Shelling an imported mesh

[Anonymous]

I am trying to make a shift knob out of this https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:359898. I have already made a prototype and found that it is too light for my liking and want to have a cavity to put weights in it. When I try and shell it I get "Error: The operation could not create a valid result. Try adjusting the values or changing the input geometry." Is there anyway to fix this? I lowered the mesh count by a factor of 10 and don't really want to go any lower.

[Anonymous]

This is the first one I modified. Along with adding a cavity for the second one I made it thicker and modified the hole for the rod to go into.

[royce.florian4XTFJ]

Hello. The work around I found for this works very Well but may not be the most straight forward and requires a decent pc with GPU card. 

I import the mesh (.stl or .obj) into Autodesk Recap photo and reexport as a .obj « quad mesh ». There are other free softwares that can do this as well. Be careful that the mesh res isn’t too high! This will depend on your pc. 

I then ilport the quad meshed .obj (not .stl as .stl can not be quad mesh) into fusion 360. Then right click the body in the left menu and « convert ». 

You should now have a normal solid body that, depending on its geometry, can be shelled/modified as any other body!

not sure this is the best option, but it works!

[TrippyLighting]

In theory that is how I'd do this as well and that is really what I created this tutorial for:

However, there are a number of additional steps that make converting this particular mesh a more challenging candidate.

1. It has internal structure that should probably be removed before conversion. I did that in Blender.

2. In Instant meshes the resolución needs to be increased from the default, because otherwise details will be lost.

3. After converting into into a T-Spline in Fusion 360 it needs to be repaired with Utilities->Repair body.

4. Then Fusion 360 still complains about self intersecting faces. those have tobe found and fixed manually.

Then shelling will likely also have to be done in the T-Spline environment, because this geometry is too complex to be shelled with the tool in the Model environment. Some of these things I'd also probably do in Blender as working with a mesh is simply faster than working with a T-Spline.

Edit: This is converted into a surface in Fusion 360.

If this is for 3D printing you are probably better off working in Meshmixer.