hi guys I have been using Fusion 360 for a while now and I am looking to do a highly textured plate for a project, like a leather pattern onto a mold for plastic parts. I used to use 3DSMAX a lot, so the way I am thinking of doing it is applying a old bumb, or normals map I have, to the model in some way to create the geometry for a CNC mill to cut, is this a possible solution to put organic textures onto a part?
here is a texture to play with.
thanks for any help
This is only possible for renderings.
There is no displacement mapping that would allow you to modify the actual 3D geometry of a surface with a high level of detail
That depends on the level of detail you are expecting to see in the surface. In my experience displacement mapping requires a lot of polygons and fusion 360 cannot really handle that many at the moment. There is a Fusion 30 script that modifies a T-Spline mesh based on an image but I personally would create the displaced mesh outside of Fusion 360 with Blender as it is much more responsive. then I'd import the surface into Fusion 360.
Then you have two choices
1. you can import the displaced mesh and convert it into a T-Spline.
2. you an import the mesh and directly convert it into a BRep. In order for that to work the Mesh would have to have less than 10000 polygons.
You need to experiment with that and see if that would work for your application. Could you post a bigger image than that post stamp size picture ?
@Anonymous
Can you post the full size image....I have an idea but probably wont have anything to show until later this weekend...
Phil Procario Jr.
Owner, Laser & CNC Creations
this is as big as i have
They did not use bump maps at all!
The face was scanned with a NextEngine laser scanner, which creates a triangulated mesh surface.
Then a softwarer (I assume that goes with the scanner) is used to clean up the mesh.
Then another part of that software does a very nice job of creating (NURBS ? ) surface patches form the mesh.
That is imported into Fusion 360 and stitched into a cohesive surface in the Patch environment in Fusion 360.
Then some standard Fusion 360 modeling and the thing is a solid body that then is machined on the CNC mill.
Bump and normal mapping are pure GC illusionist tricks that do not modify a surface. What you are talking about would be displacement mapping and that process has nothing to do with what's shown in the video.
Possibly. Hard to say without having the actual data available.
you can ask that in the comment section no YouTube.
One thing I can tell you for sure is that Fusin 360 does not allow surface modifications by means of displacement mapping.
@Anonymous
The face model did have the eyebrow data in it look closely at the 1:40 second mark.
Nurbs data is a set of patches and doesn't show surface detail like polygon meshes do. You can have a huge amount of surface detail in a single patch where as you can't have any surface detail in a polygon.
Once you use an external app to generate the displacement data and convert that to mesh data depending on the polygon limit you may have to split the mesh up into pieces and reassemble them like I did in the what's possible with T-Splines thread. Anything is possible just depends on how much work your willing to put into it and how powerful your computer is.
But @TrippyLighting is correct your not going to achieve all of this with just Fusion by itself. I should know since I do this kind of work everyday...all day...
Phil Procario Jr.
Owner, Laser & CNC Creations
This image shows an example of a comfortable amount of surface detail that I've been able to achieve with T-Splines and traditional CAD:
Not bad for a 100% CAD workflow. But for something like this:
For this level of detail, a non-traditional approach is needed. These were created in Geomagic Freeform, then surfaced to bring into CAD, and completed there. The small surface patches and the corresponding point structure of the patches can be seen here:
Crazy surface detail like this is best done outside of CAD, then brought in to complete manufacturing.
Understood. That is not available in Fusion 360. If you've read some of the earlier posts in this thread it is clear that the actual generation of a displaced mesh has to happen on another software.
Also, traditionally displacement mapping is done on pylon meshes, not on CAD models, which are represented by NURBS surfaces, which are mathematically much more complex. T-Splines could theoretically bridge the gap somewhat, but for high levels of detail they are not performant enough (in Fusion 360).
this post is a little old but found it first when trying to make displacement map.
I found a usefull add-in that do the job:
Fusion360Image2Surface
I managed to make this light cap rather quickly with it
That addin works mostly on flat(tish) surfaces.
I usually use Blender and procedural textures that are used to displace quad polygons.
So if you want to end up with a complete sphere with a texture on it you'd create a subdivided sphere in Blnder and then use the technique I described.
The resulting quad mesh you would export into a .obj and that you'd convert into a T-Spline in Fusion 360.
