Better STL export capabilities

[dirktheeng]

I work with CFD software quite often and we use STL's to define the boundaries when we mesh a volume.  The STL's we get from Inventor and Fusion 360 are not ideal for this.  While they are clean and water tight, they often have very high aspect ratio tirangles on flat surfaces and are often very different in size.  I assume this is due to two reasons: 1) edges of intersecting flat surfaces do not get added control points in the middle and flat surfaces are not meshed with internal points.

What would be much better for us is if an algorithm like what is in Meshmixer to create a "solid body" is built in as an option.  However, we would like the sharp corners not to be rounded or cut off as they are in Meshmixer.  Basically, that algorithm produces almost ideal STL's for us because the triangles are all nearly uniform in size and the aspect ratio is very close to 1.  We use meshmixer right now in some cases, but we don't like how sharp corners get cut off.

[schneik-adsk]

In the stl out options you can alter aspect ratio. 

[dirktheeng]

I am aware that you can do this, but make a cylindar and you will find that the top and bottom (flat surfaces) do not respond because there are no internal points on the flat surfaces.   This is very bad for CFD.  Even with the controls, we still have to take it into meshmixer and then make a solid out of it to get a decent surface mesh.

Please actually try examining the differences between the STL you can get out of Fusion 360 and Meshmixer