How to Open and Modify .STL files in Autodesk Fusion 360 in 2021

[Music] welcome to this video where we are going to show you how to import a stl file into fusion 360 so you can make modifications so this is very handy in case say you found something on thingiverse or you design something in tinkercad and you want access to a lot of the tools that are found in fusion 360. so to begin on the top toolbar here we're going to go to insert and we're going to insert a mesh now the mesh we're going to insert is our stl file so this is something that i made in tinkercad and i just want to polish by adding a couple fillets and just making it look a little better so immediately we get a pop-up we have to assign a unit type and you can also alter the position however you would like so this is as i mentioned something i designed we're going to add some fillets and to do that we need to turn this into a 3d object so to begin to do that on our cube on the left hand side if you right click we are going to hit do not capture design history so everything beforehand and from this point forward will not be recorded which is fine with us no issue now on the bodies folder you can select your mesh select your overall stl file and on the toolbar there's a little tab called mesh right here you're going to click on it and under modify you are going to hit that drop down and you're going to choose convert mesh now there's two different methods and this depends on whether you have the personal or hobbyist license which is free or the paid subscription license so if you are using a free version you are only going to have access to the faceted method if you pay however you are going to have access to the prismatic conversion and this in my opinion is the better of the two what it will do essentially is for example in my model right here you see this face is broken up into a bunch of triangles what that is going to do is automatically combine those triangles to give you a single face and i'll show you why that's so advantageous here very shortly so i'm using the personal license so i do not have access to that right now but if you do i strongly encourage you to use it and if not we're going to stick with the faceted and it still does a good job does not take long now what this has done is taken your mesh taken your stl file and now we have a 3d solid design of that stl file so now when we look at all the solid tools within fusion 360 we have access to them all which is why now i can go and add a fill it so one nice thing about fusion 360 if there are multiple of these triangles on the same plane you can select a couple of them and when you hit the delete key it will automatically combine all those which is really nice because now for example i want to add a fill it i'm going to choose that top edge i will put a let's do a three millimeter fill it on there and so we can see that at least in my opinion this left side with this fill it looks a lot more polished a lot nicer than this right side that has that hard edge and so i'm able to put phillips around here and just polish my design up now one thing i do want to mention is because we had to use the faceted method when i want to go right here and maybe put a fillet on this rounded portion of my design i'm going to have to manually select a lot of these little triangles which not only is this more manual and more time consuming but it runs into an issue of resolution where say we have these i hit delete and so now i have a couple faces here but when you look at up top well i just lost some resolution i don't have that nice curved shape anymore because i have these ridges now possibly you could go in here and select only a couple of these faces and hit delete but then now you still have to select all of these edges and fill it them individually and even then to be honest sometimes it really just does not look good like this it just doesn't look good but this is a free version you can't complain for a free version especially with how good fusion 360 is but something to notice depending on what and how you are modifying your designs so that is how you bring in an stl file into fusion 360 so you can make modifications at this point you make your changes that you can export as a stl file again and you are now ready to 3d print your design so i hope this is very valuable to you i hope this just comes in handy if you have any questions or concerns please comment below i'll be glad to help best of luck and we will see you in the next video

Channel: TheAdamBomb

Views: 14,209

Keywords: Fusion 360, Stereolithograph, STL files, tutorial

Id: i6yAQPBhkaU

Length: 5min 45sec (345 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 05 2021