New Mesh and Reverse Engineering Tools in Fusion 360 | Autodesk Virtual Academy

all right thank you for joining us today my name is brian mcphinsick of course customer success manager here at ktv technologies and welcome to autodesk virtual academy brought to you by ktv technologies today's number 67 uh what we used to call fusion fridays and uh we will be revisiting a topic that we discussed three years ago uh the last video that we uploaded was three years ago uh regarding meshes and how to go about them and last time was uh definitely more of a t-spline approach uh today we'll be going more into maybe direct at mesh editing excuse me more so because of the new tools that autodesk recently released inside of fusion 360. [Music] so let me go ahead and post in the chat here just some links that make it more relevant to you guys of like where i'm coming from um this is essentially and let me make sure it's to everyone this is essentially the link to the first one three years ago that was pretty popular um and it just taught us how to manage the uh models around the meshes back then and today we're going to be diving into where we are with meshes now inside of fusion you can't do everything um uh you can't just click a wave a magic wand and fix everything but you could there's a lot uh more tools that are out there and i also want to mention that our good friend at uh autodesk jason lichtman has an amazing webinar that he did that i'm also gonna post here here in the chat room you can go ahead and bookmark that or something um but i highly recommend checking out this um as another perspective into the into the uh mesh environment as well uh i'm gonna do some different examples some might be similar but some might be different from jason's but definitely check these two uh webinars out and with that said let's go ahead and dive right on into it so this might look familiar with you if you uh have been tuning in for the last three years this was an example i used three years ago and i want to show you what you can do now with this model and i want to just show you the the most powerful tool right off the bat at least in my persp in my opinion of what you can do to to translate a stl or a mesh that was converted that was clearly converted as you can see here someone definitely exported as an stl or did a save as uh obj or uh now fusion i think can do three mf i think is the acronym for that um and uh they they're sending you this file whether it's to protect their intellectual property or whether they're uploading it to a website like thingiverse.com uh where you can find a bunch of stl files for free so let's go ahead and dive into fusion360 with this dewalt makita adapter i believe it's like a hand power tool so just like we did last time we right clicked and captured design history down below here you will notice that there's a mesh tab that just won't go away which is a good thing and this is where a lot of the new tools are so with this what we did last time we did we went straight to a convert like we wanted to change the or what we did last time was to change the bottom of this we went to a convert mesh and right off the bat it's already a little bit different here you have two options here whether you want it to be faceted where it keeps the triangular shapes uh the way it is now uh and then you're gonna have the a direct edit model and delete them later um or you can choose a prismatic option which which we'll get to in just a moment here um but this will be the the new tool that we'll be diving into but there are a few one or two steps you have to take before uh clicking this option here so this is the previous option and let me just show you what it looks like uh if you were to go through it with it now so it's giving us a little warning of how much time it's going to take for this to to um to calculate and in the past if it's over 50 000 facets then it's going to not even allow you to convert this and it'll error out but uh this is just a warning of 10 000 so we are fine with that and yeah what we did in the past was we just converted this to a b rep um it's nice and you can still do this this is still part of your workflow autodesk didn't take away any functionality they either just move this somewhere else or or what have you but you can still delete the features like that which is nice but notice you can't get things like this fillet here like if you start trying to delete this corner um it's not going to repair as smoothly as you might think and i already started to make it lag there and as you can see i tried to lean that face it didn't didn't quite work out for me so that's some of the issues you may still run into until today so let's go ahead and dive into the new tool so i'm gonna do an undo or let's just go ahead and just delete all these features down below here and now we're back with our original mesh again and what we're going to head towards and i'm just going to run into errors on purpose because i have a feeling you will run into the same errors uh so if we go back to that modify convert mesh tool and we choose the one we're trying to head towards which is this prismatic tool i'm going to select this model as the tool i want to or the body i want to convert and just real quick before i hit okay there are two options here parametric which which uh links to the relationships of anything previously and base which kind of starts from scratch and breaks any links that might have existed previously to maybe give you a more lighter weight model i'm to go ahead and try to hit okay here and we're going to see an error because we didn't uh follow the formalities of of this workflow so essentially it's trying to calculate um the the meshes and is trying to you know see that this is one flat face but we didn't we didn't uh tell it we didn't line it up to be successful uh by giving it what is called this new tool called face groups now face groups defined automatically defines what each face uh is a part of what group it is like this face here let me let me try to use this tool this red tool um [Music] everything okay everything over here i don't know if you guys can see that but that's a little ugly but that is essentially supposed to be one face right and with face groups it's going to define that for us and then it's going to whisper over to the the trans the converting conversion tool to tell it hey that's going to be one face please convert it for me whereas if you just try to send it to that tool now it's not going to understand that so we're going to go into generate face groups here and then we're going to select the body to generate before and there are two types here there is the fast type and this tries to generate it as fast as it can and i don't see why anyone would want to use this unless they have a pretty dumbed down model to begin with or if you have somewhere that you need to go but i would recommend using accurate because you want your mesh to be as accurate as possible and then boundary tolerance so this is really important as well so if you do 0.1 it's going to be maybe less tolerance it's not as sensitive as if you were to do 0.001 millimeters and i'm actually going to do .001 to show us what you might run into doing it this way um and then you can check this box to see a little preview of it which is which is fine um and then there's only 5 000 faces which is not a crazy amount either so we can go ahead and generate these face groups here and it's going to uh it's going to think a little bit about that and right now we aren't seeing the face groups uh we're seeing just a regular gray mesh and this is because we haven't had the face groups turned on the viewing of it and i'll show you right after this is done loading what that looks like so it just finished for us and we have this face group feature but let's go ahead and go to our display settings down below here mesh display and then turn on face groups and now if you're familiar with color component uh cycling toggle uh this is similar to that but for face groups so you can see that this this face i was talking about earlier this is now considered one and it's all defined by that one light blue color there which is really reassuring um mind you i did have 1.001 millimeters of a tolerance turned on so that actually was so sensitive that it made this face here which should have been one face into two faces which we which we will see what will happen next um but we got most of what we're trying to look for um done here and i'm going to come back to it in just a moment but now if we go to convert now if we're uh conveying to our tool hey we have our face groups now let's try to convert this to see what it gives us and sorry about the weight i i try to do it as as much of live as much as possible um and i think this isn't too terribly too long to wait uh for it to finish there's definitely some other uh scans that or it's not scans other stl conversions that take a lot longer than this so uh just mind you you might be spending a little bit of time uh jumping through some of these ropes so hopefully i could save you some some of that time as you can see here it did not convert it as you might expect because like i was mentioning earlier there were those two faces there and it shouldn't have been as sensitive as it was and that was due to the tolerance that we set it at so there's definitely a little bit of a learning curve i would say i wouldn't say you can just use this right off the box and it's a one fit all kind of thing that's why they have those tools there for you as you can see there there's some issues there as well but but you can see that there's a lot of features that it cleaned up like at the bottom here you see that philip that we saw earlier we can just delete that okay it's not a solid body but once we once we get the other model we can delete it um and now it's it fixed all that all the uh that meshes i was gonna say messes the meshes that were there on the corner there so let's go let's turn the tolerance to a hundred thousands or 0.1 millimeters and see what results that will give us so let's go ahead and delete that conversion double click on this and change this to 0.1 and let's take a look at what the 0.1 will give us which is going to be more or less the same but you'll see some differences where we need to see them thank you very much and there's one face there which is reassuring these guys look good let's go ahead and convert this to the prismatic bodies and as you can tell they're both faster because there's less to work with less tolerance and thankfully now we have a solid body uh that this face is fixed there everything looks really clean and mind you we have just taken an stl body from thingiverse or from your vendor and they thought they were they would be sneaky enough to export it as an stl file to you to protect their ip or intellectual property but we just converted it back to the solid bodies we don't have the sketches of course but uh we still have like the entire b-rep body that's editable um and now let's try the moment of truth there there we go you do it to both sides just to keep things even there so yeah wanted to show that right off the bat because i think that was one of the biggest uh new improvements inside of the fusion mesh workspace about that came out about a couple months ago so definitely worth uh playing around with yourself um and definitely let me know if you have any questions in the chat about this i am happy to answer any more towards the end and this will be on youtube in a couple weeks all right so let's go ahead and dive into the next example um i did want to show something that wasn't all the same examples from three years ago of course so i found this brute head on thingiverse.com and i thought there were some great examples i can pull from this relevant to some of the new tools so if we go here to our group head uh this is actually a pot plant for um plants and as you can see here there's a little water hole here for water to escape but let's say i have a lot more water or it's a plant that doesn't want any water whatsoever sitting with it in the dirt uh for for those plant enthusiasts out there you might know what i'm talking about so i want to make a bigger hole here at the bottom um but we don't want to do what we did in the last example which was convert everything to a b rep or convert everything to a yeah essentially be wrapping editable model and the reason being is because look at all these little triangles there's way too much for it to convert and trust me when i say it's going to take you way too long if not it will fail when trying to convert this so what do you want to do what you can do is use one of the new tools which is directly editing this in the mesh environment so let's go ahead and dive into some of this some of these new tools here so first let's capture the design history and if we want to create a hole for the water to escape we are going to create it here at the bottom because that's how it's going to travel through our pot and taking a look at the bottom here uh looks like someone sliced um poor groot uh if you watch guardians of the galaxy his his head off here for the for the plant um and they did not clean up very well down below here so we're going to go into mesh and we're going to go into the new direct edit tool so if you're familiar with surface modeling there's it's like a similar idea where you can directly edit not even surface modeling i mean the fusion 360 parametric direct edit that we just did works as well so we're going to directly edit this body here and there's a lot of ways you can go about it here's one way that i want to show you so if i want to kind of clean this up and re-mesh this i'm going to try to select a few features here i'm clicking and holding and i'm just trying to select some features there i'm accidentally clicking features on the outside and i can clean that up in just a bit here but i want to make sure i select the ones on the inside and notice how there's all these little lines that i can't even get to um and i'm not going to try to hurt my eyes trying to see which ones are to be selected i can go to this grow and shrink tool here and i can grow my selection instead and it'll cover my bases there and notice how there's these extra um selections here on the outside well i don't want to select some of this because if i were to remesh this i don't want to remesh some of the features i actually want to keep for groot's neck here or if i accidentally click like over here i definitely do not want to remesh that because that's part of his texture as part of his face so i could just hold alt i troll i tried holding multiple things but alto is definitely the one for this one uh hold alt to remove it's like holding control except it's all sign and you can change the brush size as well as well on the right hand side but i'm just holding alt and then just selecting or clicking and dragging to unselect some of these features here to kind of clean it up all right that's good enough and then let's go ahead and do a remesh sure and once that's remeshed you can see here we still kept a lot of his handsome little chin there except now let's go ahead and take a look at i like to always check with my visual styles uh here to just make sure it's going to look the way and have the same details as it did before and it might have taken away some at the very end there if i spend a little bit more time i would have made that just a little cleaner but for the most part i think i'd say 90 of that is pretty dang darn good um so let's go ahead and go back to our visible edges there and we are done with that portion uh next to create the hole at the bottom let's go ahead and exit the direct editing and we're gonna go to solid and this is um so i'm not going to like try to be uh very very detailed with the this was you know infusion before and this wasn't um because to be honest i don't remember exactly what was in here previously but what i am going to do here is i'm going to create a 3d body that kind of goes through for the hole and i'm going to use this as a cutting tool having troubles uh rotating this here i'm gonna use this as a cutting tool for the water drainage um and what you might have had to do in the past was export this as an stl this new body here as you can see this is a mesh this is the regular body but now in with the new mesh tools uh there's a one click test light tessellate tool where you can just convert it in-house or in this workspace and again i don't i don't i don't believe this was in here like a one-click button like this uh six months ago i think this was more recent than that uh along with a lot of these other tools like shell which we'll get into in just a second um so we'll go ahead and convert this into a mesh body quite simply like that and then if you know where i'm going next i'm going to use the combine tool and i'm going to select the target body that i want to cut the tool body that i want to cut with use the cut operation and then i would hit ok here but i am i've done it too many times where i know that with this mesh of 257 000 facets it's going to take a long time and i'm not going to have everyone wait here or i don't want to crash my machine either um so what we can do there's a couple options one is you could remesh it and dumb it down which we don't want we want to keep the groot's happy face here and make it look as detailed as possible uh two is to split the body so we can only re uh we can only do a cut operation of just the bottom half of his chin and then we can combine it again later so we can go ahead and use the plane cut tool let's go this body and then we'll cut up to about let's go just past his mouth there just make sure fill type uniform split body okay all right then we got two different colors there because of the not the color component cycling toggle but the face groups um so now we can hide the top part of him and now this is going to be much easier for us to do the cut tool so now it's going to go ahead and cut that for us and i should have looked at our faces i'll look at it after of how how much less there is to to work with rather than the so if we take a look at the mesh body it was 200 000 something before now it is fifty five thousand i'd say rule of thumb and this is me uh just from experience a hundred thousand and more you're going to have a harder time uh with it again depending on your hardware depending on your machine depending on how much you want to weight 100 000 or more that's when you start to be more cautious when doing a conversion or a combined cut operation but luckily we got a bigger hole now and you can see here in the meshes you weren't you aren't typically able to do something like this where you can directly edit the mesh itself and that's pretty cool to be able to do that without having to mess with or mesh with if you will the rest of guru's head there because there's a lot of detail that we don't want to get into trouble and the last operation that we can do is do a combine of these two and that's it and then you can send it off to a 3d printer or what have you so that's the groot operation there that's example number two we're going to go into example number three now which is if you uh recognize this this is the intake manifold example that we did three years ago let's let's see where we're at with this now see what we are capable of doing to this model so here it is right here with the face group coloring and knowledge glory and we'll go ahead and dive right on into it uh right click capture design history um and in this case i want to create just like before and quickly a spline that goes through the center of this so bear with me as i create that one two three four five six sure and then it's nice to work with 3d sketches it's very straightforward let's go with that i'm selecting more than one part there i jinxed myself it's uh it's getting harder i'm not sure what just happened there let me delete that and do that again spline one two three i'm just counting for no reason here it's not actually a technique all right let's see if this will behave this time there we go i can move it manually if i want to get more centered to where i wanted to be and one more and this is a spline that's roughly going through the center of this um mesh all right so next uh again my favorite tool let's do a finished sketch my favorite tool is a plane along path because you can just select this path and you just drag this wherever you want or you can put in the value so let's go with 0.9 we'll just do a handful i don't want to do a terrible amount and have everyone wait so let's just do a handful uh let's just subtract 0.15 so 0.75 um 0.6 and 0.45 all right so we have four of them here and what we've done in the past and i'm just going to show it here real quick was we converted this into a b-rep body and then we um then we projected the silhouette of it so we did the convert mesh uh faceted and then real quickly we got a bunch of different triangles that we can directly edit uh from the model which is which is fine we can still we could definitely still head down this path maybe i shouldn't have pulled that uh we just definitely still head down this path because it did give us a pretty uh clean feature oh i really should not have done that as an example there let's cancel out that um and then i projected this them onto the sketch and then we did a manual um spline that went around each one of these so that one took quite a while for that to happen let's show let me show you the other way that you can go about it now so um there is a similar tool inside of fusion now that allows you to create a mesh section and i believe this might have been here already uh but i just want to draw this to your attention uh which is the ability to instead of having to convert this to the b reps you can just use the mesh as your as what you want to project and it gives you this nice clean um it's not actually a sketch you can utilize until later and i'll show you what i mean but you get that nice clean little uh representation of it that might be cleaner than those triangles that we just saw earlier so we'll do that a couple more times it depends your use case scenario to be honest there's no one workflow fits all and that's why they have so many different tools at your disposal for this for that reason all right so now we have a bunch of different profiles that we can but if we try to loft them together so if i go to solid and i try to go to loft it won't let me select that it's not a profile you can select yet and the reason being it's just it's it's just that's the way it is the only way you can make it something selectable is if you go in here to your sketch or into the sketch itself and then you can use this tool called fit curves to mesh section and if you use this tool you can manually draw the spline in yourself or you can select closed line so if i select this as a closed line hit ok now it's a profile i can extrude um and if i do that again to the next one here so if we double click on that sketch fit curves to mesh section um let's go ahead and select that profile okay finish sketch now we have two profiles that we can loft between but let me show you why i wouldn't go with this path this route because if i try to laugh one and two oh it's not visible let me turn it on that's actually not bad but i'm supposed to look a little bit worse than this um because if you look in the closer to it i mean i guess you can go this route but you nine times out of ten i'm getting a very rigid looking loft and it's not as clean as this one this one looks a lot more clean um but you can see here that it's starting to be more rigid as opposed to a smooth surface there that you might get from a t-spline so that's one of the reasons why i wouldn't head down that path of just using the fit curves to spline methodology uh you definitely still can but let's take a look at our other options here so let's go back into let's do an undo train here undo undo undo okay now we're back to where we were before what i did stumble upon and i think this might be the better solution for this route again it doesn't have to be but i want to share with you fit curves to mesh section still using that tool but instead of the closed spline tool we are going to use the circle tool because this is pretty close to the circle and if we select on this spline or this mesh projection here it will give us this blue circle instead of that of the silhouette of this which was very jagged and not nice to loft um if you try to do ellipse which this actually looks more like uh the tool actually doesn't work right now what it just did right there was it created this little circle in the middle which is not what i'm looking for um so maybe there's a little work that might need to be done for that or i'm using it wrong but the circle tool seems to work relatively fine of course it's not as close as the model as i would want it to be but it is a step in a the smooth direction so if i were to do the circle tool for the other four the other three here just go circle go to the third one let's create another circle and then the fourth one here all right i know we're we're going a little over time here usually we have like 30 minutes or so for this but bear with me sure i'll assure you it's worth it um in the end here and then we will instead of lofting it with like a regular loft let's go ahead and loft it with the t-spline loft because you can move that around later um loft let's go one two three and then four now we have this sleek looking t-spline body which is similar to the the original mesh body um that's definitely off right there and maybe we can do a sort of a shrink wrap not a shrink wrap but like a similar shrink wrap tool like a pull command and edit it more later but it gets you in the right direction it's way more smooth than uh using the the previous tool i was talking about and again you can use the steps that were shown in that the video three years ago that's why we had that video out there because it is an option but this is just another option and another tool you can start heading down towards all right so let me see the other new or let me share with you just quickly another other new features that are definitely worth mentioning because i don't have time to show everything but i'm going to show you i'm going to at least mention it here so if we want to essentially make this a solid body or fix this model there's a lot of new repair tools inside the mesh environment now so if we go here to repair and we want to repair this look at all these different repair types that exist now i won't dive too much into each of it but there are more repair types and if we hit ok here it will just close up that hole for us which is really nice and then there's also new shelling capabilities and again this might not be the best example for this but you can shell this model out and if i make this opaque you can see what that looks like you can see that it's shelled out there in case you need to use this for 3d printing or what have you and i'm just going through this quickly just to show you share with you what it looks like um and what what else it's capable of but there's also turn that back there's also a very awesome and powerful repair or analyze functionality inside of fusion 360's preview environment currently so if you go over here to preferences preview features mesh repair analysis turn that on and then let's go and direct edit this this is the last uh the last example and then we are i will let everyone go here but uh let's go to edit feature let's go ahead and delete that um let me do that again i think i messed that up direct edit delete okay there we go all right there's a hole in there clearly if we since we have that new preview turned on we can go ahead and go to repair now and now with the repair tool besides these four options we have here there's an analyze defects tool that allows us to take a look at it's like a sketch doctor if you've worked with a sketch doctor before all the different issues that may be prevalent in your model open boundary there's that here which is detecting and it will help fix it for us as well once we hit okay and there you go it fixed our mesh for us and it even told us like what was the issue and it fixed it for us so very powerful tool very it was so quick and easy to use as well as you just saw there so definitely check that out when you're editing with uh meshes here and that that wraps it up that's the uh the last feature that i wanted to share and uh those are the those examples this will be on youtube a couple of weeks here so definitely reference it if you need to edit meshes in your future and then upon next month uh my colleague alex will be returning to help do some of these fusion friday or avas as well so uh look forward to some manufacturing um the return of manufacturing um webinars uh in the future for machining because i know there's a lot of new updates on that side as well so yeah if you have any questions i'll hang around for a couple minutes here to help answer any but if not thank you so much for for watching thank you for your time out of the day and happy friday as well so i'll stick around for another 30 seconds or so in case you you have any questions you can definitely ask it in the chat or if you are watching from youtube you can definitely uh leave a comment as well and then my good my good friend and colleague uh uh colleague uh will be christina will be um sending that those questions over to us so see if we have any okay there is a question um why are piping not available in fusion 360. uh well it's a it's not a new tool fusion is but it is like a newer tool and they don't it doesn't have all the tools and functionalities that might have existed um in other more mature tools like inventor or solidworks those have been around a while and they've definitely added some of those needed functionalities in there um there i mean there is technically a tool called pike inside a fusion that you can create pipe but it's not the mature piping that you think it it would be fusion serves another purpose it doesn't serve fully as like a deep bill materials kind of software it's more of a a whether it's for manufacturing and you want to use the machine shop uh or whether you want quick iterations of a new design um that's it's more lightweight and dynamic uh fusion is so i would use it in addition to maybe tools you have existing so if you have like the product design and manufacturing collection uh you can use inventor for piping and if you are trying to do a quick mesh edit then you'd that's when you'd open up fusion so best of both worlds good question though all right i don't see any other questions coming in so uh thanks again and i will see everyone next month take care everyone

Channel: KETIV Technologies

Views: 12,591

Keywords: autodesk, akn_include

Id: otYAO6FBVoA

Length: 40min 0sec (2400 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021