Fusion 360 — How To Change STL Files — #LarsLive 75

are you doing welcome to livestream number 75 today is October it is the 12th it's 2 p.m. Eastern and thank you so much for taking the time to join today's livestream either if you are entering right in right now to say hi or if you are watching the recording both of them really appreciate it today we are going to talk about STL files we are going to talk about how you can change and how you can modify them right inside of huge to 360 I can see we already got people coming in this is absolutely awesome thank you everybody for for taking time revisited to join the live stream and of course like I said if you're watching the recording thank you if you haven't already I would really appreciate if you would hit that subscribe button that would mean the world to me so talk about STL files um let's just start out by let's just start out by talking a little bit about this type of file STL's it normally comes from two places it either comes from a scanning device all we are talking 3d printing now I have talked about STL's before on the live stream and until recently I have never been a big fan of STL files the reason for that is that STL files is really just made up of triangular shapes versus like solid modeling where there's actually data in there right it knows the computer knows there's something there it's it's a solid you can you can do different things with it STL files is literally just made up of triangles it's the outer shell nothing fancy about it now in the past whenever you worked with CAD software you couldn't really do anything with STL files again just you couldn't go in and manipulate these triangular points you could literally just open up and look at it until fusion started to mess around with with the mess settings that we're going to explore today so you can actually now modify them inside of fusion and work with them but like I said scanning 3d scanning all printing so for free to scanning it kind of makes sense you you are scanning something and normally it's just by you know shining a light or a lace or something on something and the STL makes sense because it's kind of like just building the shell around it out of these triangles 3d printing because it is just a shell again and not really high resource the problem with STL files that many people run into is then when you're scanning for example how big are you gonna make these triangles the smaller you make them define the detail do you get on your mouth you're gonna see that just in two seconds inside of fusion the smaller you make the triangle the the more accurate they're gonna be but you're gonna end up with a lot of triangles and that's where cat software in the past have really somewhat choked because it can't handle you know and a huge amount of triangles because cat software is actually trying to you know you want to create into a solid and you're getting all this data and the more triangles you have the bigger data that gets so cat companies don't put a limit on it just to make sure that your computer the home kind of like just box down because there is so much data we're gonna talk a lot more about that so that's the problem with ACLs but let's dive in through to fusion well before we do that I just gotta bring up this website here this is a thing of ours I think it's how you pronounce it this is from make up on who makes 3d printers and a lot of people a lot of you guys have pink me with models that you have found out here this is all STL files so this is really 3d printing people who share their models s STL so you can go out here and you can find your model and you can find a model and then you can just send it right to your 3d printer and print it the problem is of the challenge whatever you're gonna call it that then people look at these files and now they want to manipulate them right they want to make a couple of changes and that's where they look to fusion so I did this before we started this yesterday but I uploaded Mount Rushmore our with Ben Franklin um in it I'm a Big Ben Franklin fan so so I'll roll that and the way you upload STL files into Fusion you can just go up here if you want to get them in here you can go up and hit upload and hit select files and then it will take you out to wherever I just cleaned out my downloads folder but that was where I had that one I have that downloaded from thing Thingiverse okay I'm gonna call it alright let's open up Ben Franklin on Rushmore and open up and look at this STL file so it opens up fine inside of fusion 360 now first thing you want to do is you want to get the mess workspace running on your computer and that is in preview mode so you have to turn it on so if you've never played with a mess just follow me along here move up and click on your name up here and go into preferences and this dialog window is going to open up and go over to the tree over here where it says preview and make sure that well I check all of these but at least once a day hey check on do you get the mess workspace in here so make sure you go ahead and do that and when you've done that hit apply and hit OK so let me just repeat that if you haven't already go to your name preferences preview and check mess workspace and then hit applied it ok ok if you didn't get that what's the recording and go back now one thing that happens with this model when I brought it in and a little disappointment is well it looks like a pretty dang good model of my Rushmore but this is not Ben Franklin I don't know what what happened there but that had nothing to do with the file that is just that that was just to share my disappointment with you so this is a triangular shape um and you can see that if we kind of like zooming in here a little bit you will see that everything is made up of these triangles it's just an open shape and well what we here's the thing we got to determine right off the bat here and that is if we just want to print this thing just go and print it you don't have to to change it over or to to anything now if we want to modify it we could try to sort of turn this into a solid so we could actually start using some of these commands that we have used before all like you know cottage food sweet loft and all that stuff but like I said the problem that we kind of run into is that the cat software has to convert all this all these point all these triangle shapes into a into a solid shape now if you want to test it out let's just window this whole mess thing and I'm in the model space by the way and right click and if you do that there is an option here called mesh to be ramp that would really mean turn the mess into something that we can turn into a saw it so if I click on that you will see that our mesh body selected because we highlighted it and we can turn it into a new body so I'm gonna hit OK but when I do that I get a warning this mess contains a large number of facets that's the triangles mess surface count sixty six thousand three hundred and eighty six facets huh he give me a dollar for every facet see six thousand three hundred and eighty six conversion has been aborted there you go forget about it Fusion is not going to convert this into a solid and I hope that this kind of like makes sense because if it did this the data are in there because every single face every sixty-six thousand three hundred eighty six or whatever was surface it literally has to calculate every intersection point because that's what solid modeling does right that it keeps everything on track and your computer would literally just it will sit there forever now we are gonna convert this one a little bit later I'm gonna show you a couple tricks so don't you know don't abandon ship yet we have things to we can do here but right out of the gate this is a problem and this is a good way for you to test how big these is so if we want to modify it we have two options we can either turn it into a solid then we're gonna have to make smaller writing rectangles triangles I'm sorry little rectangles triangles oh we could possibly modify this model a little bit now for that we're gonna go to the mess workspace now when I hit the drop-down you will see that I have a mesh tool workspace over here now now even so we check that box in the preferences but this will this mesh option will not appear unless you do have a mesh thing on your screen so if you went over and you hit it in the preferences checked on the preview but you try to look for it now and you don't have a mess on your screen you're not gonna see it because you know fusion is like well if you don't have a master you don't really have anything to do in here so I'm gonna switch over to to this mess space in here and I want to show you some of the different tools where we can modify this and how we can turn it into a solid now if you literally uh let me just show you how to make the triangles laugh so it will convert into a solid because if that's all you're looking for you're not don't really watching this live stream to learn about the other tools though that you probably should but if you're just looking for the quick and dirty within 12 minutes let me show you there is an option in here that is called reduce so if I click on that it asks me to select my body now you will see if you look at my mouse you see how my my cursor looks a little weird that's because in default in the mass we actually have something called paint for selection I'm gonna show you that in a little bit that's really cool but I'm gonna switch it over to our good old standard window selection and I'm just gonna highlight the entire thing again so now we've got the whole thing selected now over here in the menu under the reduced that was found under the modify tab you have a couple of different options you can either reduce it by adaptive all by uniform that means that now all the triangles gonna be uniform throughout the model I would think adaptive is what you normally want you know just because there's big areas here versus where the eyes are more details on the faces you have a couple of different options over here in the reduced target I normally just bring it down to face counts because that was what we saw before on when we did the 66,000 face counts and I always click preserve boundaries and then you have this slider where you can control how many face counts you want so if I run it all the way up you will see that it ends up about 60 it was 66 thousands by the way this number is not hundred percent accurate down to the one decimal but it's pretty damn close let me roll it down so like something very small like five thousand so we're going from 66,000 down to 5,000 and let me just hit OK here and it's gonna think for about a second literally it's not gonna think because it actually failed it in here okay that's interesting um this is when I this is what I love do these last names let me just start at the head again maybe I make it maybe I made it to have an adaptive let's go to face count let's just bring in maybe ten thousands except it's on the preview honest you tell me that it's failing in here okay I'm gonna go to forty thousands okay I don't think it's gonna do this alright ah that is interesting it should be able to do this I'm not a quitter it could be because face count let's try yeah I want to try one more time here let's try they sort of switched it over to density instead and let's make it really small and that's something it doesn't like about about this it probably doesn't like Benjamin Franklin it's not the real vendor in Franklin alright you know what I'm gonna come back to this well so you should try it on your model make that smaller but of course the smaller you make it the the less detail you you're gonna get right so if you're looking at George Washington here you know look at how detailed the eyes is and you know we have like the live so you go and look at and my good hero here Abraham Lincoln right there's a lot of detail the smaller you're making these triangles um the or the bigger you're making these triangles the less you're sending the count to the less they kind of less accurate they're gonna be and you really can end up with where you know the faces becomes like blocks okay let's try to modify this mess first and see if we can get this face count down maybe we can figure it out so I want to serve it York all of these tools first of all this is definitely not Benjamin Franklin this is a little disappointing whoever whoever this is now I'm going to show you this selection tool over here this paint tool I showed I talked about before there's a cool other tool in there called a mesh palette I got to show you that a trick I checked that on and I get this little thing over here where I can actually control kind of like that brush size I'm picking with so instead of making Windows I can paint it's almost like a paintbrush and I can change the size here I can kind of paint areas that I kind of like wanna highlight so this is super nice working inside of of the mess environment also be aware of down here over to the right over here you have you can make the selection bigger just by clicking here you can make it a little bit smaller that's kind of a nice way to when you're trying to select something so it's kind of like expanding spanning out all right with all these faces selected let's go up and hit the modify tab and let's try something crazy like erase and fill like I said this is definitely up in Franklin's face so I'm going to click on that and I get a menu up here and when I do that you will see that it changed this the the face profile through the same uniform triangle shape now that is actually something called minimal what is really great where the software actually makes the smallest amount of triangles it can use and that makes me look here and I can see if I like have some peaks and valleys because I didn't share did a very good job selecting let me just go back and maybe select this a little bit better let me make a smaller brush size and just go in and reselect around the edges here so we get as close to the base as possible going here there okay and let's try that so let's go back into modify and let's go into erase and fill and now when I switch it over to minimal it almost became completely flat like the face was never there so that's it okay to that and we at least got rid of of that attempt on Ben Ben Franklin over there so that's a good way to kind of like clean that up and you see we got a lot less triangles what actually makes me you know think that we'll be talking about bringing the face count down you could use the eraser fill are the places right like if I went over an area where it was really really bumpy so like if we're looking at Washington's kind of coat area here if I went over here and I kind of like maybe made the brush size a little bit bigger and I took all these things in here and I now go up and I say erase and Phil and I have the minimal checked I really just eliminated a lot of triangles on an area that may or may not be so important to you right so you can exit go in the end kind of like clean this up a little bit with this erase and fill and not other tool you should know about that as in here is the one that is called plane cuts you can actually cut through parts of this so if I hit plane cut and let's select the mess body and I can flip it so we get the other end I can actually kind of like cut with almost like a plane through here I can actually get rid of I don't want to cut Lincoln I can actually get rid of all that mountain there that was kind of like a little screwed up and I get an option overhead or either no Phil Oh Phil if I just say no Phil and hit okay it's actually you can see the shell you can see the inside of of the model here now of course module control Z to undo if I go in and I do that same cut again I would probably select minimal in here si as a change to to this so now we get the least amount of triangles to kind of close close that up so we can we can do that now you could also have chosen to instead of cut with a plane you could also have used like separate so you know some people have asked me a few times about how do you know what if my but if we wanted to preserve these the the precedents here still convert them into solids but we want to keep a high detail but it could be by separating through here so we could go in and you know do a plane cut and decide to you know minimize our our cut distance down to you know one or two one or two precedents right and then save that that out right and then we could end up with with a higher detail of just of just that that precedent that is now of course a lot a lot smaller quantity we could do this in separate files right so that was one way we could do it you could you can do that with a cut you could also do that with the separate so if I go in and click separate and I select my my mesh here what's pre-selected oh I got on paint window click on that and we can go ahead and it separates and then you can you can separate well I should probably have cut them cut them first and then then we could we could separate them out like that let me just go back to to the plane cut here for a second so like my plane oh I think I just made two of them because I separated okay a little bit closer to mr. Lincoln I don't want to I don't want to get rid of any of the presidents Washington Jefferson Roosevelt and Lincoln away okay so so one of the ways I guess I'm getting to is that the way we can minimize this is by cutting away portions that that we don't want right um another tool you need to know about in here I think is the smooth tool can also be pretty cool so let's go back into our paint selection in here and you know find an area that maybe you want to smooth out so if we go in it looks like there might be some bumps here let me go across a little smaller you can select certain areas and then if you go in and use the smooth tool I don't know if you saw it it actually will change how smooth that that area gets let me hit it again three-two-one see how it kind of smooths out the area so it takes those triangles and kind of like shift them out so that's another tool that you that you definitely should know about all right let's see if we can't turn this one into I'm gonna save it for a second and see if that maybe my whole select dilemma before so let's select the whole thing here and let's go in and do a reduce and I'm gonna leave it on adaptive I'm gonna change this to face count and I know that it was 66 but it's probably a lot smaller now where we now where we caught it well actually you know what before we do this let's find out how smaller it is so let's go back into the model environment let's select the whole thing right click same s2b wrap hangout right-click the whole thing modify mesh master be right there we go so you will see that we now we went for 66,000 now we exit down to 57 thousands but it still don't want to convert it okay let's see if we can convert this now back to the mess space reduce and I'm gonna select the whole thing it's probably just user error right something is happening between the desk chair and the keyboard here face count now I'm gonna try to go up to about I know that around 40,000 it actually might do it so it was at 57 I'm gonna do it at 40 and we're gonna try to see what it's gonna do here and it still fails okay that is interesting I am not sure why it would fail in here did you do so I'm gonna try that's right density and let's just bring it down a little bit maybe there's something with this model maybe because I've been playing around with with this model maybe I have done something wrong sort of repair it see I just did I prepare on it what does change the shape a little bit now I'm in trouble shooting mode here select dad I'm gonna go to face count thirty thousand maybe you shouldn't have tried that for serve areas it's thinking about it alright hang on this is not okay with me what am I doing wrong let me just promote up the one original one fresh and free here maybe if I don't mess with it maybe if I stop messing with it alright let's try it and go into the mess space here I'm gonna try first highlight thing reduce leave it a face count I'm gonna leave this for serve boundaries on it sort of go to about forty thousands and hit okay yeah I don't want to do that what if we do it without for serve boundaries no okay what if we do without face count uniform small haha okay uh you know what we're gonna do is that we're gonna do this we're gonna do this live so how about we do hitting up on the half now there's two more things I wanted to show you so it looks like this was maybe where where I got this oh maybe not I'm not sure let's see here oh yeah yeah this was where I got the Ben Franklin let's try it Einstein he was a pretty oh that's it so they are downloaded Einstein and let's try to go back in here hit upload and let's at least see if we can earn a b-plus and trying well that is loading on the takes of the water this is why I like live streams just because somebody's saying select from top left to bottom right yeah that exit you know what that could actually also be it couldn't it it could be because I am selecting the wrong triangle that's actually maybe not a bad bad idea that's just so when I go in and select what do I have for I have select through so this way versus this you know what I don't think that it makes a difference in in the mess workspace I don't know if it does the same thing as as it does in CAD where it picks different depending on where you are no it's the businesswoman all right let's try to bring in Einstein here maybe maybe I just need to maybe I just need to restart fusion that could also be let's see I haven't seen the Einstein model all right Einstein looks a little better I guess so again if you right-click here select this thing right click and say mess to be red let's see how many 97 97 thousand so that is definitely a lot more with Einstein in there let's go to the mess and yeah doesn't really matter what we select in here I would think oh yeah you know what look at this doesn't select the whole thing actually I would be alright let's try this so now everything is selected I just held on control why I made sure that I think I've literally windowed every possible thing in here that's right now reduce I'm gonna do the face count and and like I said forty thousand for me have have worked in the past hit okay and now I actually think we might get in somewhere now you need to be aware of that when you do this no we're not getting anywhere when you do this normally that if you get it to work is that I probably just have to restart it could also be because this livestream software sometimes do it's a fee remember when we did the rendering that screwed everything up so it could be that that I guess I'm I could be finding finding in here let's write five thousands now what you will see though if it converts it down is that it's gonna it's not gonna work that it is gonna have you seen them many times that you can try on your own and your own stuff is that it's gonna work a lot slower in here after you convert into Assad and honestly if you just got a 3d printed I don't know if I wouldn't even even converted it into a solid the only one reason I want to bring it into a solid is maybe into the model environment is if I have to to do something special specific with it now one other thing I want to show you though before I'm quitting on today's lives you know hopefully you got something out of it besides that I'm struggling sometimes to when I do these and I don't prepare enough another tool you need to know about if you are doing a little printing is the align tool in here that will actually let you select now I don't have a body but in alright now you're gonna now you gotta pretend with me here remember this simulation thing just play just play along here this is this part here we we converted this from an STL file into a solid we didn't but I want to show you the line tool so if we click the the organ here you will see that in this case here Z is is up so this would be would be off well there line tool is great if you're doing 3d printing and if we knew that Rushmore is not gonna fit on our bed this way it needs to be kind of like flipped upside on one side like I need to kind of like have it you know standing like this for it to be able to fit inside of my printer so if you go into the align tool it's under modify Alliance or linear you select your body that you you select the body that you you want to to have you and you can select a face for example this and then you can just hit the plane and it flips it to that face so this is an easy way that lines one tool is in a super easy way to take a model it don't want to fit and bring it and lay it over the other thing of course that I should also say when it comes to especially if you've got a 3d print this go into the make go to print and in here you get some other options on how you can refine the triangular shape of your your part I use meshmixer for my print utility there's a couple of under other ones in here you pick whatever one you want but a lot of the things that I just showed you you can do inside of a fusion like cutting things away healing things you can actually also do that inside of something like mesh makes the same thing right flipping it up side down okay well I'm terribly sorry that I couldn't show you the big finale of exit turning in through to a solid but you know what honestly if you wanted the freely printed um it wasn't really you know no reason to do it anyways unless you wanted to use sweeps or cuts and things like that um I guess that is what I gotta pay when I do these live streams that not always things works but I hope you got something out of it at least you got to see the mess environment and I bet you that as soon as we're done here I go in and try it and then it's good of course gonna work that's that's how it is hope this was useful um you know what we're gonna end this today's last in tomorrow's live stream is one hour later it's a three o'clock and we're gonna talk about cam we're gonna talk about how do you machine this second side of your part so why don't people don't ask me that question your machine the top side you want to flip it over how do you do that it's gonna be fairly basic we're not gonna get into two months of advanced tomorrow but if you were wondering about that tomorrow at 3 p.m. Eastern again sorry that I didn't ever got it converted over to a solid but hey you saw some cool mess tools I think I wonder what I normally do I'm gonna end the broadcast so if you're watching the recording really appreciate it thumbs up thumbs down if you like these videos and I'm gonna jump in the livestream and say hi to everybody take care

Channel: Lars Christensen

Views: 47,659

Keywords: Autodesk, Autodesk Fusion 360, Fusion 360, Design, 3D, 3D Printing, Tip, Beginner, Lars Christensen, #LarsLive, akn_include, STL, Thingiverse, Print, Scan

Id: cKXvIWpLoeU

Length: 36min 48sec (2208 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2017