Fusion 360 - A better workflow for irregular and organinc .stl files

so the question is how do you get from a faceted STL file from a triangulated mesh to a result in fusion 360 that looks this smooth this came from a scanned landscape and this here came from a head scan a head sculpt and this looks really smooth it doesn't look faceted so the question is how do we do this the usual answer is often well just import the STL file into fusion 360 and then in the mesh workspace it was either the remesh of the reduce tools to reduce the face count and the face count of this STL mesh is already over 300,000 faces and even if I were to use the tool in this case it doesn't even work because the mesh has a problem it has a duplicate faces duplicate vertices so not only doesn't it work if you do reduce the face count if you would actually be able to do this it would remove that much detail that the mesh would pretty much become unusable and wouldn't resemble the original result so the question is of course how do we do this so the first thing we need is actual STL files and the terrain mesh fire comes from an online tool and I'll link to those linked to those websites that I'm going over here a link to those in the description below this tool allows you to select a specific landscape arrange here define an area some some settings here and in the end when you click on export it'll create an STL file that you can download the head skylit I got from the Arctic 3d scanner website they have a section with 3d scans where you can download scan 3d files in STL format I'll be using three different softwares to solve this these problems the first one is meshmixer it's free software also created by autodesk it's not and source but it's free the next one is instant meshes which is a very valuable tool and another software that I use frequently is blended so with that out of the way let's get started so here we have mesh mixer and let's start with importing that head scan and that is here there it is so inspecting this head scan I'm noticing these tool parts here and I really don't want these these holes here so I'm going to remove these holes in in mesh mixer that's here in the Select tool and I want my brush a little bit smaller maybe like this I'm going to select this area that's okay I'm going to select that area and then edit and erase fill these areas and that's exactly what I want also don't exactly like the the orientation here I'm going to go into the transform tool change this to word frame then I'm just going to rotate that and translate that the way I would like to have this oriented alright and that's already all the things that I would want to do in meshmixer and even if you you'd be happy with with the way this looks and meshmixer one reason to need to get it into meshmixer is because the next tool only accepts obj files and one other format and we need to export this as a dot obj file and i've already done this so let's go to the next step the next thing we need to do is we need to create a quad mesh we need to remesh the triangulated mesh into a mesh that consists only phases with four sides and my head sculpt is here and this this suit is fairly straightforward for these sorts of objects I've opened the mesh and the target vertex count is determined by the tool will based on the mesh information that it finds and I click on sort of once I click on sort of twice it generates a preview of some sort of mesh I click on export mesh now here's the important thing we want a pure quad mesh and I click on extract extract mesh and that shows me how that mesh looks like that is going to be extracted and in this case I don't believe that is a fine enough mesh to convey all the detail that can be seen in the STL file so what I'm going to do I'm just going to overwrite this target mesh count go maybe to ten thousand accept this with yes and solve again twice click on export mesh pure cotton edge and extract mesh and this also looks faceted but we have a cotton mesh and that's what we want the reason why we want that is we want to convert this into a t spline infusion 360 and that only works with a mesh that hath has either mostly quads or as a pure quad mesh and in this case I'm also applying one maybe two smoothing operations or iterations and now I click again we see that this changes the geometry and topology of the mesh layout and then we can basically save it out into a mesh and that would be another obj file so with that completed we're going to go back into fusion 360 there are two ways to import a mesh and convert it into this into a t-spline the first one starts with turning off the timeline importing the mesh converting it into T spline and turning the timeline back on I'm not going to do that I'm just going to insert the mesh and pick my head sculpture mesh that I created in instant meshes rotate it into my preferred orientation and here's our mesh so the next step is that I need to create a little T spline and convert this mesh into a T's plan and we'll take a little while alright here's our T span so we now have two bodies in in in our fire one is the actual mesh and one of the t spline and this T spline doesn't look smooth it looks sort of faceted and flat shaded and the reason for that is there's actually a problem with this mesh and that that can happen so if I click on finish' form now the bone tool that tells me eh there's something wrong with the topology and I'm going to close this out I say return and in these cases it usually helps when we click on a repair body select the body and then fusion 360 actually shows us in red where there is a problem and so down there is a problem and in this case I'm just simply click on auto repair and that also will take a little while all right and now that has changed to more smooth display and I can click on finish for and here is my completed solid body so that's a burette and in essence all these little patches here they're NURBS patches non uniform rational B spline so that's also the difference between a mesh mesh has a finite resolution an STL mesh has a finite resolution and due to is triangulated nature it also doesn't have topology and massif in a mathematical sense and a NURBS surface is mathematically precise description of a surface with no finite resolution and that makes it very suitable for working with alien fusion 360 so now you can basically go ahead and use all the modeling tools that you have here in the model environment in queue to 360 to work with on this on this object so the next the next object that we're going to try is that is that landscape so as I said earlier that landscape already has a problem and the problem is that it has duplicate duplicate vertices and that is something that we are going to fix with blender so when when blender starts and this is blender 2.79 pretty soon blender 2.8 will be released and the user interface is a little bit different never mind though I'm to work with 2.79 so i also change from perspective to orthographic mode and insert my STL file import STL so then I'm going to press the end key and click here on on the same tab and change this well the default is usually nothing but I change this to millimeters so when I export the STL file it'll be actually I'm going to export it obj file but it'll have the right scale then I'm going to also change the clip to ten years alright so I hit the tab key and go into edit mode and we can see there are 600 90,000 edges in there 395 thousand faces and there's absolutely nothing that we can do with this match in fusion 360 other than reducing the face count in a way that would totally eliminate all the detail that you have in this mission so the first thing that I want to do I don't really want that box nature in in inside meshes so I'm just going to simply delete first of all I change this to through select it's similar to what you do in fusion 360 and hit the B key and box select all the vertices here on the bottom because all these vertices belong to all these faces here that define this box around the object when I delete these vertices a completely delete the box on the bottom so that leaves us with this landscape SEL but as I mentioned earlier this STL has another problem in that it has many many duplicate phases so again I hit the let me show this again edit tab key to go into edit mode with the object selected I hit the a key once or twice to select everything then I hit the W key and select remove doubles and we can see here in the top that it removed over 50,000 vertices so now all these duplicate vertices have been removed so another thing that I want to do is I want to actually scale this down I don't want this landscape to be so tall so I'll hit the S key for scale Z key to limit this into the Z direction and maybe as Z a little bit more all right now it looks okay and then there's another thing that I want to do oops I want to flatten this area I don't want this in my final object this can also be done in mesh mixer but I really want to do this in an blender that blender also has a sculpt mode and in this particular sculpt mode what I'm going to do I'm going to there's a flatten brush here that I'm going to use and I'll make that a little bit stronger and I limit this to the z-plane so with that I can actually flatten out this area here just brush over it and there's a flatten brush in mesh mixers well that would do this kind of stuff so if you want to remove something from from the SCL mesh before you qualify it you can do that in blender as well so just use the tools that you have at hand and if a tool doesn't do what you want it to do well then just use another tool right okay so now we have flattened that area and with that we've done everything that we want to do in blender now can now go ahead and export this as a dot obj and again I've done this before so now it's going to go back into instant meshes so I've opened our landscape dot obj file already and this is still triangulated so yet again I need to simply solve click solve click solve and it provides me with a with a preview of how that qualified mesh looks like I personally think this is this this would probably be okay so this looks pretty rugged I'd say and there are some pretty sharp corners in there so I'm going to apply some smoothing iterations and click on extract mesh again and that looks okay to me so again I could just save this out into yet another obj file and that obj file we would now import into fusion 360 so back in fusion 360 I'll do the same thing as I did with head start insert mesh and wear this landscape I am obj and here it is and now yet again I'm starting a little T spline select that surface that STL file here in the viewport right click and click on convert and just convert it into T spline this takes a little while because it's a it's pretty dense mesh so this mash looks actually actually very smooth and that means if I now click on the finished form button it should actually work and convert it into T's blunt sorry into a NURBS surface and that's it that's our final inner surface and there it is so I'm going to change the display mode really quickly to show one other thing I change this from shaded with with edges to just shade it and we see these strange artifacts here and no worry these are just visual artifacts in the viewport that have to do with the viewport code in fusion 360 and the way it Tessa lates these these surfaces to make viewing them easier sometimes it leads to these artifacts but if you right-click on the body and the viewport are not in the viewport in the browser and change the display detail control from adaptive to fixed and to high then these these artifacts in the viewports will go away and you end up with that nice surface here what can you do with that surface well as I showed earlier that disk that I did it's actually fairly simple you can create a sketch now and use all the other tools that we have available let's give that 15 millimeters pull that back down a little bit so that's a that's a solid body here and I can basically take the surface and split the solid body with that surface oops so there it is there's my disk then I applied a little fitted here and well I also applied the Philip to this to this edge here but let's talk about that for let's talk about that for a moment that isn't so trivial because as a good chance that if you apply a kill it too large then few 360 will not do it so I'll apply the pawn tool you need me to fill it but for example a point five millimeter fill it might fail and it does it should give us an error message down here so point five is to four point five is too big and that has basically to do with all the very small radii and the curvature of all these all these NURBS surfaces that you have here so there are two things that in the solid modeling area probably won't work with with these sorts of surface is created from SDS one of them is shelling that almost always fails unless the surface is less detailed than the surface and surface offset and fill it in that is very often going to fail but other than that you can use all the solid modeling tools that are available and work with these surfaces

Channel: Peter Doering

Views: 10,786

Keywords: Fusion 360, organic, irregular, .stl, stl, meshmixer, blender, instant meshes

Id: aMZKgzBpodI

Length: 22min 8sec (1328 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 20 2019