New to Fusion 360. Trying to take a mesh butterfly keychain and add an indented rectangle to the middle of it with someone's name inside. Running into...issues.

[Christiannorrid]

I am admittedly very new to 3d modeling. I've printed out some complex pieces in the past but this is my first go at actually changing a design.

I've spent the better part of a full day trying to figure this out and, well, I'm lost.

I have this butterfly design in mesh but from what I can find out, Fusion simply will not allow you to put embossing on mesh, much less extrude/cut out the rectangle in the middle where I want to place the name.

I've tried converting it to solid to I can do the rectangle sketch > extrude cut method but with this model it just end up turning black.

I made some progress last night on a simpler butterfly model in that I got the rectangle cut in and a name on the rectangle face but I spent probably a solid 2-3 hours trying to select and move the **** name once it was down and just couldn't get it to work. So here I am, stuck between trying to figure out a way to do it still in mech (doesn't look recommended) or converting to a solid and dealing with the black conversion problem AND going back to my "unable to move text" problem last night.

Does anyone have any pointers here with what I'm attempting to do?

Thanks!

[Drewpan]

Hi,

If you are VERY New to 3D Modelling then this project is WAY beyond your

current knowledge level. I strongly recommend reading Fusion RULE #0

that is Pinned to the top of this forum BEFORE you have another go at

something this complex.

Ok. Your problem started with two things - the size of the model which is

simply way too small - 9.992mm, which was built with in excess of 10,000

individual mesh triangles. You can model something that small and with

some detail but not THAT much detail. More than fine with "some" types

of 3D printing but for a back conversion to a solid - forget it.

The method I used (see attached file) was firstly to reduce the number of

triangles to whatever it was to about 8000. Then I repaired the mesh so that

it was watertight. This is a very standard method of importing a mesh into

fusion.

After all this, THEN I converted it to a Solid. 8,000 triangles took a while to

calculate on something less than 10mm across. Once I had a useable solid

I had to do an Extrude to Emboss as Emboss couldn't cope with the number

of faces. Debossing is just using the extruded text and using it as a Cutting

tool with the Combine command.

One of the things about fusion is that there a often several ways to achieve

the same end result. Sometimes there is only ONE way to get that result but

it is not always obvious so you need to know the other methods to find one

which will work.

Cheers

Andrew

[Christiannorrid]

Hey Drew, 

Thanks for the response! I am absolutely VERY new, and I mistakenly thought this would be an easy starting point. I was very wrong.

I appreciate the help and effort and will be going into some easier tutorials here.

Cheers!