FreeCAD for Beginners pt.7 - Importing .STEP files and Scaling

welcome back to another video today we're back in freecad and i wanted to show you something that you might find useful when you download models off the web and you want to make a few changes to them i'll show you how to import a step or stl file consisting of multiple parts how we can split those parts up and how we can scale them uniformly with a rough idea of their size okay so this is fusion 360 and this is something i designed as a prototype for my raptor 2 project a few months back you can actually learn more about this on my channel if you haven't watched any of my project videos go take a look at raptor 2 you might find it pretty interesting so obviously this has been designed from scratch in fusion 360. and we can see that everything in here is its own component so we've got a base here which i can separate and everything is unique and we can move it around individually so the challenge here is that when you transfer from one card package to another you kind of lose all this and your sketch information is all lost as well so you're quite limited in terms of making modifications so what i've done is i've exported this as a step file and i'll show you how you can do that really easily in this particular case we want to export the whole thing so in fusion you can right click here and export you can select what type i use the step file select your location and save it out so that's what i did for this i saved this whole model out as a step file and now if we jump back into free card i'm going to import it into here and show you kind of what we can do with it and the limitations of jumping between card packages so to import a step file or an stl file it's really simple i've shown you before in a previous tutorial you just come up to file import you want to go to the location where you saved the step file in this case i'm already here so i'm going to hit open so as you can see we've imported this model in it looks exactly the same but we've lost a lot of our information as i said in regards to sketches and our dimensions you'll see that it's imported up here as a part now if you click this drop down you'll see all the different components that i had in fusion 360. so if i come back you can see we've got base 480 kv motor a bunch of spurs pinions and belts so if we come back you can see we've also got that here now in freecad often when you come across a 3d model online if the person has exported it correctly nine times out of ten they'll provide a step file which will enable you to have things broken down like this which makes it a lot easier to make changes or use parts of the design in your own project as i mentioned in my previous free card for beginner series it's very good practice to have each piece of the model its own part or its own component and in fusion 360 you will notice that i did have two components here but i left a lot of these as bodies so that's translated across over the freecad to keep our good practice we can easily convert the spur here into a part by clicking on the spur come up to create part then we can just drag the spirit onto it and now we've got the spur inside a part as opposed to being its own individual body and you can do that for all of them so i'm going to do that really quickly okay so now just like fusion 360 we've got everything here in sep components or separate parts and just like here they're all separate we can separate each of them now in three card if i select one of these just like i showed you in the previous tutorials in the beginner series we can hit space and i'll hide certain parts of the model what you'll tend to notice as well when you import models like this is that they're no longer connected right so in in fusion 360 the motors are secured to this frame using a joint so the motor can spin and it won't move anywhere whereas in free card for example if i go up to the left motor here and i right click transform if i just drag one of these i can move it anywhere i want the reason for that is because you lose that information such as sketches joints and alignment when you transfer between these card packages so we'd have to recreate this inside of freecad and what i'm going to do in a future video is show you exactly how you can do that how you can take more complex models like this bring all these parts together make them have them all connected as one model and that kind of sets you up then to start designing your own projects where things get a little more complicated and you have multiple different parts and components just like this project this tutorial is focused around scaling objects so we'll focus on that here and i'll make that video separately later on so let's undo what we did so that our model's in the correct position first thing we'll do here is notice our orientation of the model so our cube in the top right if we come to the view here right you can see everything's kind of upside down or sideways it's not right we want it to be correct to our workspace especially if you have an existing model and you're importing something into that you want it to be correct so we can easily fix that and what we'll do is we'll come up to our master component here which contains all our other components we'll right click transform and notice you've got these little arrows and balls that pop up that allow you to just rotate the model and move it around so what i'm going to do is grab this one rotate it around nicely like this if we click on our cube and click top you'll know when it's at the correct orientation because you'll be able to see straight down onto it so we're just going to hit okay and if we come back out rotate around a little bit you can see that's improved it but i also want to rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise so that the front where the belts are is facing the front so we're going to go and do that again grab our master component right click transform this time we're going to grab the green ball we rotate that around to something like this we can click front we need to go a little bit more so let's drag that one more there we go we can hit ok and there we have it our model is now inside a free card with the correct orientation in regards to the origin and the coordinates of the environment so what i'll do now is focus on the scaling and show you how you can scale this whole model as one but this is mainly going to be useful if you're wanting to print something simple like a model that you'd have on your desk or a figure and you wanted to add a bit of text to it or something like that just gives you a rough idea of the size of these things before you 3d print them obviously you can scale in a slicer but that doesn't allow you to customize the model or add any text to it so this is one of the reasons why you'd want to do this in freecad as you can see here once you import it in you've got no reference to scale at all here because you lose all that sketch information so you are limited in terms of what you can edit but you can still use a sketch for example as a guide so i'm going to show you how to do that so let's click our master component we're going to create a new part here by clicking the yellow button at the top we're going to rename this to guide then we'll switch to the part design workspace by clicking the drop down and inside of this make sure the components active by double clicking on it so you'll see there the component just says guide if i double click it goes bold that means the components active so let's add a body in here as well by clicking this blue button and inside of there we'll create a new sketch now i'm going to sketch on the x z plane here and just hit ok so what i'm going to do here is just quickly grab the rectangle tool we're going to draw a line we're going to draw a box around our model as we've done before in previous videos we're going to set up some constraints so that we have a rough idea how big this box is going to be so we'll grab our horizontal constraint select our two points here we're going to make that 250 mil and we're going to add a horizontal constraint as well so we'll grab our two horizontal points at the bottom we'll make that 500 mil and we always want our model centered around the origin typically so we'll create another horizontal constraint so we'll grab our center point one of the points on the edge i will make that half of the width which would be 250 mil again hit okay and there we go we now have this rectangle around our model we know the width of it we know the height of it so now at least when we scale this model we've got a rough idea of the size so we'll hit close okay so now in regards to scaling you are somewhat limited in terms of what you can do and what you can do after you've scaled it so i'll show you how you can do it so the first thing we do is select our master component here this will select everything for you and your entire model will turn green then what you do is come up to the draft workbench so make sure you're in there and on this toolbar here with the blue icons you can see a tool that scales the selected objects from a base point we'll click on that we'll click enter point make sure you have checked uniform scaling and create a clone and from here we can increase our scale factor and we want to keep this kind of within our bounding box here so i'm going to make this 2.9 you can see that's roughly inside and now we know that the length of this is 500 mil and it's within our 250 ml height so we've got a rough idea of how big this thing is so let's hit ok now what that will do is it will create a clone for you and you can see the clone here so we're going to hide our guide now if we hide the clone as well you can see that our model is still in here the good thing about the clone is that if we make any changes to the original model this will also reflect in the clone so the downside to the clone is that notice that we've lost now all our original components for it so if we hide the clone we've still got our original we've got all these individual components we can make those changes to those and deal with them individually whereas with the clone we've just got a single entity here that is a clone we can hide the original for a sec now the only way to combat this as far as i know is to downgrade this part so we've done this before in a previous video as well so if we click on the clone everything highlights green we're in the draft workspace still there's an arrow here that says downgrade selected objects into simpler shapes we'll click on that and now what that's done is it's broken this down into different solids so you can see the individual bodies again so we'd have to go and create parts if we wanted to remake all these things at a bigger scale but we've got a bunch of parts and it's kind of separated in faces as opposed to components if i hide the main body here and we focus on one of the motors if we go to solid 3 you can see that's the outer edge of the motor solid six is this cover part and you could go through and combine these using boolean operation to bring all those parts back together and you can do that quite simply i'll show you one example of it so we'll take solid six solid five solid seven we might as well do the whole thing right so solid eight we've got that one solid nine i believe that should be everything that's the whole motor the belt pinion is separate so we'll leave that so if we go to the part workspace there's a tool up here on the menu make a union of several shapes which is a boolean operation we can do that and now here on our part tree we've got a fusion which has brought all those back together and inside the fusion we've still got each of those solids so that's one way you can bring all these parts back together so if i bring back the original solid you can see there we still got our model but as i said really limited after you've scaled it it would be really useful if you could still edit sketches and whatnot through a step file but unfortunately you can't and oftentimes you've just got to work with what you've got which is why i've shown you how to scale this way i wouldn't recommend scaling like this for larger more complex projects like this example where we've got multiple parts they need to be specific sizes but for something simple as i said you know if you've got an stl file of a bottle for example from thingiverse you could pull that into free card scale it up to whatever size you want then add some text to it and 3d print it and that's the typical application of something like this but what i'll do in the next video as i said is i'll take the original import that we've got here so if we get rid of this scale we're just going to delete i'll take this model i'll show you how you can add color back to it i'll also show you how you can mate all these parts which is something you'd make use of in your own projects but that's it for this one i hope it's been useful i hope it's been a bit insightful as to the limitations of transferring between card packages and often why it's just better to stick with one so that's it for this one i hope it's been quite insightful at the challenges you face when jumping between card packages but also useful in that you can take other people's models scale them up to a size that you need and make some simple changes to it if you made it this far into the video thank you so much for watching i just wanted to quickly reach out and ask for your support if you appreciate these videos that i put out for free on youtube please consider becoming a website member to support me my biggest goal is to do this full time and keep inspiring people through teaching and sharing my own projects you can help make this a reality by becoming a website member and i'd really appreciate it in return for your membership you gain access to my fusion 360 for beginners course you also get access to my 3d cad files for all of my projects and finally you'll gain access to the members only discord channel where you can hang out with the other members and ask me questions all links to these web pages i'll put in the description down below any support would be massively appreciated thank you back to the video

Channel: thehardwareguy

Views: 65,984

Keywords: freecad, freecad tutorials for beginners, freecad tutorial, freecad part design tutorial, free cad 0.18, cad beginner course, beginner cad software, freecad course, freecad scale part, freecad scale object, freecad scale model, freecad scale solid, freecad downgrade, freecad scale stl, freecad import step file, freecad import stl, freecad import step assembly, how to import step file in freecad, how to scale a model in freecad, freecad scale mesh, freecad scale body

Id: Ae5O7j-hFwg

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021