How to fill in mesh to make solid object?

[joshpigford]

I've created a mesh surface that I'd now like to fill in to make a full, solid object. Use case here is that I'm creating this object to ultimately be cut out of wood on my CNC machine, but the issue here is I just have the surface instead of the filled in area.

I'm ultimately wanting it to be level/flat on the underside.

[SaeedHamza]

You need to patch it from the bottom and then stitch it

I can take a look if you could share the mesh

Regards

[joshpigford]

Here's the file I'm working with.

[SaeedHamza · Accepted solution]

Here is a screencast

Regards

[joshpigford]

Saeed, this was so fantastically helpful. Thank you so much!

[renataFD2X9]

Hello Saeed,

I have a very similar case as Josh has and I was trying to follow your very helpful tutorial, but I got stuck. I have a mesh in .stl of a 3D scan of a human head which I want to fill. As a final goal I want to make a helmet out of this 3D scan, so I assumed that making this mesh a solid object and filling it could be my starting point. 

I was able to somehow follow your steps in the video, given that I think I have a newer version I needed to find the new ways of doing what you did. I got stuck on the extrusion of the projected geometry that you made, where your extrusion was somehow hollow once it went pass the mesh. Mine didn't do that, it was a solid extrusion from top to bottom. 

I don't know what I'm doing wrong, would it be too much trouble if you could make the same tutorial that you made for Josh but with the current version of Fusion and with my mesh?

[TrippyLighting]

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@renataFD2X9 wrote:

Hello Saeed,

... I assumed that making this mesh a solid object and filling it could be my starting point....

---

That is a good assumption, however it really depends on how you do that.

The mesh is open at the bottom, so converting it directly into a solid isn't going to work.

The first step would be to convert it into an open surface body.

Using the faceted conversion option, the only one available to free subscribers, is a terrible idea

Then we'd use a surface patch to close the bottom and stitch it into a solid.

The easiest way to do that is to convert the mesh into a surface body using the organic mesh conversion, but that is only available to paid subscribers.

We can use Blender or InstantMeshes for the conversion into a quad mesh, import that into Fusion and convert it into a T-Spline and then surface body.

Attached is a model where I used the organic conversion after fixing the mesh in Blender. I removed some duplicate vertices and the bottom rim had a few triangles missing.

If you'd like to learn more about this, I can create a screencast.

[renataFD2X9]

Hello Trippy, thank you very much for you help!! 

After seeing your answer I dived again into the project to try to achieve my goal. I had noticed before the missing triangles at the bottom, but I didn't know how to fix them. So I installed blender to try to follow your steps. After doing some investigations, I managed to repair the triangles at the bottom, and after that I was able to close the mesh at the bottom. Then, I exported that to an STL file, and then import it into fusion so that I can convert it into a solid body using the organic mesh conversion but I couldn't. Then I thought maybe it was because I didn't eliminate the duplicated vertices in blender. So I tried to eliminate the duplicated vertices in blender by following some tutorials, but it didn't help... I don't even know if I did it correctly.

So basically I tried a lot of different things to try to follow what you explained, but I'm sure I'm missing something.

After not achieving my goal by trying those steps, I tried using the file that you kindly provided to try and create my helmet. I don't need any complicated geometry or design, for the helmet. At this point I was only trying to perform a shell operation so that I can have the first prototype of the helmet. I can make some other geometry modifications after that but I think that starting with a shell would be enough. The problem is that I couldn't perform the shell operation. I tried selecting the bottom face for the shell operation but it won't let me input any widths for the shell, it pops an error. And that's with small widths like 0.01 mm, if I try 5 mm for the shell's width the program freezes.

To summarize, I could use the screencast that you're mentioning so that I can make sure that I'm not missing any step. I do have access to blender, and I do have access to organic mesh conversion. Knowing this, could you help me with a screencast of how you would do it please? If you can also include the part of the shell operation that would be great for me, I would like to see how you get around that error.

Thank you in advance for all your help, is being very useful and I do feel like I'm making progress so thanks!

[TrippyLighting]

Here is a screencast explaining the process:

https://youtu.be/QaHLIh018ns