From Beginner to Pro: Conquer STL Files in Autodesk Fusion [UPDATED!]

in this video we're going to learn how to work with STL meshes infusion now it's important to note that not all mesh files are created equal if you create a design in a CAD program and convert it to a mesh file it's going to be different than something you get from say a 3D scanner we're going to be focused on 3D scanner based meshes in this video but most of the tips and techniques will work across all different types of meshes so to get started there are a couple of ways you can bring a mesh into Fusion the preferred method is to use insert mesh on the mesh tools we're going to go and find an STL an obj or 3mf file and open that infusion now it's important to note that STL files are going to contain only triangular mesh elements and nothing else obj and 3mf files can also contain quad meshes or endons these are mesh faces that are not just triangular they also have other information in some cases such as material or appearance and even 3D printer settings for our purposes we're going to focus on the STL but any of the options would be the same note that in the insert mesh dialogue we have Center move to ground as well as flip up Direction it is important to note that none of these options will allow you to select specific parts of your mesh and align it to the coordinate system these are going to allow it to flip based on 90° rotations but they will not allow for precise input based on mesh selections so if you need to align to a coordinate system or your origin make sure that that's done before you bring the mesh into Fusion most 3D scanning software will allow you to do this and there are also thirdparty Solutions depending on where your workflow lies we're going to say okay and now that we have a mesh body infusion the next step is to double check the mesh properties we always want to make ourselves aware of the number of faces that we have in a mesh body in this case 214,000 as that number increases you'll notice that Fusion has a harder time dealing with it one of the main reasons is that every time we hover over a mesh body it's going to highlight it and what happens is all 214,000 of those triangles get highlighted to simplify this we can rightclick on the mesh body and make it unselectable this means that rotations and movements in the canvas area are going to be much quicker personally speaking I would say that anything over 500,000 faces is going to start to really show a performance performance degradation and fusion so if you have a large mesh file one of the next steps is to remesh that to reduce the mesh count let's go ahead and take a look at some of the mesh tools that we have to simplify and smooth out this mesh one quick note for you if you do have to align your mesh body in the coordinate system you can go into direct edit we're going to select the mesh body and we can use direct edit tools to create construction planes by selecting specific points on the design design in this case for example I'm going to create a three-point plane selecting points on the edge of the mesh the reason this is important is because we can do this in direct edit but we aren't able to select individual mesh elements when we're not in direct edit mode we can now show the origin and we can use tools like measure and find the angle between our current mesh position and the default angle in this case 0.5° that's close enough that it's not something that I would worry about and for a design like this which is a belt guard for an alternator really doesn't require us to be that precise but if you're working on mechanical components and you need to get it just a little bit closer to precise then you can use those tips in the direct edit tools now as for remeshing and smoothing out a mesh I suggest that you do that while capturing design history if you happen to open a mesh file using file open or importing it into your data panel you will also want to make sure that you right click at the top level and you capture design history that'll be off by default for any neutral imported file formats so under modify there are two main tools that we're going to focus on that's remesh and smooth we also have the option to reduce the mesh count this often times is not a great option when we're dealing with scanned meshes so we want to focus on remesh because inside of remesh we have preserve sharp edges and preserve boundaries there are two different types of mesh elements we can create an Adaptive or a uniform when we use the Adaptive option we have a shape preservation slider when we use the uniform option it's going to be using a uniform mesh element size based on the density that we choose we're going to go ahead and select the mesh body using the default density of 0 2 and a uniform type and say okay what happens is now Fusion will go through the entire mesh file and it'll change the element size based on our settings if I drag this back in the timeline you can see that we've got some mesh elements that are extremely small and some that are a little bit larger but after a remesh they're all going to be a consistent size what you might find is that you see a little bit of loss in the original shape of your design once you start to remesh so it's always something that you should be aware of and careful with your density settings The Next Step that we want to go through is smoothing our design now smoothing doesn't have a shape preservation option we simply have a smoothing slider this is going to determine the degrees of smoothness that'll be applied what this is essentially doing is it's taking a look at mesh elements and the angle between adjacent faces so what ends up happening with smoothing is when you have areas of transition like essentially a filleted Corner as we apply smoothing those filleted Corners become flatter and flatter so if we drag the timeline back you can see that this entire face has actually changed angles as we go through the smoothing process one thing that I would note is that if you do Smo smoothing before you do a remesh often times you'll get a more accurate model and a smoother response but it is going to be model dependent so make sure that you do play around with the order of operations and also the settings within each tool so this looks pretty good so far so the next step in our process is to figure out how we can gather information and begin making our designs based off what we have here now there are two main workflows or methods that we could use to recreate a mesh base design one is the use of mesh section sketches and the other is using free form modeling we're going to start with mesh section sketches by selecting the body and allowing it to create a section sketch I'm going to repeat this process using my rightclick marking menu and in this case I want to rotate that plane and just continue to create additional sections I'm going to do this one more time but in this instance I want to use the plane that we created and I want to slightly drag that inward to get a better section of the mesh often times you'll note that at the very edge of a mesh you'll start to get a little bit more variation and this is very true when you're talking about scanning of thin objects so now that we have a couple of mesh sections what can we do with them well in the sketches folder you'll notice that each sketch has a sub mesh section we need to edit each sketch and from our create menu fit curve to mesh section this is a little bit tricky you need to use a little bit of information about the design intent for example if the original design contained straight lines we may want to use the straight line tool to recreate those sections with straight lines this will allow us to rebuild the design using just those straight lines keep in mind that each of these straight lines is not fixed or constrained in space so we may want to use fix unfix for each of them and then we can use the the end points to extend and trim the overlapping sections so using trim and extend we can build out a flatline based version of our cross-section in this case I'm going to move on to the second sketch and I'm going to repeat this process using a spline when we take a look at fitting spline curves we have to be very careful with our tolerance values remember that these mesh sections are created based on a lot of small triangles as we create a spline or multiple splines through here using our tangency option we can create multiple splines through the design but if we come back and we take a look at say the curvature Combs we'll see that we have a lot of variation in the spline and once again this is purely based on the fact that we're trying to attach it to a bunch of small triangles as the spline is moving along so as we're recreating designs using things like a spline in a mesh section will not give you the best final surface results it's always a good idea to think about the design intent and use these tools to your advantage but make sure that you understand the limitations and the outputs that you're getting from each one now that we've seen a little bit on how to create mesh section sketches let's talk about the other option which is creating a free form body using Create form we can start a free form Body by using the face tool and object snap if we're using object snap we can begin by snapping directly onto the mesh body using this tool I'm going to go ahead and create a couple of faces across the design making sure that I do snap to the common end points as we do this the new faces will be directly on the mesh body going to go ahead and add one more here and then we'll say okay to make this a little easier to see I'm going to go into the bodies folder right click on the mesh and change its opacity to 40% now we can see that we've got a free form face that lies directly inside of of that mesh I'm going to go ahead and use edit form to continue to model this design out from a right hand view I'm going to hold down alt and continue to model this following the curvature of the design each time I let go and hit alt again I'll be extruding a new face if we have object snap turned on while we're doing this the faces will snap directly to the mesh body we can see this does produce some potential problems so if we use contrl Z and undo and we turn off object snap we can begin manually creating these faces and as we manually create the faces they're no longer snapping to the underlying mesh body which means we're going to have to use another tool called pull to bring them back in line so from our modify dialogue we'll select pull I'm going to select all of the vertices in the design and select okay this will pull them down to the mesh reference and you can see that everything looks looks like it's created it pretty close fashion going to go ahead and say finish form and now we have a nerb surface that closely resembles the scanned mesh that we brought into Fusion there is one more method that I think we should mention before we finish this video and that's the ability to convert a quad mesh directly to a free form body so if I insert another mesh in this case a quad mesh version going to go ahead and Center this move to ground and say okay now this is a quad meshed version of the same scan in a much lower resolution when we're converting a quad mesh to a free form body Fusion really likes to see 10,000 faces or less so keep that in mind as you're converting your own if you do have the product design extension it's important to note that under convert mesh the organic option will take a triangular mesh convert it to a quad mesh and convert it to a free form body if you don't have the product design extension you will need to convert it to a quad mesh externally using one of many different resources once inside of here under utilities we can use the convert option selecting the convert type quad mesh to t-line and select our quad mesh body from here we now have a quad mesh t-line body which can be manipulated and adjusted as needed for example if I don't feel like we need this Edge I can select it and delete it to clean up the quad mesh if I feel the same with this one I can delete it and clean up the quad mesh there we can also get rid of this edge here and if we want to make any adjustments to the design for example if we need to pull up a small section here we can begin to manipulate it directly once we're done working with a quad we can select finish form and once again we now have a surface if I hide the edges using control4 we have a surface that we can work with but it is important to note that there are some potential issues when you convert a quad mesh you need to be very careful with the end result and often times it requires you to go back in using tools like utilities and repair body as well as using other tools like utilities make uniform as well as modify and smooth the conversion quality is going to directly impact the final surface that you get so the more time you spend working on that quad mesh conversion or manipulating in the free form environment the better the end result result are going to be at this point those are the main ways that we can work with scann or reference meshes in Fusion by creating mesh section sketches by creating free form bodies or by converting it to a quad mesh and converting that directly to a t-plan body how do you work with meshes in your own designs do you bring mesh bodies into fusion and is there another workflow that you have that we didn't cover here if you have any questions please leave them in the comments as always thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Autodesk Fusion

Views: 19,684

Keywords: fusion 360, autodesk, design, engineering, mechanical design, mechanical engineering, industrial design, product design, CAD, CAD software, Computer Aided Design, Modeling, CAM, computer aided manufacturing, machining, manufacturing, make, cnc machining, cnc programming, integrated CAD/CAM, integrated CAD, integrated CAM, stl mesh to solid fusion 360

Id: 3zweZhS5zcc

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2024