Fusion 360 STL Editing Tutorial

hello internet maker pals Christmas tow here with a fusion 360 tutorial I'd like to show you how to modify an existing 3d model specifically something that you get an STL format so that you can adapt it better to your needs the example I have here is this nice screwdriver wall mount published by Bob bot on Thingiverse and you can see here that it holds a set of whee-ha screwdrivers very nicely mounts to the wall through these screw holes and it is published Creative Commons so we are allowed to remix it and modify I'm giving credit here to the original author and as you can see he's given us an STL file to download sometimes people upload the CAD files the source code files that they originally used when they created their model in this case and a lot of cases you only get the STL now I could bug the author I could say hey could you please give me the file might turn out that he made this in openscad or sketchup or any number of different programs I might not have those programs and it might not know how to use those programs so while it's always nice to be able to go back to the CAD file so you can modify it some in some cases what you have is the STL and you just like to do something quick and easy my situation here is that I printed this off and it fits my screwdrivers really nicely but then when I wanted to attach it to the wall I have this rather large screw wall anchor combo thing that they work really nice but unfortunately it doesn't fit in the screw hole that was in this original model and when I tried to force it in just to see maybe it would cut its way through and still work it split the plastic so that's not going to work I need to make the hole larger very simple thing just enlarge the screw hole print another copy I should be good to go so let's look at how to do that in fusion 360 it's not necessarily obvious if you haven't done it before so hopefully you'll learn something here or at least be entertained watching here we are in fusion 360 I have a new blank design I'm going to start by bringing in the STL file that we downloaded from Thingiverse so you do that by selecting insert insert mesh and as it says this inserts the selected mesh file into the act of design so I'm going to select that file from Thingiverse and you can see it right here now we have the opportunity to position scale etc this mesh before we load it in in this case I think would be easier to work with if it were turned on its side so I'm going to rotate that 90 degrees to start with and the other thing that may not be obvious from looking at it here but if we move the camera around a little bit you can see it's kind of floating in a weird spot it's hard to tell really even where it is a lot of times these things do not load at sort of a sensible zero position so to fix that issue first I'm going to click Center to put that at our zero zero and then also move to ground because it's still kind of floating actually it's now it's halfway embedded in the ground so I want to click move to ground in order to get that sitting on top of the ground so now we're in a good spot and I can click OK here and now you can see the mesh is loaded now this is where it gets a little bit technical complicated I'm going to try not to say too much about this number one because this video could go on for a long time and number two I don't necessarily know what I'm talking about so the more I say the more likely I am to say something wrong what you can see here hopefully is that this is a triangle mesh the original geometry is not available to us we can't for example just select that circle and enlarge it because fusion doesn't know that that's a circle and also it doesn't have the tools to work with a mesh file like this it will import it and there are some things that you can do there especially in the newer versions I don't know exactly how those work and I don't know how to do what I want to do in those workspaces so I'm going to demonstrate what I see is a fairly simple solution and one that I've used quite often which is we'll just load the mesh in and then convert it to a B rep file which we then can actually make modifications to the first trick in order to do that if I right click on this it will give me a bunch of options but the convert to be wrapped choice is not one of them this is one of those things you can only do outside of the timeline if you've used fusion 360 you know that it has this really awesome timeline that allows you to go back and modify things that you did earlier and recalculates all the changes and so on there are a few things however that don't work within that model and this is one of them there are a couple ways you can work around this you could go over here to this gear menu in the lower right corner and you could say do not capture design history and that would turn off the timeline history you could also do what I'm going to do here which is to select create create base feature base feature allows you to do a series of operations that are not captured they're not saved so it's almost as if you froze time and then went off outside of history and created a bunch of things maybe you create some shapes drilled holes and then whatever you did and then when you sort of resume the flow of time it's just like this thing pops it into existence and you don't have the history of the operations you use to create it normally this would probably be a bad idea but in this case all we're really doing is a conversion operation here so it doesn't really matter what we'll still anyway the practical upshot is if you select create base feature you get this little icon down here in the history for base feature I can now right-click on this mesh and I have mesh to be wrapped as one of my options so I will choose that the dialog pops up here everything's selected correctly I want to create a new body so I'll click OK and now you can see that it's created a body with faces and sort of the the objects that were normally used to working with in fusion 360 it's a bit strange because normally you wouldn't have this all cut up into little triangles but for our purposes that is fine what I'm doing here is showing kind of a quick and dirty way to get this done I just want to take this file and enlarge the screw holes print a new one and be done with it now that we've converted the mesh to a body we can click finish base feature and get back to the timeline so from now on the things we do will be captured in the history like they normally are I'm going to open this up here and let's just kind of take a look the front of this and essentially at this point if what I wanted to do was just to make this hole bigger I could do that and it literally could go in and select create hole and and just put you know put a hole in here and make it a certain size you know at this point I'm kind of eyeballing it so you know that this obviously there there there's a bunch of stuff that's not right here okay but I want to make the point that you could do that and just take the you know loading the mesh convert it to be rap and just start adjusting it for my aesthetics however there's a slightly different approach I would like to take to this what I want to do instead is actually recreate this but using the profile that we already have to recreate it in a very easy way and then I can modify it from there so the first thing I'm going to do is create a sketch as one off and does so I'll click create sketch here and I want to create a sketch on the on this bottom plane but I can't quite I can't quite get to it because this is in the way so I'll just hide it temporarily so I can click on the thing I want to click on okay so that's where we're going to create our sketch and then I'll show this body again I'm actually going to change the name to make things easier we'll call this template because that's kind of the template for the thing we want to make as you can see I am in a sketch I have access to the geometry from this body and I can use that in a number of different ways within the sketch in this case I want to do the fastest and easiest thing that I can do here which is to project that template body into the sketch and use that outline that I'm looking at right here as my sketch so all I have to do is go to sketch project and include and choose project and then I want to make sure over here my selection filter that I'm not choosing specified entities I'm choosing bodies I want to I want the whole body otherwise you to just pick and choose parts of this but I don't want to pick and choose parts of it I want the whole body selected so I'm going to click on that and you can see right away I get all these little purple dots and lines which is the silhouette of that body projected onto this two-dimensional sketch and if I hide the body itself you can see that just with one simple operation there we have the profile of this thing so I can now click stop sketch and I've got my sketch there and I'm ready to just simply extrude it so click on extrude and here it is and now I can make this into a three dimensional object but the question now if I want to make it as basically I want to copy the original so how big was the original ice but I could get out the calipers and measure it I suppose but there's a lot easier way to do it here we have the model in fusion 360 so if I unhide that template again and here's a little bit of a trick this arrow here is the thing that I'm you know adjusting the height of this right so if I if I click on this arrow and now I can click on the top face of that body and you can see the the mouse over here is saying snap to 12 right so what is the the height that I want to extrude this to well it's the height of the original if I click that is 12 so just by clicking that now it snapped that distance to the top of the of the template body that we have in there of course now it's looking at it and saying well it looks like you want to cut that because it's it's pretty good guess if you're extruding something through another thing you want to cut it but in this case that's not what we want to do we actually want to create a new body you can either go into operation and choose new body or another way to do that is just to hide the template again if you hide the template now it's like oh I'm not cutting through anything I must be creating a new body you see that operation changes automatically so there's always like 30 different ways to do anything and sometimes if I remember I'll try to I'll try to show you a couple different ways quickly but we are trying to get through this fast so now we have a new body that's not made up of triangles and it matches exactly the template so I can turn that on this went off and you can see that's right in there the only difference right now is that it's missing the screw holes so let's take care of that situation now what I'd like to do for this is to create a sketch on the front face of this new body here it doesn't matter which one of these I choose because they're all coplanar so we'll just pick one and again I can turn on this template so that I can see it in this case I'm not going to project this geometry I could do something like that but I want to I want to do a slightly different technique this time rather than use the existing holes that are already in there there is the hole on the outside part and then there's you know it's it's counterbored so there's a wider hole and then an arrow or a hole that goes all the way through but rather than use those existing circles and so on I'm just going to use one of them purely for the purpose of getting the center available I click look at over here that will Azumi back to sort of face on looking at this thing I want to kind of find the center of this circle the only thing I really care about in this original circle is just where the center is and I don't want to actually use the circle itself this might be easier to demonstrate than to talk about so I'm just gonna do it and then maybe it'll make more sense the first thing is I don't want to draw a real circle on this sketch I just want to make a mark for reference and you do that by turning on construction so this will allow me to create create an object in this sketch that is not actually usable for anything other than other things can refer to it and the thing that I want to create is a two point circle you can see that this will will sort of snap to any of these existing intersections with it with the triangles here so I'm going to choose a point on one side of the circle and I'm going to choose a matching point on the other side and by doing that I'm creating a construction circle because a construction chosen over here and the important part is that now I have a center point I did that on one side and then I'm going to do the same exact thing on the other side again just choose a point choose the point exactly across from it and now I've created so I've created two construction circles I can hide the template and you can see again these sort of an orange dotted line and I can now stop my sketch because that's all I wanted out of this so hopefully now the reason for doing that is a little clearer that just allows me to get a reference to where that screw hole was in the original design on each side and now I have the ability to refer to the center point of that screw hole and now I can go up to the create menu and I can choose create hole so we can kind of do the whole thing right from here no pun intended if I click on this you do two at once so I'm going to click on the other side as well and they'll be identical and now we have a bunch of different options here in the controls for the hole the first thing we want to do is select the extent of the hole so right now you might be able to see that is going 14 millimeters deep and then it has kind of a taper at the end if we choose instead all for the extent then that will drill a hole all the way through which is what we want really not it's not a partial hole so that solves that part and then the next part is the diameter of the hole in this case now this is one place where I got up the calipers i measured that special screw that i want to use and i determined that it is 6.3 millimeters so i'm going to set the diameter here to 6.3 and that will give me the correct hole that that screw is going to go through without cracking the plastic and then there's one more thing we want to do because rather than a simple hole we would like to do a counter bore to make some room for the screw head now the counter bore has its own diameter and its own depth if you remember to that sketch we did just a minute ago the diameter of the original counter bore was 8.5 that was that circle that we used for reference and it came up as 8.5 that fit perfectly fine my screw-head so I'm just going to go with that counterbored diameter 8.5 would be perfectly usable and I'm gonna keep that and now the next question is how deep do we want the counterbore to be you can see we can adjust it to any depth available and this is another place where I'd like to just reference the original design that the counter bore hole in here it's getting a little bit busy maybe I'll hide this body and we can take a quick look you can see that there is that maybe you can't see it zoom in in here there is a there it is so there's a counter bore here and whatever that depth was was actually pretty reasonable for my purposes and this is another place where you can you can just kind of click on it so there this here just want to adjust my view to be a little bit less crazy alright so this here is the control that we use to adjust the depth of the counter bore and if I click on this to select that now it will allow me to click on a face here from the original template body to snap to that depth so as you can see snap 23.5 is what comes up here if I click on that that'll snap the depth of the new counter wore to the depth of the original counter war which is three point five millimeters and there you know we know that worked I know that the screw had to fit in there so I'm going to just use that rather than to come up with my own number so now if I hide the template again and we show this body that's the screw hole that we're fixing to make on it it actually looks like that's exactly what I want and because I selected both of them on both sides we've got the whole thing ready to go just have to click okay and now that screw hole is cut and that's it we're done this modified screwdriver holder is ready to print in your 3d printing software of choice so next time you run into something where you have a model and you're like oh that's that's almost what I want it just needs a little tweak realize that you there are tools that you can use in fusion 360 to load an STL file and tweak it and make a slightly modified version that's better for your needs now this of course we just clicked on things visually and align them to existing things so this is not parametric I can't very easily modify the size of the screwdriver holes for example even these things I certainly can go back here and I can right click in the history edit feature and I could change this you know if I decided that this hole was too big or something and I needed it to be 5.3 so some of these parts are easily editable and others not so much but again if all you're looking to do is take something that already exists and make a few little modifications to it this is an easy way to do that now really quick note you may have seen the controversy recently and YouTube's changing their rules on who gets to be in the YouTube Partner Program the practical upshot is you need a minimum of a thousand subscribers I don't have a thousand subscribers yet so if you like this if you want to encourage me to do more if you want to help me out a little bit and find out when new videos come out which is the benefit to you then please do subscribe to my channel I would love to hit that magic 1000 mark thanks a lot for watching for now that's all I got

Channel: Christopher Masto

Views: 41,485

Keywords: stl, 3d printing, fusion 360, cad, cam, mesh to brep, project geometry

Id: sqkdlbFYcAI

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2018