Reverse Engineering from a 3D Scan with Fusion360... for FREE!

if you want to use a 3D scan of a part like this to make a fully modifiable and usable 3D CAD model using only free software you're in the right place [Music] welcome to making for Motorsport where we make more spend less and go faster so consumer grade 3D scanners have exploded over the last couple of years with creality and Revo Point putting out some fantastic models that really bring some great scanning results to within the fingertips the grasp of Home Gamers and amateurs in their garage but there is a problem and that's the file format these scanners put out which are mesh files so that's great going straight to a 3D printer or going into blender to sculpt something in an organic way but if you want to do reverse engineering if you want to take measurements if you want you need planes you need cylinders you want to modify it that's very difficult now if you've got the right software it's a bit easier but often that software is worth more than the pro-grade scanners so what we need is a way using free software to achieve the same result let's find out if there is one so the first job of course is to scan the part so I'm using my CR scan lizard to scan this a voxel Corsa C upright now the reason I'm scanning this will become obvious in later videos but for now all we need to know is that I need a 3D model of this that I can easily modify but it's also a useful part because it's got some very clear geometry it's got planes it's also got cast faces that means that I've got a nice variation of geometry to deal with now it doesn't matter which scanner you're using because actually we're just going to pick up from the sdl so for this I'll simply say I used dry shampoo and scanned it from multiple angles and combine them to give me this the final scl which leaves us with this 3D model before we go any further we just need to work out what we're trying to achieve here if we just wanted something we could 3D print or something that was just purely a copy of what we've got as far as our scanner can do well there it is we've got it done send it to the printer it's an STL you can do it straight away however that's not what we want to do so we want to reverse engineer so we want to pull out all of the features that interact with the other items that give it its form its its function and its fit so I want to extract all of these points where it interacts at the steering arm the strut the brake caliper the the drive shaft and extract all that information and built it into a another 3D model that I can then modify and change using parameters so that's what we're going to do but first off we're going to remove a few things from this model and simplify it slightly so we've got all this writing here all these casting marks we've got these items here that look like they're a sprue from where it's been cast which we don't need so we're going to tidy this up we're going to do it all in mesh mixer so hit the music [Music] oh my God [Music] and there you have it a simplified smoothed out model that really is just giving us the information that we really want to see but as you can tell it's not aligned with the coordinate system at the moment which is a problem so for that we're going to open up another piece of software so this has gone inspect and this is a fairly chunky piece of software that generally only the pros get to play with but they do have a free version so you can open a new project import your STL now we've got the model in the software we can easily align it to our coordinate system by using a three two one alignment where we pick first off three points that are on a plane perpendicular to the x-axis and then two points that are on a plane perpendicular to the y-axis and then one point on a plane perpendicular to the x-axis z-axis even and there we have it we've got all of our points in and you can see it's now aligned to our coordinate system but you can see Zed's going the wrong way Zed's going down instead of up so if we flip that that will flip Zed for us going up that way so we simply go okay and there you have it it's now aligned to our coordinate system pretty nifty what we can easily do in gum inspect also is we can use the construct function to put planes and get them fitted to our mesh so if we click there that is now constructed a plane fitted to all of those points that you can see highlighted in red all of those facets and that's great however the more we do that the more they're going to be fitted to the model and they're not going to align perfectly with the planes that form the basis of our coordinate system the origin so that's going to make life very tricky so we're not going to do that although it could be a very useful thing in the future we who knows you might see that in other videos but for now we're just going to save this model and Export it as an aligned mesh foreign into Fusion 360. now I'm using Fusion 360 because I like Autodesk products I know Fusion 360 better than anything else and plus it's free for free so you can use a really powerful program without having to spend any money now cards on the table I am part of the Autodesk Creator program so I get a fully featured version of this for free but none of the features I'm going to use here are behind the payroll are behind the paywall so they are fully available for anyone to use so let's get stuck into it so first off we're going to import the mesh now I always like to use the insert mesh function because that enables us to do a few things because we have this screen available to us here so what we can do is we can Center It On the Origin and we can also Move It to the Ground that we can potentially flip up the direction like that but we don't want to do that we want to leave for me I like Zed to be height so that works perfectly well so if we look at it from these various angles and we turn the origin on that works well enough for me now what's the goal we're going to build a fully Prismatic model out of solids so not surface but solid so something which we could Define in using parameters if we wish to we can change we can measure and we're going to do that here and the first place first and the first thing to start on is to give ourselves a datum right down the middle of the dry flange so the axis of the axle if you will to do that we're going to do the core trick this is the killer app this is the one trick you need to know that will help you out and basically it's this create mesh section sketch so we click on that first and we click that body and you can see it's already selected This Plane and we can pull this plane through and we can use and we can also set if we want to fine-tune it we can do that with this box here and I'm going to take a section create a sketch on that section there these Orange Lines around the spigot on the flange on the dry flange click ok now that has created a sketch a bit here called sketch one I'm just going to rename that and call it the Drive spigot section yep and the next thing we do is we right click on that we go edit sketch and you'll find it's easy to just easier sometimes just to turn these off turn off the meshes so you can see this sketch now you can see actually we're now in sketch mode but we can't really select those orange items but what we can do is the second part of the trick which is this fit curves to mesh section so we click that it gives us this little man this little dialog box here where we can draw lines we can draw curves arcs but we're not drawing them we are fitting them to this so we really want to fit a circle to these two circles so if we go to Circle and we can click on that one that gives us a mat and you can see there's a maximum curve deviation there are four point one zero eight of a millimeter so it's not far off so if we click OK there that gives us and finish sketch that gives us a a surface a an enclosed Circle an enclosed sketch so we could do anything with that we could extrude that we could do whatever but we're going to go here to axis perpendicular to face at a point and that's the face and that's the point and there's our axis so we turn the the mesh back on you see we've now got an axis running right down the middle of it looks pretty good to me now you may have guessed you can use some of these tools to do alignments in Fusion and you can do the full alignment to the coordinate system in Fusion if you wish and in fact there's a whole load of videos already on this stuff so I will put together a bit of a playlist of some of the videos I found very useful in learning how to do this and I will put them all on my screen or I'll put them up here or somewhere or in the description so you'll be able to look at exactly the videos where I found this from and by the way after this video I would suggest you go and look at learn everything about design he has hundreds of videos all about designing things on Fusion using solids forms surfaces he knows what he's talking about so any questions or any issues with with this stuff check out his videos I bet you he's got the answer in there but let's carry on with this anyway so let's start building this model the first thing I'm going to do is revolve this dry flange so what we need is to take a section sketch of this dry flange and we could drag another um playing in but I'm going to construct a plane that's right down the middle and that's the easy to do because we've got a XIs so we can say playing at an angle on that axis 90 degrees and you can see it's there right there in the middle of the dry flange so that's pretty handy so we can go to here create mesh section sketch using that body and that play and we click ok and we've got magically another sketch so I'm going to call that so section and if we turn this off we can see we have essentially cut that in half so what I'm going to do now is exactly what we did before we right click exit edit sketch and we're going to go thick curves to mesh section and see we're still on Circle so it's just given us a circle but what we can use is spline or should we use clothes spline and that will essentially go around fit that one that one and we're going to just draw them all in because why not so now you can see we've got all of those areas as again closed sections that we could extrude we could do something with but we're also going to do a little bit of drawing here so I want to if we look at the the mesh itself actually there's a fair amount here that could all be extruded and revolved so obviously we can't revolve these bits here so we'll cut them off now we've got a closed area that we could extrude or evolve let's do it let's do a revolve Extrusion we've got the profile selected we have the axle axis there that looks pretty good so there you have it that's the first kind of section done if we bring the mesh back in you can see that in many areas come on you can see in many areas it's about bang on it's not many no it's kind of sharing the space pretty well however we can see here that we it's following the Contours of the mesh and as you can see that's not quite a perfect Barrel a perfect cylinder and it is because I've got it here and you see there's no taper on that that is a nice parallel sided cylinder so what we're going to do because of the way we're modeling this we still have our design history here so we can go back and we can actually go back and change the mesh this diode this drawing that it's defined on so we can go back edit sketch and instead of just blindly following this we can actually put some rectangles into it and we can yeah look at that looks about right that and we could fill this whole area with rectangles and we could start knocking it out and making it into shapes that we actually like the look of to give ourselves something to revolve but we're going to do one section better than that and we're going to use measurements [Music] so we've got Mr we have a Mitty Doyle's son and we know that that drives bigger to locate the wheel is 56.49 millimeters in diameter so what I'm not going to do here is go through every single step because this is essentially just 2D drafting in Fusion you can use constraints in the same way you can interact with the mesh section sketches in exactly the same way as you would do any other drawing so it really is dead simple so if you want to create a sketch based completely on constraints that you can come back and easily modify later now's your chance so now you can see that we are looking far more like an engineered piece like it's got actual cylinders that you can Define that we can go in if we don't like that diameter we can go back and change a number and it all those changes will roll through how's it looking yeah we still got it fairly close to the model itself so now we're going to try and model this steering arm so to do that so we can do the same thing again we're going to create a mesh section sketch click the body select that plane which is the one we're looking down on really at the moment and then we're going to select the right position for it move it down here and you can see there that one's cutting it pretty much through the middle so that's the one we want to click ok to that and which has given us another mesh section sketch so we'll rename that one steering um and we'll do is we did go in edit sketch and turn off the mesh and the body so we can see it and that's the job there so again create fit curves to mesh section close spline will just create a close blind based on that and we will create a circle based on that and there we have again we've got a closed section we can do something with so what I'm going to try and do is just I want to create this body and I want to join it to this body so I'm going to cut it off fair amount inside this body but I don't want it to interfere with any of the revolved sections so here it may well do so it will cut that off and then we've got a separate section here which we can extrude so let's do an extrude to go back to our solid Tab and we go to extrude and we go two sides let's put the mesh back on let's see if we can get that let's have it let's join now you can see the top level top surface on that kind of somewhat tapers so I'm going to and this surface here is actually machined so this is the raw casting coming through and then you've got all the forging then you've got the machine point there so I'm going to extrude on this side enough to give me that much kind of a space because we're going to come in and do this in a slightly different way and we're going to do that on the other side as well we're gonna have it so we can you can just see it so it gives us pretty much all of the the arm you can see that looks pretty good it's quite close but you've got all this material on the top and the bottom but we we couldn't do anything with so what we're going to do is what I want to do is I want to have a plane that runs pretty much down the middle of there that I can then do another sketch on and then remove so we need a plane down the middle of there now the best way of doing that is simply to go back into this sketch and to give myself a construction line that runs broadly down the middle highlight it turn into a construction line turn the bodies on just so I can organize it and then we can do construction playing at an angle the line is already selected so I just do 90. and you see we've got that there so now we can do our same trick again we can go back to the mesh tab create mesh section sketch click the mesh click the section section plane and there we have it so now we've got our mesh section sketch we can simply go in edit sketch and do pretty much the same thing we did before and first off we'll use thick curves to mesh section now I don't really want this to be absolutely bang on it doesn't really matter so in order to get a better smoother flop spline I'm going to up the tolerance here and that should mean I get something a little bit more usable so because I'm going to use this shape to cut out I'm going to give myself a little box there so now we've got the outline now I'm going to tweak that because I'm not quite happy the way it Scopes in and out because it doesn't have to be absolutely bang on but I want it to look good and look like there's a nice smooth kind of tape it there so now I'm using the spline tool I'm also using constraints and measurements off the part itself to get what I think is going to be the most representative profile for this steering arm so now I've got everything defined I can just we can finish sketch and we can pick the bits we want to use as a kind of a delete tool so we go to extrude and use cut and we can pick all of these bits that we want to use as the tool to cut this down with foreign you can turn the body on it doesn't really matter too much the extents because we're not intersecting any of the bodies and there you have it I have the destruction turn off the sketches and we're getting and we're getting pretty close to what that's what we should have and that's the core of the techniques so let's just do that a few more times but pretty much everything else so it's a dead easy set of instructions first off you create a mesh section sketch then you right click on that new sketch and edit it then you fit curves to mesh section and then you've got some lines that you can interact with the same way as any other sketch and those sketches then you can use in the same way as you would do any other sketches on fusion and you can extrude you can revolve you can Loft you can do pretty much anything and then once you've got those solid bodies you can then modify those in the same way you would do with any other bodies you can chamfer put um fillet radiuses on and use them as cutting tools whatever you want to do so it really is quite simple and very powerful but it does take a long time so after about two or three hours of modeling you can see we've got a model there that's fully Prismatic fully editable you can go back and change it any way you want and turning the mesh on it's not that far off now we can go back and we could tweak it and change it and make it absolutely perfect but that is good enough for me so hopefully you found this useful if you have then please hit the Thumbs Up Button this is just a really kind of compressed summary of these tools if you want to know more about this kind of stuff then head over to learn everything about design it really really is a fantastic YouTube channel and check out the playlist for all the other videos that I've watched trying to work out how to do this so if you're still watching now hit the thumbs up button please it really does help if you've enjoyed this and hit subscribe so you don't miss anything in the future and if you really do like it then consider heading over to the patreon and joining these lovely people heading down here but that's it for now so thank you for watching be good but if you can't be good don't get caught bloody hell this takes ages [Music]

Channel: Making for Motorsport

Views: 203,674

Keywords: Reverse Engineering, RE, Reverse Eng, Scan to CAD, Fusion360, 3D Scanning, 3D Scanner, CAD, 3D Printing

Id: imGrla3b3Mo

Length: 28min 41sec (1721 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 15 2022