Quick! Modify an STL file — Fusion 360 Tutorial — #LarsLive 118

welcome to livestream number 118 my name is last Christiansen and today we're gonna talk about STL files quick edit an STL file so this was a model that was sent to me let me show it to you that was sent to me um oh about a week or two ago and it's an STL file at first I exist I thought it was a coffee table um does it look like a coffee table I don't know but I just looked up in the name it's a light box huh I guess you know I don't know any better than that uh but it's an STL file I reached out to the guy who sent it to me he wanted to do a couple modifications to the STL file he got it from a website called Thingiverse thing the words I think I put a link to it down in the description area it's a place where it looks like a lot of cool people are uploading things you can you can freely print so if you're into 3d printing for example that's the trick now what I want to show you today is a couple of cool tricks about STL files inside of fusion or 360 and we have talked about STL files before here on the channel so if this is the first time if this is the first time you're watching the YouTube channel here are the live streams thank you I appreciate it but even if you watch a few but you're like whoa STL files something new there's some in previous live streams now I used to hate STL files and the reason I used to hate them is because an STL file is only made up of rectangle or triangles sorry it's it's really a shell of a model completely completely made a shell made out of triangles and you can see that if you assume if i zoom in on some of these areas here I hope you can see it it's just oh there's no radiuses everything is just triangles the two reasons that I don't like SCL files first of all because in the olden days you didn't use to have to you couldn't do anything with STL file it was literally just to show on your screens luckily with fusion that have changed but secondly um you know if you're looking at a development like this area here you know it's not very accurate it's it's no more accurate then then the triangles are created so when people used to send these to me and be like hey can your machine this a work with this it used to be a little bit of a nightmare but like I said fusion we have some neat tricks now like I said we've worked at it before if you go to your preferences if you go to your preview you you have a mess workspace you can turn on and when you do have a mess file what we have here if we go up and look at the at the drop down here you'll see it's a mess body we do get a mesh environment like I said we've been in here before especially we talked about if you got STL files that was huge and when I'm talking about huge I'm talking about the number of triangles right so I just want to make sure that if you get this sorry I'm gonna maybe repeating myself I just make sure you understand that the STL file is just triangles and normally you can control this the size of the triangles but many times causes that you can't control the tolerance of it right so if you have like a curved surface like a mouse and it's all build up of triangles you can't get you know that that curvature in them so what I'm referring to when I'm saying a big STL file that means when there's thousands upon thousands of triangles a very complex shape then it can be a problem but you can do this let's go back and we X gonna be in the model space today but it's very not normal when we're talking STL files if you right-click on the mess body you can go to properties and then it shows you over here the facet count or the face count or whatever you want and you can see that this model is only only but it's only five thousand six hundred eighty triangles or faces I should say made up of triangles and know that that that's a lot it's not too much for fusion what I can actually do now notice this I'm in the model environment I want to make sure you you get this and I've uploaded by using the upload button right here uploaded this STL file into our library just open it up ups open it up here if I right click on the STL file and I go down to mess to be wrap now this is only gonna work if the STL file is small enough if it's too big this is not gonna work but I can say here match to be wrap and you will see over here we get a very welcoming icon new body click on that and fusion will exit convert this STL file into a solid body but of course we love because we love solid bodies yeah now the question I got this was not really the exciting thing but the questions I got from one of you guys were I would like to make this panel thinner how do do I modify the thickness of this panel well this is a solid body now but it still made up of triangles that has not changed I mean it's so it's a watertight solid body but the face is still broken down into into to this triangle shape but that's okay we can we can work with that so what I'm going to use is I'm actually going to use the standard press pull to move this face but as you can see I can't just select I mean I could go in here hold down control and select each individual component but it's actually not bad right here and then hit Q but I want to show you another tool because that's you know so about learning here right if you go up to your your select area up here anytime I'm working with something like triangular shapes like a mesh or in this case something that was an STL I really love to use the paint selection instead of the standard window selection so I'm going to hit paint selection now what I've done that you will see that icon changes to that also be aware of that in here there is a lot of different selection filters that we can select in here and if we actually go up a little bit you will see that there is a selection priority where we can select a priority in here in my case I want to select a face so if I sit like so first look at the selection fellows look at everything is checked except select fruit if I go up and select select face priority and go back into that selection fill and you will see that it narrowed it down just to those body faces so that's what that does okay now with that paint selection and send some only selecting faces I can literally just paint hold down my left mouse button and I can paint all the way around there to do that now I could probably have picked that hold down ctrl or command on a Mac and selected this as fast as I showed this but now you know now with all the selected I'm gonna hit Q for press pool right so this is pretty standard modeling environment it's gonna become an offset face and I can actually stop holding in this here now if I gotta make a little bit smaller I'm gonna go minus 25 millimeters I'm gonna highlight it so no look at the screen so minus 25 see how narrow it is just got let me change it back to zero so that was the original size it unselected one of them there you go hit okay to that and not only did you just see that it made this panel thinner fusion actually also repaired these faces right it made it one face now so what fusion did if we spin it around this was kind of how it looked originally what fusion did was because which it had to change the kind of the face identity of these when it moved the face I saw that it could just prepare that whole face and still keep it watertight now another thing I wanted to show you that it's interesting about this is the hole that was in the fruit here now that was actually never a hole right because it was triangular shape it was made out of and this is one of the dangerous things about working with mess theta like an STL file is well we could all agree look like as a whole but we know that it's not because they got these faces well let's go ahead and fix them it's our little tip to fix that so what I want to do is and by the way you will see that I'm because I'm working with this STL I'm working with no history down here you could go up here and right click and turn capture history on but I actually don't recommend it when you're working with this kind of mess body it can actually kind of make things a little more difficult having a history in here so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to repair this hole so I'm gonna open a new sketch on that face and I don't really know what the size of this hole is because you know I don't there was somebody on Thingiverse who was kind enough who was kind enough to to provide this model so what I'm gonna do is when I create a line but I'm assuming that you know the intersection all of these here are kind of like true so I'm going to create a line across from here and I'm a gonna place it I mention on it now notice that it's fully defined so when I play this dimension of 270 point zero six seven I get this warning that just letting me know that it's gonna be a driven dimension instead of a driving dimension we talked about this in a live stream I think last week how there's brackets around it but just means it doesn't something bad it just shows us that this dimension is not driving the length because the two end points does but I wanted to show this because we're gonna use this to cut this part now you could be tempted to hit C for circle and just draw a circle from the midpoint of that line right to that in a section there but it's actually going to cause a little bit of a problem and I'm assuming in a little bit so we can see how the problem is that well if we cut like this that's gonna be what I think you would call like a zero energy happening on each in a section where the circle meets the high point of this wannabes STL file circle so what I'm actually gonna do is I'm gonna make this circle a little bit bigger I'm gonna make it ten millimeter speaker so I'm gonna type in two hundred and eighty point zero six seven okay so if you look at the so if you look right now we know the line or the the max of this wannabe circle was 270 now I made it ten millimeters tall bigger I'm gonna hit enter to that and then I'm gonna use the press pull again so Q and just select that sliver right there and now I can use it as a cut so cut right through and I'm just gonna say through all because that's what I normally do and hit okay and that means that now we have a not only actually have a hole now the hole is too big right but that's okay if we hit Q again and so like the inside of the hole we can actually make it you can make it smaller right so I can say now this is a radius here so I can say 270 point zero six seven / - you can do right in here right here okay and I have now just fixed that hole that was there before and now made it made it better and just to make it cooler because of the dad it actually healed up that back face because again a fusion had to solve because we made that cut all the way through it had to solve what we cut through what is this back face so we have just not only made this wall thinner of this STL file we've actually also repaired something wanna be round hole to to be be round now does it matter that this model here is all made up of of triangular kind of shapes not necessarily if you just gotta freely put this you're probably okay I am at people who sent me this type of files and want me to machine it and then he can actually become a little bit of a hassle I want to show you one more really really cool trick if you're not familiar with that with the replace phase command you're in for a treat in a second so what I mean by accuracy is again these triangles look at this radius here for example right that is not a real radius it's it's again triangular of course the smaller the triangle is the mole you can say is coming closer to a circle or a development of a curve but you know again it's hard to control and actually if we look at this flat spot here or this curve if I go to the right view and you look at this you can you can see if i zoom in you can see that this is broken down by flat sections and that will definitely show up pretty much whatever you're doing I mean even if you're 3d printing this that will will show up so that's why that replace face can be really really cool so let me show you that on this section here let's make that smooth so a trick to do is we gonna use a tool we've used before on the livestream and that is the suite tool but I'm not going to do this in solid it makes it gonna do it in in a surface or pets environment but that's that's okay it's not really that confusing I'm going to open up a sketch here so I'm gonna click sketch and just click on this face here it's gonna go normal to and I'm gonna use a spline to create this curve so I'm gonna go over and select spline and just make sure that when you zoom in that you get the right edge right because that's kind of like what we're gonna attach the to so I'm gonna zoom out I'm gonna zoom all the right back in hand you can really see how this is not a radius right it's I mean of course remember we are very close right now so I place the spline all the spine in point right here and and hit okay so now we have a spline and with these splines we get these spline handles right I'm actually gonna make this spline handle you see over here oh my selection is off here hang up go in here and select that's the only thing when you have used these selection tools is that you kind of like want them back again if I select this spline here I'm gonna make this handle horizontal I've talked about before using constraints on your spline so I'm gonna make this one horizontal okay now it's a little bit hard to see the spline right now but if we go down to the spline point down here let's click on the spline get that handle I can start to kind of like shape that and of course I can't make it match exactly what we have because that's kind of junk P because it's just all these triangles but we can get close right I think that looks let's just say that that looks pretty good so I'm gonna need this is my first line Emily stop that sketch so now we have that spline sitting right there on that face now and know that I'm not kept all the history we still have sketched bodies we could still do a lot of all these things I'm going over the second scats because this is our profile now we need to pass and I'm going to open the sketch here all right click create a sketch and I'm just gonna make a line so I click the line tool and I'm just going to make sure I'm snapping into that same intersection I had for where my my curve was and just for the to make it a little bit easier here I'm actually well that's what he's if I look at it sorry I'm actually just gonna make it a little bit longer and I'm just gonna place it out here and because I couldn't quite see you at a place that I'm gonna give it a horizontal relationship right now okay I'm straight so what do I got let me just hide the body right now we have the the curve we just created the spline and then I just made this line I make this longer now if you go to the patch environment and we use to sweep over there select the profile select the path we get a a surface instead of and the reason I go to the path is because this surface is no thickness it's almost thinking like a piece of paper and it's laying right if I turn the body bag on it's laying right on top of it's a surface right there right that's right claig appearances let's take paint go to faces and paint metallic oh yeah sure how about a red download that come on there go so red is now the surface okay you can see how it's kind of like laying right through our model there now with that surface right there and I'm just gonna leave that here in the tree doesn't doesn't hurt anything I'll go back to the model environment okay and now I have to select all these sections in here I'm just hide our surface right surface if we go over here to the replace face it says the source for the faces and that's gonna be all these and again you could select them individually you could go down to paint go down here so like face priority oops and just oh face priority like that let's go and I'll paint it here Oh too soon then so I couldn't there we go so we got all these selectively next out of my place face so we got those twenty faces selected now what is the one we're going to replace it with and that's going to be that surface so I'm gonna select that take a second and then hit okay and we're a little bit telling Fusion that we want to replace the face that we just had on our model with that surface and I returned that service back off you will see that we just eliminating all those all those lines and we now have a nice surface that follows that curve we created and I will just leave this this surface body I wouldn't delete it or anything just leave it over there and you could now do that for all this right so I mean you will see down here we have some weird development right now but I mean you could go in if you had to not if you know if you don't have to don't do it if you don't have to but if we wanted to kind of like get rid of these triangles that would be one of the tools you could use this okay replace face so from there from from this kind of mess to to a a flat surface like that so just to recap working with STL files it's out of fusion just it's kind of changing the dynamics a little bit how we can actually we can actually work with them we can modify them in here now again it will always be a struggle if you have an STL file with a bunch of faces on triangles on it you definitely want to be cautious and like I said we've created different live streams and then in the past if you can't remember it my email address is down in the description area allows the Christiansen and all of this calm and I'll direct you to to the videos so SEO files can be a little tricky to also remember the accuracy can be you know whatever those triangles are those triangles are but definitely with this tip here you can go in and you can stop modifying and even replace some some of these tools so man I hope that this was useful um you guys 165 people in the livestream I really appreciate it if you're watching the recording I also appreciate you take time for that if you like this as always do me a favor hit the thumbs up if you don't please be honest it the thumbs down it's okay you know I'm not gonna cry too much and if you have not ready to subscribe to the channel then then appreciate that to tomorrow's cam tomorrow we accepted a machine an STL file because you can excel as a pro cam to a pet on that so tomorrow is all about cam if you're not into cam that don't interest you I don't blame you then tomorrow take the day off have a beer relax with the family whatever or whatever you want and then hopefully I'll see you on Tuesday because Monday is actually a holiday so so that would be Tuesday alright guys thank you so much I really appreciate you taking the time to watch these you're awesome if you're watching recording thank you I'm gonna in the broadcast and jump into the livestream take care

Channel: Lars Christensen

Views: 181,733

Keywords: Autodesk, Autodesk Fusion 360, Fusion 360, Design, CAD, Modeling, 3D, 3D Printing, CAM, Manufacturing, Tip, Beginner, Lars Christensen, #LarsLive, akn_include

Id: yxC-kwuksug

Length: 24min 7sec (1447 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 11 2018