Export as Exterior Faces Only

[ebunn3]

Hi

Solidworks allows an assembly to be saved as as an exterior surface only model which reduces large file sizes down considerably.  Is there an equivalent way of doing this in Fusion?  Perhaps a scripted solution?

Eric

[BrianEkins]

Inventor also has a similar capability but Fusion does not.  It might be possible to write something that would try and delete interior faces.  You can play with this interactively to see that Fusion will attempt to heal the body when faces are deleted.  The hard part is figuring out which faces to delete.

[ebunn3]

Brian

I was thinking about using findBRepUsingRay. Select everything in the assembly. Iterate through the bodies and use the ray function to find the intersections from the outside in.  If there are intersections with other bodies I can assume they are in front of the body I am analyzing.  Process of elimination.   I would be happy to just filter out the inner bodies.   That’s my idea anyway.  Haven’t built it yet.  

Eric

[BrianEkins]

I don't think that would work because the ray has a direction. You might eliminate things that are only hidden when looking at them from a certain direction.

If you're only doing this for parts that are of a known shape that would make it a lot easier but it would take some effort to implement a general solution.  Just thinking about it for a couple of minutes, I'm not sure how I would approach it.

[kandennti]

Hi @ebunn3 .

A user in Japan was having a hard time creating motion links and motion studies for a large assembly (over 1000 parts).

He had established a working procedure, but there was a lot of manual work involved, so we helped them to use the API to handle the time-consuming part.

https://github.com/kantoku-code/Fusion360_BUNKURO 

The main process is to create a new document for each component, and copy and paste the body.

https://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=GUID-26E53439-9DE5-4A11-93AD-7E0570BAA657 

For each new document, all the bodies are combined.

https://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=GUID-d5196ad2-ff7b-4a45-873c-d9251cb0f0c5 

As a result of this process, the number of bodies and faces can be reduced, and unnecessary joints can be eliminated, making motion studies possible in large assemblies.

https://gallery.autodesk.com/projects/how-to-move-large-assemblies-in-fusion-360?_ga=2.95678940.1355... 

[ebunn3]

I’m designing some add-ins to assist the packaging design process.  Typically customer supplied CAD files of the products to be packaged are large files.  I only need the exterior, or those parts that directly interact with the packaging components.  Right now it is a laborious process to strip these files down to a manageable size.  This is my primary reason for desiring to do this.  Thanks for all of the ideas.   

Eric