How to Convert an .STL Mesh To a Solid Body - Learn Autodesk Fusion 360 in 30 Days: Day #18

hey there it's Kevin Kennedy and welcome to day number 18 of learn fusion 360 in 30 days by the end of this tutorial you'll be able to turn an STL or obj mesh file into a solid body we'll take a look at a few different options while doing this and we'll talk about the meaning behind some of this commonly used terminology in the world of 3d printing before we get started with actually converting the mesh model I want to cover some of the terminology to ensure we're on the same page and so you actually understand why we're converting the model to start off we'll discuss a mesh file now if you're familiar with 3d printing and you use dot STL files or dot obj files then you work with mesh files all the time now a mesh file is a collection of vertices edges and faces that define a three-dimensional shape now I found this great image on Wikipedia that breaks down a mesh I'll link to the image in the video description so you'll see that it shows that mesh files are created with vertices edges and faces which all create the polygon sides or surfaces of the object so looking at the last image here probably the most important thing to know about meshes is that they are surface models now to help you grasp the concept we can compare it to a real-life example origami if we look at this object made out of paper we'll see all the different shapes and surfaces that make up this model yet the object is still hollow on the inside as it's solely made up of the surface geometry now real quick let's take a look at the difference between the two most common types of meshes which are STL and obj files now an STL file is the native file format for stereolithography and it's often referred to as the acronym that represents standard triangle language or standard tessellation language put simply an STL file is a type of mash file created with unstructured triangular surfaces so again it's just making up the outer surface of the model and it's not a completely solid object now on the other hand we have obj files and really the only difference between an STL file and in obj file is that the obj file displays some extra data on the surface so you see that STL files are always gray whereas obj files can contain color and texture data which are displayed on the outer surface now the color and texture map are most commonly captured by 3d scanners which is why most 3d scanners are going to output your obj file now the last term that you'll need to understand here before we do a little demo and actually convert to file is the term B rep now B rep stands for boundary representation and can be seen as the opposite of our mesh files as it's a completely solid and watertight model now a beer up file is made up of topological and geometric information all righty so now that you're familiar with some of the common terminology let's take a look at how to use fusion 360 to convert an STL file to a/b rep solid-body the first thing that we'll want to do is make sure that the mesh workspace is enabled to do this I'll select the Preferences menu from the profile drop-down list and then I'll select preview and you'll see that we can toggle the mesh workspace on and off by clicking the check box now after clicking the check box you'll have to hit the apply button and then the ok button now a lot of fusion 360 users get STL files from thingiverse.com and they want to modify them to fit their own needs or they simply want to customize them with the name or logo so I've gone ahead and downloaded this phone stand from Thingiverse and the first thing I'll have to do is import it into fusion 360 and there are two main ways that we can do this the first way would be to open up the data panel and click the blue upload button then if I select the file I can upload it and I can double click on the file to open it once it's been successfully uploaded second way I can do this is to simply go to the insert menu select insert mesh from the drop-down list and then I'll go ahead and select the file and you'll see that before we work on the file it allows us to change the orientation now I want the top of the phone stand to be the top of my orientation and the viewcube so I can either drag these sliders around or I can select the flip up direction in the insert mesh dialog box and I can also hit Center to move it to the center origin and if your file is floating up in space for some reason you can hit move to ground to move the file to the XZ or the XY plane depending on how your orientation is set up so I'll go ahead and click OK to confirm these orientation changes now if I go to the workspaces menu you'll see that I still can't switch to the mesh workspace and that's because the mesh workspace does not allow design history to be captured so we'll have to turn off the design history by right-clicking on the file in the fusion 360 browser and I'll select do not capture design history and I'll click the continue button to confirm now if I go back to the workspace selection menu you'll see that I can change to the mesh workspace I'm also going to go ahead and change my visual style so it's a bit easier to see all the triangles that make up the mesh under the display settings I'll select a visual style and then I'll select shaded with visible edges only and you'll see that if i zoom in we can now see all of the vertices edges and faces that make up the mesh model now what confuses a lot of users here is that will actually need to be in the model workspace in order to convert this model so I'll select the model workspace and now to convert this mesh to a solid body all we have to do is right click on the mesh and select mesh to be red and you'll see in the dialogue box we can have it create a new body or a new component so I'll go ahead and select new component and then click OK now I'll switch over to another example real quick because if you imported a fairly complex model then it's very likely you'll get a warning message at this point stating that there are too many facets or number of faces for fusion 360 to convert the model so looking at this example here it looks like it has a little over 1.5 million faces and fusion 360 can really only compute approximately 50,000 facets so before trying to convert well first have to reduce the number of facets to reduce the number of faces you'll have to switch to the mesh workspace and then you can select reduce from the modify drop-down list and then we'll have to select the mesh faces or the entire body so in some scenarios you may only want to select a certain area of the faces and then others will want to go ahead and select the entire body from the fusion 360 browser the next option you'll see is the reduced type now adaptive means that fusion will adapt the surface triangles how it best fits the shape and uniform will force them to all be uniform and shaped in size so for this complex object I'll leave it at adaptive so it doesn't totally skew the overall shape now we want to reduce the amount of faces so we'll have to select face count for the reduced target and then for the number of faces like we talked about a minute ago we'll have to have this number under 50,000 and it's a good idea to aim much lower as the more faces your file has the more data fusion 360 has to process so your file will be much slower the more faces you have so I'm just going to type out 30,000 and click okay and this may take a while to process because 30,000 is still a lot of faces once it's done processing you'll see that if we switch back to the model workspace we can right-click on the mesh and select mesh to be red and this time it will convert it for us although it will give us a warning again because there are a lot of faces which may slow down the file so I'd always recommend reducing the face count as much as you can without destroying the overall shape now let's switch back to the phone stand demo and look at a few more things that we can do after we convert the file go ahead and rename the component by double-clicking on it in the browser and I'll type out phone Stan and I'll make sure that the mesh body is hidden and that our new component is visible and activated now fusion 360 did a pretty good job of processing this file and turning it into a solid body but you'll see here that we still have a lot of triangular surface faces that make up our solid body and sometimes these can get in the way of us altering the design to our specific needs so one thing that we can do is reduce the number of phases by merging them together if I wanted to work on this flat surface here these triangles will get in the way so let's go ahead and get rid of some of them now I could zoom in and select all of these one by one but an easier way would be to use the paint selection tool which is going to allow me to click with my mouse and drag over all these faces to select them much faster now before using the paint selection I want to set the selection priority to select face priority which will help ensure that we don't select the entire component and if I go back up to the menu and look at these selection filters you'll see that we can see that activating the Select face priority turned all these other options off and only left the body faces turned on which will again help us select only the faces now with the paint selection activated I can click and drag across a number of faces and if I miss any faces I'll just hold down the shift key and select them then I'll switch to the patch workspace and I'll select merge from the modified drop-down list you and you'll see that I can continue to select and merge faces to really clean up this solid body model so it doesn't have so many faces on it now having less faces will really allow us to focus on the tools in the model workspace and it won't restrict us as much as we try to modify our new solid body now there's one more thing I want to show you here in order to summarize what I covered in this video if I turn on the section analysis in order to look in the side of the object you'll see that our be reptile is completely solid I toggle the STL mesh file back on and turn the component or solid model off you'll see that it's a thin surface model created with hundreds of mesh triangles so again this is another great example of the difference between a mesh and a B rep or solid body thanks for watching if you have any questions at all about this tutorial for fusion 360 questions in general then be sure to comment them below hit that thumbs up icon if you learn something in this video and click Subscribe followed by that little Bell icon to be notified of more fusion 360 tutorials

Channel: Product Design Online

Views: 238,725

Keywords: fusion 360, autodesk fusion 360, kevin kennedy fusion 360, product design online, fusion 360 tutorials, fusion tutorials, fusion 360 30 days, learn fusion 360 in 30 days, lars christensen fusion 360, fusion 360 beginners, fusion 360 kevin kennedy, autodesk fusion 30 days, #larslive, learn fusion 360 or die trying, convert mesh to brep, mesh to brep fusion 360, convert stl to solid, convert stl to solid fusion 360, convert stl to step, fusion 360 mesh to solid, fusion mesh to

Id: yO6hboYWnfM

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 28 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/productdesignonline]

Day #18 was posted yesterday! Check it out. Cheers, Kevin :)

[u/iamtheforger]

Amazing video, I don't consider myself a novice but I would have never of been able to convert a stl to a solid object without seeing this video.

[u/horendus]

Thank you so much for this video!

[u/horendus]

From a purely self interest based perspective these are what what I would like to see videos on

• Keeping large complex projects well organised
• Assemblies and usage examples and tips
• Examples of you drawing complex models
• Exploring and showing how all of the Sketch and Modify menu option are used

They way you formatted the Stl to Mesh video was fantastic. Iv already uses this new skill you taught me to modify a model that had huge overhangs so I could print it easily

[u/horendus]

To me its not so much about the amount of parts but more about the complex methods used to create parts and ultimately the product designs.

What im interested in is learning the mindset of talented designers, how they think about a problem and what tools and methods they use within fusion360 to solve these problems.

[u/horendus]

No worries well once I catch up on your videos Ill be more qualified to offer suggestions for future content.

[u/horendus]

I just subscribed to your uTube channel and realised theres a tonne of great looking videos there so my comments have been a little naive.

Ill start watching through them now.