Editing large stl files from Thingiverse for Free using Fusion 360 Step-by-step

all right good evening everyone i wanted to quickly make a video to show you how to pull files such as sales from sites such as thingiverse and then bring them into a free account software such as auto desk fusion 360 convert them into an editable body all right you can't edit seos but this is a far easier way and it allows you to do more complex features so say you want to customize features such as i did back in the day for this iron mask where you know making a straight cut and the print software is easy but um it's kind of obvious that when i dropped this later it broke along the line that i've epoxied together so i wanted something more complex like a dovetail so that the parts will snap together and then have a lot more strength once adhered so that's what we're going to do today also made a couple tools so you can gauge how big to make your dovetail for your machine so you don't have to do trial and error i went ahead and made four different testers for that and i'll reference them to this video so you can print these to test that see which size thickness of a gap works best for your machine and if you want the files that i've printed are the in files after we get through running through this whole thing you can find them here okay i'm also going to link hopefully this uh step-by-step list that i made that will help guide you and show you the settings i use etc it does have some pictures of different sketch options and some stuff to catch yourself on shout out to these guys which i will use their file on just as an example so step by step let's go sorry about that let me see if i can drag this down okay so first step is of course to download the file from thingiverse click download once this timer over here runs out we'll see the compressed folder uh pop up while that's loading it's kind of a large one we'll go ahead and create our new file here new design and fusion 360. by clicking the plus icon close the old one and because that takes a little bit of time too because it's kind of complex so uh we're back over at the folder you can see it's a compressed folder we need to unzip that or extract the files so that we can uh select the individual files so going to click on files um i totally show people how to just drag and drop these but as you can see there's many many parts in this file so um i'm going to go back to downloads and drag that to our desktop because i've already downloaded this it's going to say that i've already downloaded it card already exists but you would um just drag and drop it there and as you can see it says already exists because i already have it so i'm just going to say exit and not deal with that okay i'm going to move this off screen and expand our file here our new design file so first thing i want to do is of course save so i'm going to click in the workspace and then click control s on my keyboard to say we'd like to save this i must save it as just sample and then save okay now um we want to import that file um which it won't allow us to because it's still in a compressed folder so i'm going to open up my files go to desktop where that's located at you would find it here it would look like this um click on that then right click go to extract all and because i've already attracted these i'm not going to click extract but just pick where you would like that to be extracted to desktop et cetera um and it'll create a new folder as you can see here that is extracted and just a regular folder now once you have that you go to insert click insert and then do insert mesh a lot of times i'll show people how to import the model um into your data panel over here as you can see there's one there from another video but because this is kind of complex and why not i'm going to use the insert option so insert insert mesh that and then find the file you're looking for if you i've already been going to this one but you'd see it more like desktop you would find the folder click on that go to files and then look through these if they don't look like pictures uh hold down control and use the roller on your mouse to zoom in and out there's the helmet there there's also a second one but the bd for battle damage as a battle damage version i'm trying to do the regular helmet so click on it click open it's going to import it i'm going to select millimeters as my unit type i've already verified that that is correct for this file but in my other video i'll show you how to measure to confirm if you want to confirm okay i'll shrink this video down get it out of the way as much as possible and you can see now that we have a very complex you can see all the triangulation um of this stl file and now we're gonna start working with it and trying to make it edible body and then make our custom features so if i clicked in bodies you see mesh body typically we would just go ahead and convert this i'll show you why that won't work with the more complex one like this on your object under browser click that right click and then select do not capture design history we need to do that so that we have some options available as you saw uh some tabs pop up there and the mess feature is now available so under modify click mesh mesh to be rep and i'll do it as a new component but you can do a new body so new component okay you can see that it's going to abort that operation because there's 80 000 faces on this um fusion360 wants there to be less than fifty thousand fifty thousand or less to do this but don't worry i'm gonna show you how to do that it's pretty simple okay we just need to reduce the number of faces so click okay go to the mesh tab click modify reduce you can also find reduce right there but all right there's the settings i use and the density i use i think standard it's like in the twos but our 0.2 but you use about 0.12 for density um and i use adaptive so sorry about the dogs barking i just left them outside and so we're going to select faces i use the paint feature so i can just drag like this and if you don't have that showing you can go to select paint selection versus having to um you know free form selection why not so and then you can also adjust that size so i go in uh you do need to decide where you want let me push escape here you need to decide where you want the um least quality of the print and as you can see from this print that did last night high quality on the front because that's the visible edges visible side and then less quality on the back if you can see the triangulation there it's shiny uh it's kind of nice and then large uh there's almost no difference but um no one's gonna see that and that's where i would like to if i was having to choose like right now that's where i'd like to reduce the quality uh and there's other ways to do this if i want to show videos of using mesh mixer etc for stuff like this that's a great option as well so it's just how to do it in fusion so i'm going to go back in click reduce and show you what that looks like so each time i click ok it will reduce the number of faces there you see that's far less and we probably subtracted a couple thousand there so escape i'm going to do control z because i want to do it all once control z and continue selecting one note on this as you don't want to run over an edge like this because it will automatically select faces around that edge which would look like this if it allows you to do it it'll look like this see i'll reduce the quality on the front and i don't want that so ctrl z control z control z all right control z out of that and i'm going to go back in and keep selecting trying to avoid the edges i'm going to leave my paints brush size pretty large keep the video a little bit faster you can do this in batches you don't have to select so many at once um and that's what i would suggest that's why i suggest for someone that's newer to this but i know it's gonna be fine all right that's pretty good grab as many as possible let's go ahead and do reduce and click okay that turned out pretty good i'm actually going to reduce it again while it's just selected let's see what we come up with that one's not as good as you can see sometimes very large triangles will add mass i'm actually going to leave it like that i don't see anything major um typically i wouldn't want that a logo trying to put the video to be fine escape if we go back to solid tab click modify go down to mesh match to be rip um and then select the body click okay you can now see that we have 69 000 faces so we reduce it by about 11 000 faces which is great we just need to get rid of 19 000 more and as you can see we have plenty of opportunity to do that with this bottom part so back over to the mesh tab reduce go ahead and select all you can without hanging over the edges etc don't worry even though we're not capturing design history if you mess up you can push ctrl z or just if you haven't done anything also escape it's great as you can see i ran over a little bit here didn't run all the way over but it might cause a problem we'll see in a second you want your faces to be about on the same um as possible but if you're pretty good about figuring out what you're trying to do let's see if that'll work okay yeah that turned out pretty good let's see if it'll let me do it one more time all right that's acceptable for this video um yeah that's not too bad and we do have a lot of faces to get rid of but let's show you what it would do if you went too far so let's reduce again see if i can oh well that's good okay yeah sometimes as you can see it's adding a little bit of height there that's fine for this video let's go back and see if we are close now modify mesh match to be wrapped i'm going to click the body has a selection and click ok we're at 54 000 got to get rid of about 4 000 more and no problem so back to the mesh tab uh here's a good tip is that um since we know we're going to be cutting here and when we adhere them together we're going to finish it by putting something on the surface to hide that repair so that's a good place to lower if you have to choose to lower your quality because we'll be manually by hand repairing that area and i'm going to select this as well a little bit of that that's not too important yeah this um i know i'll be adding some bondo or wood filler to that area to hide that edit them together click okay i do not like that do control z reduce gotta change this to 0.157 okay that's acceptable to me um yep maybe i'll do a little bit more but um for the video speed i'm gonna say that's fine surface i'm sorry solid tap modify mesh mesh to be wrap click the body click okay 50 400 oh we're so close okay mesh reduce and i'll just maybe i'll select yeah that's why you're repairing that area i'll go ahead and sand this down if it gets too bad well would pause it but i know i hate sometimes when um youtubers pause the videos i don't get to see what actually went into it okay okay didn't really want to take away any over here but i will put on some of the edges i don't notice as much you could really spend more time up here but i want to make the video quick okay shoot i'll produce it let's do it in the face this is a great practice but it'll be fine okay yep that's not preferable but um i'll make the video quicker so back to solid tab modify mesh match the b wrap select the body click okay all right 49 000 that's pretty close to the max so i almost expect the system to have a lot of trouble with this but we'll see you'll likely see uh over here turn black and uh the loading for a while if it takes too long i'll pause the video but um don't worry if you're working on complex file it has crashed on me before click ok and we'll see the system struggle with this for a minute as you can see in the bottom right hand corner it's a loading thing here and this over here just try not to try to move the model too much or do other stuff on your computer while this is processing just be patient r i want a computer with more processing power than mine has if you're working on a laptop which i was originally going to start messing with fusion expect it to crash sometimes when you try to convert a body without any faces okay so we're done uh as you can see the mesh body is not visible right now i'm actually going to go ahead and delete that uh for simplicity but our new component here is what we just created it is of a traditional body like that as you see so i'm going to go ahead and make sure i save this ctrl s and i'm going to go ahead and turn on my design history that's it for below browser on the object right click capture design history now we're going to treat this as a traditional cad file and we'll want to do parametric design so we want to track our timeline so it's going to take a second again to load and now we have a timeline down here no features added yet but um as you can see we have a body up here still loading a little bit on my side but uh now let's discuss so you want to make a custom feature what i showed you earlier is what i want to add which is the dovetail features like this and let's jump into that so first thing i do is sketch i'm going to pick a plane that looks to be about parallel with the part of the body i want to cut and when i turn on my origin over here um oh because i already clicked sketchup i'll click escape show what that looks like i could click turn on the origin or you can click sketch and your origin will automatically become visible i'm going to select this face because it will allow the sketch to cut through when i extrude the sketch all right i'm going to go ahead and figure out about where i want to cut this first go around i think i want the cut to be about through these triangles so i'm going to pick a point here that's at about that height i'm going to click p on my keyboard for project click ok and now i'm going to hide that component so we can focus on the sketch and as you can see i now have projected this one point from about the height that i want to cut you must draw a line across and lock it in horizontally if you can see the horizontal constraint there if you don't know how to do that click the line and then click horizontal in your constraints then going to click the line click the point while holding ctrl to assign a coincident constraint which now lost it at that height i'm going to turn the component back on to see if my line is longer than the component and i'll just go ahead and manually drag it to just a little bit longer than the component itself okay turn the component visibility back off now let's edit this so our lips draw out our duck tail these don't matter too much visibly because you're going to hopefully cover them up once you've adhered your two parts together i'm going to draw this basic line careful not to lock use all those locks just let it be about like this draw that turn this line click it right click turn to construction and then click d on your keyboard for dimension dimension can also be clicked here so uh to avoid confusion on y'all's part i'm going to go ahead and switch my units to a millimeter as more people use that in 3d printing and i'm going to click v again for dimension and make this three millimeters make this one in line with it like this uh 10 millimeters and i will make the angle which that line is to the horizontal line 98 degrees okay uh let's constrain now the lines are black let's go ahead and finish that to get going i'm gonna click mirror up here you probably won't see it there you'll probably have to click create mirror okay click the two lines here and your mirror line okay now we have essentially created the dovetail now let's instead of redrawing that many times let's go to rectangular pattern under create click these four lines um under the objects and then for the direction we'll do the horizontal line do spacing option so extent we're spacing um i'm gonna go ahead and do 25 of them for now but we'll look in a second and the spacing distance i want to be 10 millimeters so let's see what that looks like they only went one way i want them to go both so i'm going to go symmetric for the directions so that they go both ways and we know this line is long enough so we need we don't need all these extra ones let's go back to 23. see what that looks like and then 22. 21 seems to be about the least we want because this side will run out if we go any less so we'll click ok and then i'll go in and delete these extra ones by clicking holding control selecting those lines there's an easy way to do this but this will be simple to hold control this is only two of them and click the delete key all right and i'm gonna go ahead and save just in case it's freezing up a little bit just wait a second and now we'll go to trim potential if we want to remove these lines here we want just a simple sketch because we're going to be working with surfaces just go through and drag your trim tool you just hold the left mouse key and like if i starting here i can just continue to hold my left mouse key and drag through all these let's see holding avoiding clicking or dragging through any other necessary lines okay so your sketch looks like this click escape and we're good to go let's go ahead and turn on our component visibility to view this one problem you might run into is accidentally cutting a small piece off like if we left it like this we'd probably have as that line goes in a little bit just a tiny piece of body cut but i'll actually go ahead and make that mistake with y'all and so i can show you that we're working with a nice model now and we'll go back and edit that so let's go ahead and make it so finish sketch all right for now i'm going to turn the visibility back off on the component i'm going to go to surface tab and go to surface extrude here and create and i'm then going to for the profile select all these lines not really the fastest but so many a lot of y'all just do it this way so be fine okay so we've selected all of our lines go ahead and check yep um i'm gonna do profile plane for direction i'm going to go ahead and do symmetric now we're ready to make sure this intersects our model so i'm just going to grab on the arrows and just shoot it through just make sure it goes through everything it's plenty big you can make a little bit smaller if you want but it really doesn't matter so i'm just going to leave it and make that a new body as you see there okay i'm not going to do any type of angles right now i'm just going to do this the simple way all right see our surface bodies here that we've created and that'll be fine so the next thing we need to do oh and you can see that we're collecting our history of that surface body next thing we need to do is go ahead and click create i'll tell the surface tab go to thicken for the faces don't try to select each one just go over to the bodies here in the bodies folder select those two bodies i have to hold ctrl there we go so i saw that i was thicken holding control click on the two bodies are if you have more than one body holding for all two eyes all right thickness um this is a good point to show y'all the test rig i made for you all so that you know what your printer can do everyone's printer will be a little bit different um so you'll need to know what thickness to do and i went ahead and made this test print that you can download that will give you zero point start at 0.2 millimeters thickness cut and then up to 0.35 millimeters test cut and that's just a quick simple way to print that and so go ahead if you want to pause the video find that and print those but i went ahead and tested mine with that uh with those testers and i know that my printer worked well 0.35 millimeters and one side is fine for me and new body so okay as you can see i just turned that surface into a thick um body here and now we have a tool to cut the main faceplate in half so with that let me go ahead and save again give it a second yep i'm still loading i'm sure my computer being a little slow today but under solids tab and go to modify you could click combine there but under modified you'll find combine click that sorry about those dogs morgan um so under target body you want to select the main the face plate and tool bodies we're going to select um the body that we just created here operation is to cut i'm going to make a new component and i'm going to keep the tools you don't have to select those options that's just what i always do because i like my files to have as much uh information as possible so select those two and we should be ready to cut oh okay that save is uh a little trouble normal a lot of winter weather so the internet time a lot of trouble and my computer's being very slow as well but just give it a second i'll try to pause and let that load well say it's ready okay okay clicked okay it's gonna take a second again probably the best day to make a video with uh computer problems but probably more realistic of most people's experience at this point go ahead and pause every time i say i'm going to pause it finish this so okay we're in here let's go ahead and turn off the visibility of all the bodies close that folder and you can see we have our old component component one cell and we have a new component let's go ahead and look inside that new component all right actually we'll just turn off the first component's visibility so that you can see that now it looks the same except it has a cut all the way through with a dovetail cut this actually turned out pretty good uh this was mentioning earlier about making a mistake that see this part here could potentially break it's a little close so let's make that a little bit better um i thought it'd be smaller but that actually probably would work but just for an example because a lot of people are gonna mess up there so down in our design history we go to that sketch edit sketch to div with right click you can also find them in your sketches folder i know it's this side i'm just going to go ahead and hold down control and delete those two lines here and then draw an additional line here push escape shrink my camera back down now we're done and do finish sketch that load up and we'll see all right um so as you can see we're faulting because we've made some uh changes i'm going to go ahead and roll the design history back to each one of those click on the yellow fault and do edit feature by right-clicking selecting feature as you can see we've selected all the lines but except for our new one so while i'm in that selection go ahead and click that as well and click ok now you see we've fixed that error let's roll to the next one it automatically fixes up but let's verify that by turning on the bodies yep now you can see we did one larger cut which actually apparently was not what we needed that went off i guess so uh okay yeah i meant to make this here sorry i'm not trying to make this video this long but i'll go ahead and correct that so i'm going to select those lines like i said that i don't want that small feature cut delete that leave this line why not get this line this one's probably constrained nope let me drag it i don't want that and finish sketch again i have some problems so we'll go ahead and right click edit feature and i click on the select we'll select the extra line we just drill to make a large long face to make that part the last cut a little bit bigger okay fixed everything i'm gonna go ahead and roll the timeline forward now it's a solid body again looks like it's not selecting that so let's go ahead and do solid body right click um it's not letting us edit that so escape and let's just suppress that feature and redo it oh sorry all right okay um let's press that feature it's a long video we wanted to edit the thickness the thicken command okay so under thicken right click and right click edit feature and for the faces click and add in the new sketch there a little bit of an edge that'll be okay for this video i'm not going to go too far much into it too much farther into it okay and let's go ahead and roll our history one more forward where we subtracted from the main body it's gonna take a second to load i'm gonna go ahead and lower my desk and sit down because a little bit longer than i expected give me one second okay so i hope it ain't losing by with that confusion i just wanted to show you all how to you know make sure that your last cut here was large enough so again that's the first component that we made i want to turn the visibility off and turn the visibility of the bodies off so that you can see now that we've cut that piece now let's print it we're pretty much done so inside of the component i'm gonna go to each body uh you could name them if you want click again and then you can name it top again wow so what i like to do is click this body right click save as stl you could adjust these if you want that's why i set them on and i like to send it directly to my print utility so if you have time you set that up click ok and it will send it directly to my print software but i'll also show you how to save it so this will work for my print software as you can see it would fit once i stood it up um and placed it in the center there my platform um it fit now and i'll probably print that in a different orientation but that'll be fine just as an example of how you could do it and now i'll show you how to save it with a file so do the same thing right click on body save as seo but instead of send to print utility don't check that click ok and we'll let you save it as an stl at a place of your choosing so you can select wherever you want and then go into your print utility and uh find the file so that's pretty much it again thanks for uh suggestion i don't think i actually gave a shout out but this video was prompted by someone on my last video requesting that i do a higher amount of triangles in one file and edit that and fusion and i wanted to one second i'll pull that i up to give them of course a little bit of shout out um for sebastian here who asked for more triangles i said yeah absolutely i gotta find mine said iron man helmet and it's funny because like i said i've printed one i just did it the easy way and i was needing to go eventually anyways so that's great uh any more suggestions you'll have just let me know uh or if you want me to make specific videos for specific files or edits that you need done let me know as well alright thanks bye

Channel: Jared Hanson

Views: 5,388

Keywords: stl, fusion360, 3D print editing

Id: P0vUTerEnJE

Length: 35min 22sec (2122 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021