Editing STL Files in Fusion 360 for 3D Printing: How to Remix Models

i'm going to show you how to edit sdl files in fusion 360. so stl files are really good for 3d printing however as they are a mesh they're hard to edit and you may come across some models that you want to make some small changes to such as maybe change the size of a hole to accept a different size magnet or something like that and uh this this poses a challenge as you don't have access to the original geometry all right so i'm just going to open up fusion 360 here and the first thing to do is you can insert the stl file as a mesh so you go to the insert command select insert mesh find an stl file so i'll just bring in a file here so this helmet here and then we'll accept the location so this looks pretty good if you know if you twist it around you can see some strange looking faces on here and that's just a really a rendering artifact because you look at the edges the boundary is still pretty good so the first thing we want to do is we have to convert it to a b rep or a boundary representation and that's because if you try to do something like say cut a hole in this i'll just do it real quick so i'll make a sketch on one of the faces here maybe this bottom plane and just try to make a big circle select that circle and then extrude that and just try to extrude through here and maybe like cut it so i want to go cut and you'll notice that there's no geometry here to intersect with because there's no actual boundary it's just the mesh file at this point all right so i'm just going to undo that sketch and all right so to convert this to a boundary file or a b rep file the first thing you have to do is turn off these this history so you come down here to this gear button and you say do not capture design history and so when that when you do that you'll notice you get some other more options such as i'll do that here so i'll say continue you get this mesh tools but also in the salad function you get more options in the modify button you get this mesh option down here and this mesh to b rep and that's what we're looking for so you click that and then if you try to apply this to a model and hit okay it gives you an error many times for many models and this says because the the facets on this model is like there's 52 000 versions and so if you look up on fusion's web page and you look in their documentation you'll see and converting to a b rep from a mesh you'll see there's a limitation of it has to have 10 000 facets or less and so that's all right we can we can take care of that problem so if you go to the mesh command you'll under modify you can see this option called reduce so what this does is just reduce the number of um kind of triangles and facets in the model so so i hit the reduce option and then i go and select the whole thing by selecting this mesh body here adaptive is fine uh and then this is a then you have to change this density so if you hit it at one it'll it'll not reduce it at all if you go to zero there's really nothing left so we know at 1.0 is the whole 50 000 facets and we really want to get around 10 000 so we need to reduce it down by about 20 down to 20 percent of its original density so i just scroll it down just a little less than 20 percent so there's 18.4 percent the one option you really want to check is this preserved boundary so that preserves all the edges uh and supposedly the flat regions so make sure that is checked and then hit hit okay all right so when you do that now the if you spin around your model you'll see it really does not look good it looks much worse don't fear yet if you also notice on the edges you can still see there's like flat edges are flat and in general most of the shape is still retained all right so now we're going to go back to the solid section go to modify go to mesh and then we'll go to mesh to be rep and we'll select this mesh body here and then hit ok and then once that happens it takes a few seconds usually we'll get a new body here and it'll deselect the mesh body and if you look at this one it is like the flat areas are much cleaner and the curved sections you can you can see some of these uh triangle facets in here because it we did reduce it quite a bit but when you 3d print you really can't see those so it's not too big of a deal on the flat zones you also notice there are quite a few facets still there even though it is mostly flat i've been playing around with freecad some and i did notice that it has a nice simplify feature that actually makes flat zones to be all kind of one face which is pretty nice for this this function but anyways now we're able to edit this is because it's a body object and so at this point we want to re-enable kind of the the history and so you do that by right clicking on your your main uh root project in in the browser and then you go to the bottom say capture design history so you turn that back on and it'll enable the timeline at the bottom and now we can do things like say we want to change this hole to be a different size for a different size magnet you can now start sketching here so we'll just sketch we'll just pick one of these facets as our plane i put hit c for circle and i'm just going to draw a circle kind of in this this area finish the sketch but now i can grab that circle hit shift to make the whole circle and then i'm going to hit e for extrude and then i'll just extrude down some ways and we don't want to cut here we want to join and hit okay and now you can see we filled in that hole and likewise we can do the same thing with uh making a hole so i just do the same thing i start a new sketch select an area on that plane create a new circle so if i want to put like a six six millimeter magnet so maybe i'll just do 6.2 for a little bit of tolerance so it can fit hit enter finish that sketch now you select the sketch select because now we have all those facets in there so sometimes you have to shift select and make sure you get the whole section hit e for extrude and then say we want to go extrude maybe negative 2.2 millimeters because maybe have a six by two millimeter magnet and just say cut and hit okay and now you can see we've changed the size of that hole on this model and then you can export it like normal using the tools make button and you can select that and then re-export it as an stl file again for 3d printing and you've changed that model hole so that works pretty well sometimes i have noticed in some models oops let's cancel this for like say this is doing the whole character here so i had noticed sometimes when you start extruding and making cuts you'll get a bunch of odd like artifacts so i'm going back in history here and you can see like in these corners i get all these facets that stick up that i didn't really want so you can just highlight them all and then just delete them manually and then once once they're all gone um the model exports well and usually slices and prints just fine so anyways that's how i uh make small edits and you can edit sdl files if you're just looking to kind of sculpt it in many other files or many other programs such as mix mesh mixer and things like that but these are more for like engineering type designs you want to put specific size holes or do more kind of parametric changes instead of instead of a kind of sculpting type changes anyways that's how i do it and i hope this helped [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Shawn Gano

Views: 24,728

Keywords: STL, STL files, Fusion, Fustion360, Fusion 306, BRep, 3D Printing, 3D Print, Among Us, Among Us 3D Printing, Sus, Remix, FDM, CAD, Mesh, engineering, Design, editing, models

Id: H8DXt-_aZ74

Length: 10min 2sec (602 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 03 2020