can right click now you would say save as mesh instead of save as stl or my preferred method under tools make a 3d print choose what you want to actually 3d print send it to your 3d printer or change this to another file type and save it locally really you get to decide what you want the point here is that this convert method is absolutely fantastic be able to make edits to your mesh now one thing i do need to point out and be very clear is that the prismatic conversion option is one is the only tool in the mesh features that is only for commercial use so if you are a hobbyist using the hobbyist personal use license we are happy to have you using fusion 360 but just be aware that that option for the prismatic conversion is not in the hobbyist or personal use license if you would like that option purchase a commercial license 495 a year us dollars and you'll be able to use all of the other tools that are also in fusion 360's commercial only license but this will be included as well right so you have these abilities to be able to make big changes to your model not everything is going to convert as well as this did so keep in mind that scan data the face group selection is not going to be nearly as effective as on mesh files that are generated from other cad applications like solidworks catia nx or you name it versus scan data from your phone like your lidar scanner or from a fancy scanner either way like if you're taking a scan and trying to bring it in to generate face groups is not going to work nearly as effectively in those cases the faceted approach is definitely the way to go now in those cases you also don't have to convert to a solid so let's say you wanted to make a change to a mesh and it's a very dense mesh what are you going to do let's go and take a look at an example let me bring up i want you to see a visual of the example so here you could see an older model dodge truck it's a dodge ram of course and you have a hood ornament on the very front that's a big dodge ram you can go and buy replacement dodge ram hood ornaments on a variety of places including ebay which is where you see this picture you can also download mesh files and 3d print one yourself in some cases though keep in mind not everything is available on ebay not everything is available in thingiverse sometimes you have to scan it yourself and when you are scanning your face count is going to be even higher than what you're about to see so converting it into a solid might not be realistic for you especially based on hardware limitations even if you can do it it doesn't always make sense to do it again because of performance hits so maybe you're going to go and start with a mesh file we're going to go and start with this one that i'll admit i did get from thingiverse and we're going to bring it into fusion you're going to see it right over here and i'm going to show you how to create these features at the bottom which is going to be for mounting this on a hood using the solid modeling tools in fusion and then merging it with the mesh body right that combined tool that i showed you earlier is to combine meshes but remember that the tessellate function is going to help you create a mesh from a solid so let's go back in my timeline for just a little bit we're going to start at the very beginning right so this is going to show you what the mesh looked like when i downloaded it the next thing that i did is i created a sketch which i'll show you here and this sketch is going to be the exact position and sizes of all the geometry that i need and this is exact because i'm using a proper sketch i'm using essentially an engineering tool to create geometry for my mesh so i have all my details set up i'm very happy with it then i'm going to go and use my solid modeling techniques to create the geometry so i made an extrusion going down and added a chamfer and just as a little trick for you keep in mind you can kind of see this in the background but my extrusion that i did is not only an eighth of an inch down but it's also an eighth of an inch up into the model right this is going to make the combined tool work a little bit easier later the next thing i did was i extruded two additional cylinder and also same thing it's going into the model but it's also going out then i used my thread command to create modeled threads on these solid bodies and now the fun stuff and the fun stuff i'm going to show you live so we're going to go to the mesh tools we're going to use the tessellate and i'm going to tessellate each of these bodies individually so let's go and tesselate that one this one and the third perfect now i have all three of these bodies remember that the combine command can do join and also cut and it's going to join meshes right or cut meshes and now i have all four bodies as mesh bodies so now i could go and merge them but remember that this particular mesh is pretty dense actually if we look at the properties here you're going to see that this is 582 000 triangles right so is this something that you really want to convert to a solid absolutely not in fact i'll also tell you that the the combined tool for this is a little bit slow because of how many triangles are in here so what i'm going to do is actually speed up the combine command just for this live stream for you i'm going to use another tool like plain cut i'm going to use that from the bottom plane nope not that one this bottom plane and i'll drag this up let's go see it's inside view yeah something like this so all i'm doing is splitting the body into two and then i'm going to focus on doing the combine just on the bottom if this were in a live stream i wouldn't even bother with this i would just combine it with the top right but we're going to go and use the combine this is the body is my target my tool is going to let's start with this one actually the middle and we'll join them together give that a second and it's going to go and combine those together effortlessly then we're going to go and do the same thing and we're going to do a combine between this body and then our tool is going to be both of these threaded regions and we're going to go and you do a cut and in just a second you're going to see that i'm going to end up with this disappeared and i'm going to end up with the hole that's threaded in my model itself it takes about maybe another 10 seconds and i think we should be good and you'll be able to see the end result after that in this particular case i would do a combine with the final piece on the bottom with the final piece on the top and i have my part ready to 3d print the key here though is that this workflow now opens up new doors on how you can make changes to your meshes you don't have to convert everything from a mesh to a solid to be able to change them you can also create solid geometry and use that to manipulate or edit your meshes themselves just like you see here here's a great example so let's take that to the next level the next level is going to be what else can you combine well you can actually combine a whole lot more so let's go back to that 1963 jaguar and we're going to do the same thing so we're going to recreate that hoda ornament but this time you're going to see it's much more complex we're going to get rid of our face groups you can see the nice beautiful colors on here for a moment and we're going to go and zoom in a little bit actually we're going to zoom in a lot and take a look at what we're doing here i'm going to show you the timeline that i used and the key here is that i actually used a lot of different ways to design and i did it all together i want to walk you through what they are sorry my microphone's a little bit in the way of my timeline all right so let's start about here so at this point i brought in my mesh of the jaguar i also brought in canvases to actually show me where this is going to be positioned and also the shape for the base that's going to hold the jaguar in place so this is looking really good i'm very happy with that i have another image as well so i have like two different references and then i'm going to go and model up what the base itself should be and actually let's hide that you're going to see at the bottom here i use the form command so here i have a form i made it symmetric it's very much organic so to speak and i created that going into the hood of the vehicle when i exit out of the form environment it turns it into a standard surface it's not a solid whatsoever and so i used my standard surfacing tools to patch the bottom i'll show you this a little bit more cleanly attach the very bottom stitch it together which automatically turns it into a solid but the solid is going into the hood of the vehicle let's zoom out a little bit so you could see it right so i have an interference this isn't going to fit very well so the next thing that i do is i actually bro i took the hood itself let's go back so you can see it a little more clearly and i took the hood itself i isolated it from the rest of my model and then i convert it into a solid there it is and in this particular case i use the faceted approach right this is happens to be an stl created from the computer but this could just as easily be a real scan of this hood as long as it's closed right and remember we do have the ability to close that mesh in the mesh workspace as well so once it's closed i converted it into a solid using the faceted approach and now i have the hood itself and i have this base of my hood ornament and i could use my solid combine command to subtract the hood from the base and now i end up with a base with a groove in it that will fit on the hood perfectly but i still need to mount actual geometry here so i created a construction plane using the very bottom of this geometry i created a sketch which i'll show you for geometry of the attachment holes let's zoom into there and i have my exact placement and i have everything evenly spaced once i have that i create my solid geometry just like before let's get rid of our sketch on our plane i converted it into modeled threads it's actually a little hard to see but it's there modeled i did that again for the next one as well and then i did a boolean solid combine to remove the actual threaded region from the base so now i have the base with the threads in it which is looking great and then now i need to combine that with the rest of the mesh but i have a solid and the mesh is well it's a mesh so let's use the tessellate feature to tessellate that solid body and then use the mesh combine tool combine both of those meshes together so in this example i went from a canvas and an imported mesh of a jaguar i used the form tool to create a custom base i converted the hood into a solid i used that solid to mess with that sculpted form oh there was surface modeling in between by the way and then i was able to add geometric features to it and then convert it into a mesh and combine it with everything else so this is a absolutely perfect example of being able to use all sorts of different modeling methods all together right that's important too the last um yeah the next method i'm going to show you and this i'm just going to show you a quick tidbit is i've had people in the past who always ask me about trying to convert a solid b rep body into a t spline for editing and you can do that you can actually use the convert tools under if you go into the form environment under utilities there's a convert and there's an option for b rep to t splines but it typically will only work for individual faces of a solid what you might not know though is that there's also a quad mesh to t spline conversion as well and you can use this well you could have used this in the past you could still use this the really cool thing is that you used to not be able to make quad meshes in fusion 360 and now you can so there's another new feature as well and i'll show you a really easy example so i'm gonna go and create a quick box in this particular case here i have a box and under my mesh tools when we go to tessellate this box you'll see that there's a checkbox here for create quads so this is going to turn this into a quad mesh now this quad mesh looks really boring because there's a quad for each face there's not like a lot of different quads for each face but it is now officially a quad mesh which means you could now go to the form environment utilities convert and convert that quad mesh to t-splines when i do keep in mind that the t-spline is going to be organic it's going to automatically increase edges so i wind up with what looks essentially like a quad ball and i could always go back and uncrease this select everything or reselect everything in this case and um oh well i meant crease that's why select everything and hit ok now i'm back with my my shape i can come in here and edit the form and now i can go and start to manipulate this however i'd like now this is a really simple example but the point here is simply there is now a workflow that goes from a solid body to a quad mesh and from quad mesh to t spline that's also available the limitation on this is that if you're starting with a triangular mesh right now current limitation is that you cannot convert from a triangular mesh to a quad mesh you do have to have a solid but what you might be able to do is convert the triangular mesh into a solid using the faceted method if it's a complex form and then use the tessellate command to re-tessellate that solid as a mesh that's a quad mesh and bring it into two splines i know that was a mouthful that's pretty confusing but for any of you advanced users out there you probably already know what i was talking about and that workflow is certainly possible in fusion 360. so let's check my list because we are already over time and i wanted to show you a lot but i want to make sure i cover everything the only item i have left that's in the new tools in particular is mesh section sketch so this is something that was available before and it is still available today so if you are in a model like this one and let's bring this back into a original mesh form you can go under the mesh environment and under create you also see here create mesh section sketch this was always available it was just a little harder to find you're going to create mesh section sketch choose a body and choose a section plane let's go and grab let's say the x z plane here hit the ok button and it's going to go and create a sketch with what is the orange is essentially the cross section itself if we hide the body you can still see that sketch but to note you cannot extrude this geometry it does need to be converted to proper vectors at the moment this is something that kind of halfway in between the like the original and the vectors that you want so to do that you're going to take the new sketch right click and say edit sketch and once you're in this edit environment under create you're going to see something that says fit curves to mesh section you're going to see a bunch of different options here on what you can convert you can convert objects as splines as circles as ellipses as closed splines as arcs and as lines so if i use for example the line tool and i select from this point to let's say this point and i hit ok this area here is now selectable and is very much a vector you can manipulate this and edit it if you would like but it's already of course in the right place if you don't want it to move even by accident just right click on it and fix it in place and now it's not going to move so you would do this for your geometry and once you've done it for everything you'll end up with a closed profile i'm gonna do just a little bit of this model just to try to show you generally what it's able to do that and then go and do that again actually i'll probably cheat for now and i'll just do a close spline and we'll go and hit okay and now that i have a closed spline here you'll see that this is very much selectable right i still would want to do the same thing on the inside as well let's go and do that also i'll go and hit okay now i can select the area between the model and i can extrude this up our visibility is up let's turn that back on and now i can extrude this and i have a solid body so for something like this you might want to just convert it into a b rep using the prismatic approach it's way faster way better but i could imagine that you will find uses for this fit curves to mesh section or the mesh section sketch i think you'll find that useful as well so to summarize here for a second we covered quite a few different tools right so we have new file types that's the 3mf file type we now support color for obj and also for 3mf we also have new mesh body properties and warnings all right including the number of shells that are in your part you now have the ability to repair your mesh in a variety of different ways we also have new modifiers like the shell command the combine command convert into a solid and also tessellate use those i think you're going to absolutely love them we also talked quite a bit about how the features are now parametric but even the features that do not show up are not missing they are simply hidden in the direct editing of your meshes so you can directly edit your mesh whenever you would like you also have the ability to convert that mesh to a b wrap i showed that in detail you do have to create your face groups first and there are a variety of different ways you could do that oh actually i almost forgot there is a very important tip and trick that i want to show you for face groups i'm going to change my plan a little bit and bring that back up let's bring in let's say the gearbox housing that we looked at earlier so i'm going to insert my mesh and i'm going to bring in let's see here i'm going to bring in a low a low resolution version of this mesh so it's looking actually pretty good but i'm going to go and do a generate face groups command and i'm going to use the accurate approach it might take about 15 seconds so i'm going to talk through this for a second but once it's finished i'm going to want to view those face groups and i have the feeling i'm not going to be so happy with the results for this particular file and in fact actually i'm pretty happy with this okay uh let's go grab another one that i'm not so happy with so we'll insert a mesh let's go and grab let's go and grab this one all right so this is the one that came in with my import errors and we're going to go and do a quick fix on those errors close those holes and hit ok now let's run the generated face groups on this and hit ok and this time i have the feeling i'm not going to be so happy with the face groups keep in mind that the face groups generation is parametric so you could always go back and change the resolution up or down if you would like the other thing you could do is you can stack different generate face group commands or features together and so one of the tricks that i learned from one of my colleagues kenny so thank you kenny for pointing this out to me is that if you're having trouble with face group generation start instead with accurate start with fast fast does a really good job of finding flat surfaces and isolating them from everything else and then you could run the accurate just on the curvy shapes that are problematic so once this is finished i very much hope it's in a moment i'll be able to show you how to do exactly that so we've done generate face groups it's probably going to come in a little funny we'll change it to the fast method and then i'll be able to do the accurate method just on isolated areas oh wow this one actually also came in great well let's pretend for a moment this one did not come in great this should be a good problem to have it just goes to show that we do a good job but we're going to edit our feature and i'll change this to fast it's going to separate out face grip so the flat surfaces does a great job at but this area did not do a great job right so arcs fillets things like that not as good but now when i go and i do generate face groups again i can instead of choosing the body i could choose an individual face group and i could do accurate on just that one face group and that's looking really good i'll do that same thing again on the outside and we'll go and hit ok and that's looking also really good but for example let's say this area here and this one should really be combined together all i have to do is use the combine face groups select them together and hit ok and now they're combined into one face group so you can stack together these face group generation features however many times you need and then when you're ready convert this to a prismatic solid so let's go back to powerpoint again so that was our trick for face groups we also showed you how to convert something into how to create geometric features on a mesh without ever converting that mesh into a solid i also showed you how to convert a b rep into a t spline using the quad mesh method and finally i showed you the mesh section sketch to be able to make cross sections the last thing we need to talk about very briefly is limitations because there are some right we're not perfect but we are trying our best to do great things so these are current limitations that i've found we have some limitations on alignment so whether you're trying to auto align a mesh to a plane or a symmetry plane like if you have a scan that comes in some wonky angle and you want to be able to align it to the right plane for example or symmetry plane we don't have those auto alignment features if you're bringing in two meshes and you want to align them to each other we don't have those alignment tools yet and if you're trying to bring in a mesh and a line like a scan for qc purposes and you're trying to align that to a b rep we also don't have those kinds of alignment tools either i'll also tell you face group creation as i already told you is less effective on scan data than on mesh files generated from cad software whether it's generated from fusion or solidworks or inventor or creo doesn't matter but it does kind of does work much better on stl obj and 3mf files that are created from programs like those we still don't have mesh sculpting so if you're interested in sculpting then i would encourage you to use tools like meshmixer or moto or mudbox from autodesk or zbrush tools like that i think would be great even freeform from 3d systems is a fantastic tool you cannot add fillets or chamfers to the mesh body itself you do have to convert it to solid be able to add fillets or chamfers appearances that you add to your models will not export with the mesh so if you bring in a mesh that has no color and you go and add color through our appearances and you are trying to print it on a color printer it will not see those colors because it's not going to be in your final file you also cannot remesh a dry mesh to a quad mesh i mentioned that just a few minutes ago if you wanted to convert it to a quad mesh you'd have to convert it to a solid first at least today also just to be aware of and this has always been true mesh bodies will not show up in 2d drawings and mesh bodies cannot be used for simulations there we go and that is important because even though simulations do mesh your files it's a very different mesh method so even though the word is the same they're very different things if you were going to be doing a finite element analysis in fusion 360 you do need to start with a solid body but our mesh tools in fusion 360 should allow you to be able to do that but just know that you cannot take a mesh body and immediately do a simulation on it so we covered a lot today here's the summary we talked a lot about how and why fusion 360 overhauled its mesh tools we talked a little bit about basics of what is a mesh why they're hard to work with or at least have been in the past and the difference between meshes and b-reps we did a very deep dive into the new mesh tools and workflows that it now enables and then we also talked about current limitations for working on mesh files i have the feeling that you are going to love using the new mesh environment in fusion 360. i know i do and those tools are getting better and better i hope you enjoyed today's live stream if you have any questions please feel free to put them into the chat or the comment section on youtube we are happy to answer them and i just want to say thank you so much your time today go out there and i hope you can make anything have a good one bye now you

Channel: Autodesk Fusion 360

Views: 37,431

Keywords: fusion 360, autodesk, design, engineering, mechanical design, mechanical engineering, industrial design, product design, software, CAD, CAD software, Computer Aided Design, Modeling, Rendering, 3D software, Autodesk fusion 360, cloud based CAD, CAD in the cloud, cloud, Free CAD, Free CAD Software, Autodesk CAD, 3D CAD solution, computer aided design, manufacturing, mesh, mesh editing, reverse engineering, edit mesh, scan data, mesh to solid, STL to B-Rep, Reverse engineer scan data

Id: 3tMEtHIJV6c

Length: 86min 43sec (5203 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 14 2021