Converting Blended Surfaces To Solids in Fusion 360?
Perhaps these videos might help.
Mark
Mark Hughes
Owner, Hughes Tooling
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Whether you need to convert it into a T-Spline or a "regular" solid body depends on what you mean with "modify".
If you want to maintain the shape of the scanned data an simply want to add mechanical features, such as holes, etc. The imported geometry can be converted into a "regular" body.
If you want to modify the shape, e.g. bending, or twisting the entire shape in Fusion 360 it would likely be better to do that with a T-Spline. However, T-Splines work mostly with quad surfaces, not triangles and there is likely goiung to be a good bit of manual work involved in converting the scanned geometry into a T-Spline body, if you absolutely have to stick with Fusion 😉
I think I can create a T-Spline for this bone structure in 10-15 minutes with little hand work that has relatively littel loss in fidelitey if I am allowed to use Blender.
Honestly, Blender and Fusion 360 really are a dream team.
- Import the scanned STL into Blender.
- Create a cylinder around it and add as many segments as necessary to approximate the original shape of the imported mesh.
- Add and then apply shrinkwrap modifier.
- Close ends.
- Export mesh as .obj and import into Fusion.
- Convert into T-Spline
Done!
If you can post the STL (or a dropbox link if it is too large) I'll give it a try and post a screencast.
@sohnrog @Anonymous
I finally got around to making a screencast of how this mesh can be reduced in number of polygons and converted into quad mesh with the help of Blender's Remesh modifier.
The video could have been shorter, please forgive me for the rambling 😉
A final note: on my mid 2010 i7 iMac it took almost 4 minutes in Fusion 360 for converting the imported mesh into a T-Spline. Watch the number the number of polygons/faces in Blender when increasing the Octree depth.
Hi Jesse,
Had a spin with Blender, or I should say Blender had a spin with me 
Clearly very powerful software but, the UI is slightly different, I mean, RMB to select something, really?
I now know you can change that in the preferences, but initially the interface is designed to be RMB to select.
I read here in the forum that a lot of people use Blender in some way to modify objects to import in Fusion 360, even start a model in Blender and finish it in Fusion.
Will also try to learn a little bit more of Blender in the near future.
Best regards,
Ludo
Yes, Blender's UI takes qite bit to get used to. The right click to select has been discused for the last 10 years 😉 I've gotten used to it.
Panning and pivoting objects in the viewport using a mouse is exactly the oposite behavior. Click-drag on the middle mous button pivots in Blender and pans in Fusion. Click-drag while holding the shift button pans in Blender but pivots in Fusion 360. This one is driving me nuts 
, as recently I've been working with both applications.
The modifier stack as shown in this thread has a few very powerful tools. The other powerful features are all the modeling tools for Subdivision surfaces that can be easlily turned into T-Splines. While some things in the Fusion 360 UI for T-Spline modeling are much more intuitive to grasp, modeling in Blender is much faster. Much less mosue cicking involved as it is optimised for using the left hand and left hand side of the keyboard for most of the mesh modeling tool shortcuts, so the mouse can stay close ot the object in the viewport.
There are a number of tools in the Fusion Sculpt environment which I believe are better designed than the ones in Blender. The proportional modeling (Blender term) or Soft Modification not only looks beautiful but works better than in Blender.
Here is a link to the Blender's keyboard shortcuts for the two most essential modes, the Object mode and the Edit mode.
http://wiki.blender.org/uploads/1/14/Keyboardlayout_250.png
Here is a link to a youTube video showing a tool for Blender that allows very precise and very fast control for retoplogizing an existing mesh. Probably not needed for this bone structure.
While it is not free, at ~$72 its one heck of a deal.
https://cgcookiemarkets.com/all-products/retopoflow/
Hi @sohnrog,
If you haven't already, I'd also recommend trying the Autodesk Memento beta for this - this actually includes some technology for automatically retopologizing a scanned mesh into quads.
1. Download the Memento beta from here: http://memento.autodesk.com/try-memento
2. After installation, open Momento, and 'Load a model' from the My Computer section to load in the scanned data
(Optional step 2b - Memento provides a lot of nice functionality for repairing and refining scanned data, which might be worth exploring)
3. From menu on the left-hand side, select Export > Export 3D model
4. From the 'Export as' dropdown, select OBJ(Quads), then click Export
(You might want to play with the Target face count number here to get the desired level of detail in the resultant model)
You now have an OBJ quad representation of your model, which you can bring into Fusion in the usual way:
1. In a new design, start a Form and use INSERT > Insert Mesh to load in the OBJ
2. Use the MODIFY > Convert command to convert this Mesh to a T-Splines body
3. Finish Form (or MODIFY > Convert again) will convert this T-Splines body to a solid
If you try this, let us know if this does/doesn't give you a decent result. We're planning to integrate similar functionality into Fusion 360, which should allow you to perform this whole workflow directly inside Fusion.
Thanks,
Jake
Jake Fowler
Principal Experience Designer
Fusion 360
Autodesk