Creating bas-relief's in fusion

[Anonymous]

I have been trying to create some Bas-relief's in fusion. I know what I want to do, But keep hitting a wall. I am trying to import an obj.

I am having continuous issues with being not quad mesh, too many faces. Then when I finally get one in, I can convert it to a body because the mesh errors and says run repair. But repair wont fix the errors.

Has anyone got any good advice for a process to follow. I have tried with meshmixer and meshlab.

Thanks Matt

[TrippyLighting]

Could you attach the mesh to you next post so we can look at it ?

[Anonymous]

http://a360.co/1KVjxG9 

Here is a link to the project. This mesh is probibly to heavy as is and is just something I was expereminting with. 

Thanks Matt

[TrippyLighting]

I was hoping for the original input mesh, whatever format it is. I believe you mentioned .obj ?

If you have a dropbox account you could put it there and share a download link.

[Anonymous]

Ok cool. sorry about that. The original was actually an .stl. I then played with that it meshmixer and netlabb. Here is the Orig.

 https://www.dropbox.com/s/fhbaxbq4niyaote/Black%20Rhino%20Stare.stl?dl=0

Thanks Matt

[TrippyLighting]

One reason that you cannot do anything with that mesh in Fusion 360 is because it is not a closed mesh or in other words it does not enclose a volume watertight. The back is completely missing, so you cannot turn it into a B-rep.

The second reason is of course the high poly count of almost 300.000 faces/ploygons. 

[Anonymous]

yeah I realise that that mesh is not usable. That is why I was asking the best work flow. The one that is in my project orig link. I made a solid in meshmixer. But then I had to make it into quads in meshlab and I desimated it to a smaller mesh. But I am having no success getting on that works.

This is something I want to do a bit of. So I would love to know how I should go about it.

Thanks again.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Wow that stl is amazing, the detail!  Did someone sneak up on a rhino lugging a top line laser scanner 😉

What you're attempting to do is really interesting and I've attempted similar in the past, as shown in this thread from today:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/design-and-documentation/mesh-to-brep/td-p/5794862

So I used Meshmixer, and the brush select tool to select all the faces then chose the triangle budget option and chose 10000 and hit enter, giving this decent result. 

As explained in the other thread mention, I then imported it into Fusion and converted to a Brep without issue, creating an open surface body.

As shown in the other thread, CAM operations can now be performed to machine this puppy out!  Don't mind the faceted nature of the Brep body, you'll find that will be smoothed out in the CAM and actual machining/carving operations.  It's just loss of detail that need to look out for, and Meshmixer does a good job of preserving that as good as possible.  Meshmixer also has a convenient special custom slicing feature that can quickly break up a more dense mesh into several, to be fairly easily reassembled in Fusion, but it does not like this 3D relief is really in need of that.

Good luck man!

Jesse

[Anonymous]

Thanks Jesse. That is exactly what I was after. I will give it a go when I can get back in front of my machine.

[Anonymous]

Look forward to hearing how it turns out.  And remember to do a mesh to Brep conversion, NOT a mesh to Tspline conversion (i.e. NOT Sculpt workspace), by in Model environment going to Create > Create Base Feature then Insert > Mesh, then while still in the base feature mode, going to Modify > Mesh> Mesh to Brep, and when finished clicking on Finish base feature in upper right.

Jesse

[Anonymous]

Worked a treat. Here is a pic of the end result. 

Thanks heaps for the help.

[TrippyLighting]

Awesome!

[Anonymous]

Very sweet!  Thanks for sharing that, it's quite encouraging.  Out of curiosity, was wondering how does the surface finish compare to the CAM simulation?  What was the smallest endmill used?  And did you consider using a quite small endmill, say 1/16" diameter, for a finishing "rest" machining operation?

Jesse 

[Anonymous]

Thinking about it, I guess probably another common way to reduce scalloping is just some detailed sanding work?

Jesse

[Anonymous]

Hey Jesse. Is started with a 1/4 inch flat endmill and few passes with a
1/8 ball mill. The finish is smoother than the model. Good result.

[dongillett]

Thanks for all of the detailed instructions on this.  I'm a newbie with a a new 48x96 CNC router and I've been trying to live with Fusion as my only/primary tool for CAD and CAM.  Most the CAD based modeling has come pretty easy to me but I have enough meshes that I want to incorporate into my work and spent lots of time stuggling with this.  I finally got my first usable model imported in via your instructions so very excited about this.  Many thanks!

Two follow on questions for this...

1)  The reduce UI in Meshmixer is really horrible.  Am I missing something?  I get a slider with really bad granulations of triangle budgets to pick from so it is complete hit or miss if I can hit the setting to limit to the proper amount of triangles.  Any way to type in the target triangle count rather than utilize the hit-or-miss slider UI.  I've also tried MeshLab and had good luck with the decimation but the resulting mesh wasn't liked by Fusion.

2)  I want to use the BRep body created by this process as the tool in a 'combine' opperation but it is not selectable as the tool.  What I'm doing is creating a pattern of successive sheets of wood spaced a few inches apart.  Then I'm taking the model of a horse and placing it inside the pattern of wood sheets and using it as the 'tool' for what to cut out to make a large horse statue with offset sheets of plywood.  I'm doing this as a modify/combine/cut operation with BRep body selected as a tool... but I can't select it for this operation.  I can do this fine with something like a modeled ball as the tool object. Possible or not?

Thanks

Don

[Anonymous]

Hey Don!  That sounds awesome the progress you're making and very cool idea with plywood.  Regarding your first question, after you choose Triangle Budget you should be able to click on the number and enter a value directly, such as 10,000, then hit enter or click on something else (don't have Meshmixer installed right now to definitely verify).  Per your second question, yes that seems to be possible.  In the below images the foot is a 9000 face mesh.  It took about a minute to do a Combine operation with the board as the target and the foot as the tool with Cut option, and also Keep Tool checkmarked. 

Will like to hear how this goes!

Jesse

[dongillett]

When I do the combine opperation the horse (Body1) is just not selectable as the tool.  This should be the BRep and not the original mesh (which is also not selectable) correct?

Does the icon for the body give any hints to if I have the wrong type of object created/selected with the horse?  

Is your board created in solid modeling mode after finishing the base object when you do the import the foot and convert to brep?

I am just using a free 'Makers' version of Fusion 360.  Do I have limited capabilities that could be preventing me from doing this?

[Anonymous]

Yes I just verified that the body needs to be a solid body, not a surface body as your horse is.  The mesh to Brep is creating a surface in your case because there is at least one hole in your mesh somewhere, so that it is not watertight.  My guess is that it would be most straightforward to repair the mesh in a program like Meshmixer before importing it into Fusion. I haven't tried such a thing myself, but if you run into trouble there is a pretty affordable new resource for Meshmixer here

http://honeypoint3d.com/courses/online-training/meshmixer-full-course/

When you get it working that project is going to be awesome!

Jesse

[Anonymous]

By the way there is only one level of Functionality with Fusion 360 presently (which as I'm guessing you'll agree is a pretty high functionality 😉 ).  In the future it is anticipated Autodesk will have a 2nd version that incorporates such advanced things as 5 axis CAM.  

Also it was awhile ago but I used Meshmixer to split a mesh into several nicely, such that when each was brought into Fusion with 10,000 faces, I could use Point to Point Move to perfectly align them back together flawlessly, hence multiplying considerably total face count (it appears from another user that when approach say 100,000 faces things get considerably slower).  Although from the looks of your mesh it looks pretty good as it is, and as said the CAM and CNC process will average out faceting effect.

Jesse