Everything You Need To Know About Importing STL — Fusion 360 Tutorial — #LarsLive 165

how are you doing welcome to livestream number 165 I just lost my clock here all right today we're gonna talk everything you need to know about importing files STL files into Fusion I'm a little bit early if you're watching this recording I don't blame you just fast forward we have like three minutes left just look at the clock up there and then about three minutes we will hit it hard and talk about everything you need to know about importing STL files into fusion 360 but a little bit early sitting here thought I might as well just that check in and see if there's anybody who want to join us today and I can see we all have people in here we had ice egg in here Robert is here David really appreciate fun King 3ds here that's awesome Matthew yeah all you guys I hope I hope that you guys had a we can see we got Germany here so that one I hope you guys had a weekend we had a long weekend here in in in the US it was a wonderful wonderful wonderful time enjoy it wasn't family it was just good to to kind of relax a little bit so that was absolutely awesome yeah so just start winding down here have about two minutes till we are we're gonna talk about today's what it's all about talk about STL files question here about when we're gonna do some some t-splines or how it's coming on should do some more videos on t splines I'm trying to flex it a little bit between you know some models of different stuff I'm trying to be somewhat a little bit random with these live streams we got Denmark here oh no we got Germany couldn't dark really really appreciate you guys taking the time to it so drawing these livestream it's absolutely absolutely awesome so yes today's topic everything you need to know about importing STL files this is actually two live streams kind of like packed into a quick one got keep on getting questions about these SEL and I thought I just want to make a quick video showing how to kind of like handle STL files one video so when people are emailing me with questions I can just fire them up like that yeah Royale with cheese thank you I'm gonna try to do these pretty live streams just that just I have an opportunity to say thank you through to all of you you know again I really appreciate you taking the time to watch these especially as they are as random as they are um question from Robert how do you scale the STL file whoo that's a good question I hadn't hadn't planned on sharing that but you don't want Robert I will show you that in about a minute us up um really cool all right guys hey I really appreciate you guys taking the time trying this new concept with them with some map with some pre livestreams hellos so thank you so much I can see the time is up so and let's jump in and and let's get this get this started all right so that's going clear the timer here and three sort of countdown three two one all right everybody thank you so much for taking the time to join today's live stream it is number 165 and there today is May 29th 2018 that's almost young folks my name is Lance Christensen and I really appreciate you taking the time to to watch these videos today's topic everything you need to know about importing STL files into fusion 360 this is kind of two old live streams that I'm just kind of external combined into one so and if you're looking for this topic you know what let's let's get into it and let's talk about about these these import these STL files so a couple of things I want to show you and I'm gonna try to do this fairly quickly not getting too much into details because again I know that a lot of you guys just want to get get the solution I talk too much STL file so you're normally used to in your data panel over here to to kind of import them import them in but when it comes to SEL files I actually would recommend you go to the insert drop-down and right here there is an insert mess because that is what an STL file is right it is a mesh file click on that we're gonna open up two different STL files today and it's important that you stay patient and watch both of them the first one here let's double click on this one and I'm just gonna hide the data panel up here you don't need that right now and here is this mod we have used this one in a prior live stream so you can definitely when we went into more depth but a couple of things that is important you you can choose some unit types over here these different things you can send in you also get this free move that can be rather nice so a free move if you're brand-new diffusion that means that it will not be recorded down in the timeline I'm just gonna rotate it so on top here kind of assembles with the top of this I think is a table I'm not sure Oh hit OK to that and what we now have is what we will call an STL mesh file you'll see down here in the bottom we have a little mesh icon if you go right click on the bodies folder you will also see that accession it is a mesh body so let me just talk quickly about STL files and I've gotten some heat in the past and that's probably justified ah in regards to a CFL I do not hate STL files I do not but STL files is just triangular flat triangular shapes and many times when you get an STL file you have not have control about how this tight this triangular mess was created but means that if we look at this file here and if we go to look at the left side and we zoom in if you soo-min very very close you will notice that this hole is not round it is linear linear linear that is because it is a STL file it is just a blondes of different triangles then it's headed up and the reason that I'm just not the biggest fan of them is because of the accuracy now STL files are most used because of 3d printing that's kind of like where they got there they will not they didn't invent them but that's why they got kinda like this second life was for 3d printing came up and I understand why the 3d printing companies picked STL files because in the beginning as 3d printing was not accurate at all and they just need a very light format and that's what STL files is but we like to do instead of fusion normally the end goal is to turn it in to a solids because most 3d printers will accept an STL file directly so you don't even have to go through a CAD CAM software if you download it from a cool website like Thingiverse then you can just stop it right in through to your printer but instead of fusion we most of the times want this thing to turn into a solid we means it is a watertight mount model where we have mass so meaning that if we if we cut this one and a half right now there's nothing inside of this it is just triangular none thick shell we normally want to make it a solid here comes the trick to turn this file into a solid first thing first you need to get rid of this timeline well wait a minute why do I have this timeline in the first place remember that normally when we are modeling from scratch inside of fusion we want this timeline that kind of recalls everything down here in the bottom when we got to convert an STL file into a solid we do not want this timeline we need to get into direct edit mode we do that by right-clicking up here on the top component how would you ever know that and turn on do not capture the sign history when I click on that you're going to get a warning it's not it's not a bad thing nothing's going to blow up but you need to know that we are remove everything that was recorded on this timeline I'm just gonna click continue and nothing really changed on your honor other than the timeline disappeared now you right click on the model right click with your mouse and you go in and say mesh to be rap master B rap you click on that it's gonna come up here and ask you normally selected our mask body and now we can turn it into a new body click OK to that and three two one and it turns gray and it is now a solid now if we click on the easiest way to notice this is by clicking on this little arrow here and you will see that we have X is still both files we now have a body file that's a solid and we have a a mess file depending on which lightbulb we click on now if you want the original live stream I did with this model you will see that I started converting a lot of like that hole I showed how to turn it into a full circle hole if you need that many times you don't if you're just freely printing maybe you just got to make a couple changes to this model and and you're all good with that and now the other thing I want to show on this model is that you can clean it up so if you're looking at these this face is flat that I'm hovering over right now but you can see that it's still all those different triangles you can actually if the model is simple enough if I select this face and click delete on my keyboard you will ecstacy that that fusion kind of heals the face it doesn't make anything necessarily better per se but it just looks at that face and when you hit the lead on your keyboard through that again it just kind of cleans it up it sees what I can heal that face so with this model here you could actually go around and clean up a lot other of these faces and maybe make them Marvel if they are flat faces and exit make the model a little bit more um you know flat and better to look at Robert as the brilliant question inside of enough in the chat how do you scale it well I would normally turn my my ACL file into a solid and then I would little just go down and use the scale menu under modify select the body and you can now make it twice as big if you want to and it will be be scaled up twice to speak so that was a good that was a good question so that was the first model I want to show you now it like I said it is important that that you watch the next one because let's open up I'm gonna go up here click a new document and let's go to insert again hit insert mesh this time let's select the second one and again we get a free move so I'm just gonna take this mark around on Thingiverse this is Mount Rushmore with Benjamin Franklin well I am maybe not American but I know enough about my history that that is definitely not Benjamin Franklin we had or on on the right here or my favorite should we if you are I want to read a great book leave his autobiography so a couple of things I want to show you with this one first let's follow the same steps we did before repetition is key in all learning so we had imported this mess file with the insert mesh box up here next thing we had to do was we had to get rid of the toolbar down here again we're gonna do that by right-clicking up on the top component say do not capture the sign history we are going to get a warning we okay we're not afraid of anything and we can now in in the same modus before in the right editing mode now we're gonna right click and we're gonna say mess to be rap I'm gonna say okay to convert this intro be rep and we get a warning this mess contains a large number of facets that means triangles actually it counts sixty-six thousand three hundred and eight six facets all triangle flat faces conversion has been aborted boohoo that that was not what we wanted but the truth of the matter is that turning something from a mass from a STL file into a solid does take some computer power and it's not the easiest calculations in the world so CAD companies normally set a loft of how big a mess you can actually bring in before the software is gonna kind of like get down on its knees so let's just look at this model here now I know that right now I cannot convert it over there is too many of these triangles and if you zoom in a little bit I mean look at the amount of details here on these models here just to look at some of the details right it's very fine with all these triangles one thing we could do was we could use the math tools now another thing you need to know the mesh tools in the drop-down are only available when you have an STL file on the screen okay so if you don't have an excel file on the screen you will never see this mess icon with an a a misfire on the screen you can see it now if I click on it right now I actually get another warning enable the mess workspace preview in the preferences and what this means is that the mesh toolbar is still in preview or in beta you could say here inside of fusion 360 and we don't want you to do anything in preview without making sure that you're fully aware of that you are in a preview tool meaning is kind of an Abeyta tool so things might change so you have to turn around manually that's okay I'll show you it's easy enough hit okay on this menu go up and click on your name in the upper right click on Frances and your preferences will open up move down to the preview section in here next when you look in here you will see that there's a lot of different things the fusion has in preview right now but personally I think it's pretty dang cool so we can turn on the mess workspace we can actually turn on all the different things but let's just turn on the mess workspace right here heat apply and hit OK and now when I go back in and click on the mass in the drop down you will now see that I get a de Mestral here a couple of things you should know about this there is a cool function under the Select tool called a mess palette this is a neat function that put in here where to make it easier to select things if you're working with mess so you will kind of see how I kind of have a brush right now for selection Sheila so you can actually make that brush size bigger or you know whatever whatever you kind of want if you want us to select things like that of course you can also use window selects and free from selects all the other tools inside that you normally can do a model environment you should play around with these but this mess palette can be nice for selection I just want to make sure you saw that now and a couple of things that probably should be pointed out about this model remember 66,000 some faces we have I know I'll have to make it smaller I might just choose to see if I can't Lehman eight Pentium and Franklin or whoever's Cookie Monster face that is over there so I'm gonna go on and modify make all the different tools that are in here this is maybe fun other dates who were to play around with but there's one called playing cut so if I go over here and I select our mess file and I click on flip direction you will exes see that I can use the arrows to kind of trim on this model here let's go in on the front view and kind of go to the side here I can even kind of like rotate a little bit if I want to get a little closer to there right so now it's a little bit little bit closer and it will Lexy when I spin it around here it will actually oh I didn't heal it just undo that again I should have checked heel plane cut ice to select the model and then you can you can turn on here I wanna I wanted to fill that face I want to make sure that it's filled because I was gonna try to turn it into a solid at the end so I want to turn it into a water-type model get a little bit of closer to my friend Lincoln here boom something like that maybe close enough hit okay and now you will see that it is it's healed up here so with this we could say all right so maybe we're a little bit closer now to a value that fusion could turn it into a solid and the way you would go back and check that it's just literally going back into the modern environment remember you can jump between these different workspaces without loosing anything and then we could right click on the model again and we couldn't say mess to be wrap usual xxi gonna mess to be wrap and click a new body i get i lowered it down to 56,000 but the conversion is still been aborted so it's still not good enough that's okay I'm not gonna be too upset let's go back to with the mess workspace because in the modified drop-down there's actually a reduce option in here so if I click on reduce and then I'm gonna go in and select the window selection because I actually want to reduce the entire model here that is fine for me and normally it will show up on reduced target s identity and it gives you a value I normally like to change that in the drop down to face count because that's one we kind of like been talking about right now like 66 down to 56,000 and I'm not sure what the higher you make this number you can play around with it and really depends on there is not a hard hard number there's a cop different as far as I know things that comes into effect but you can play around with this number let's try to make it maybe 35,000 facets and if you turn on these preserve boundaries and the preview you can't exit when you zoom in you can actually see the preview as you are playing around with if you're playing around with a slider here we should actually see kind of like that preview show up so let's try to make this 35,000 and I do get a would might have an issue right now this is why I like these these live streams it's in the preview on the serve boundaries and that's it okay and see what it says click on that and that's probably just gonna take a second to calculate all right I do think it did it when I'm looking over here on the mouth it looks a little tighter let's see if it did it so let's go into the model environment right click go into mess B wrap say okay to a new body oh it didn't do it alright see that it said it didn't do it it might be because the way I cut it up here I wonder I'm not gonna quit on this mesh go in and reduce this is why I like to do live streams now you can see that I sometimes struggle suit select everything I like to change this to a face count and so this boundary gives me an error I want to try to turn that off and just see here 35,000 yes it keeps on giving me there's an arrow here so I don't think it's gonna do it okay let's try a face count of 25,000 I'll go select something this is supposed to be a quick livestream 25,000 okay so I think it's maybe something with the way I cut the model here you know what let's try this instead and when I bought this it's over the new model let's go insert it straight mass let me just check that rotate that around there okay turn that off there it might be better to try to see if we reduce it if we do the reduction first and then cut this maybe afterwards try to reduce this under the window selection of everything let's change this to a face count no so that gives me the warning okay that is very interesting folks why would it do that so let's try reduce let's just write a density and I should be wasteful we don't want to do it at all all right I am going to try this instead I'm gonna try to lease that fusion now this is me troubleshooting on my end in the best fashion hi know what might not be might that be the the the official that's probably the available right now is just shaking his head and says you should just have you should just have done that but let me I want to try to see if we can't do something here um and sort that mesh I still want to move it I don't think that's gonna cost it anything change into do not capture the sign let's go into the mesh tool bar let's try to reduce it and the other problem could be with the selection here I guess if it doesn't select it may not have selected everything through looks like it did that their face count 35 so in the preview on hit okay think for a second model environments right click and then you will see that now it loaded down to 235 thousand so it missed - okay so now so in my maybe I needed to be started after I turned on those mess tools that could be it but now will it will give us a warning and say that we still have a very high count here so we want to preserve the conversion and now I know that if I hit OK to this now it should absolutely convert it but before I do that I do don't want to leave out what I did before with the plain cut so I'm just gonna do this in in the other direction the testing somebody's gonna say to me hey you skip that on the cut I think that maybe just had - maybe you just have to restart the mesh tool after you have turned it on that would not surprise me so now we're back to here let's try this again model to have it in here right click and mess to be red let's see if it does it down to 31,000 now conversion and hit OK and there was just wait a second and that should now turn into a into a solid that's at least what I am hoping it might just take a few minutes because again that there is a lot of calculations going in the background and it's absolutely important to now that when you're working you can see like the kind of bar is working on the bottom that when you're doing this turning something from an STL file into a solid that you are doing a lot of calculation in the background so in this case here it did turn it into a solid when you see that again if we hit the little drop down here we now have a solid body now again is triangular means that every single triangle is kind of flat it's a flat surface but this is now a a fully solid body like that whoo I'm glad that we got that figured out huh so I think that to take away from that to take away from this last room today this Monday on everything you need to know about importing solids one of the important things are importing STL files one of the important things is you probably to restart after you turn on the the mass our workspace to get things to it to work in there but I hope some good tips to bring it in through the mess insert mesh tool instead of through your data panel turn on the history tree right-click convert into B rap if the STL file is too big and this happens a lot I know that for a lot of you guys then go into the preview turn on the mess workspace restart your machine do that and then you have a couple of options in there to work with with some of those things in there that was what I was planning on showing today I hope that this was useful do me a favor if you like this give the thumbs up if you don't like this thumbs down especially if you didn't like me struggling around hey just that that's the that's the beauty of live streaming I really appreciate you taking the time to join these live streams I'm gonna do what I normally do I am going to end the broadcast so if you're watching the recording thank you so much for taking the time to do that and if you're inside of the live stream I am gonna jump in there before I do that if you haven't subscribed to the YouTube channel I would truly appreciate if you would do that that is kinda like how I can tell my boss that people are watching this so until tomorrow I hope you have an awesome awesome day thank you so much take care folks you

Channel: Lars Christensen

Views: 19,144

Keywords: Autodesk, Autodesk Fusion 360, Fusion 360, akn_include, Design, Manufacturing, Beginner, CAD, CAM, CNC, Lars Christensen, tip, how to, free software, tutorial, fusion, software, cad software, workflow, make anything, fusion 360 tutorial, 3d printing, STL, Mesh

Id: tRhL9TGT-3c

Length: 29min 24sec (1764 seconds)

Published: Tue May 29 2018