Smooth / Flat faces before exporting

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I was wondering if there is any way to shade faces as "flat" or "smooth" in Fusion 360 before exporting?

For now Fusion exports model with flat shading as default and, in my case, when I'm importing it to Blender, I have to smooth whole model and then manually select those faces that should create flat surfaces and change shading to "flat".

Example:

Mesh in Fusion:

Exported and imported to Blender (default flat shading on all faces):

Shading changed to "smooth". Triangles can be seen in some places:

Manually selecting faces, which need to have flat shading:

Done:

[PhilProcarioJr]

@Anonymous

There is no way to do this in Fusion as far as I am aware, but you should be able to set the smoothing angle in Blender to get the correct results on your entire model without having to do everything seperate.

I don't know Blender well enough to tell you how. @TrippyLighting can you shed some light on this subject.

I know in Maya it is very easy to do and I would assume it is also easy to do in Blender.

[PhilProcarioJr]

@Anonymous

Look here this might help you.

http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/734/how-to-smooth-shade-an-object-while-retaining-hard-edges

and here...

http://blender-manual-i18n.readthedocs.io/ja/latest/modeling/meshes/smoothing.html

[Anonymous]

@PhilProcarioJr

Thanks for your reply, I know about "auto smooth" option in Blender, but very often it doesn't 'catch' some surfaces, which in Fusion can be easily selected.

Thank you for that link as well, very useful!

Maybe some day that option will be available, it would be great.

[PhilProcarioJr]

@Anonymous

So adjusting the smoothing angle doesn't give you the results your after? You might have to play with the angles a bit to get the correct results but it should work. I do this all the time with models exported from Fusion to Maya and the results are fast and spot on.

Right now in Fusion I have only seen flat shaded or smooth shaded, but no way to set smoothing groups. Honestly though smoothing groups is a mesh modeler thing only and the CAD world has not ventured into that area yet. Just like UV mapping....it would be so nice to be able to create custom UV maps in CAD....

The smoothing/sharp edge on CAD models is controlled by surface tangency so it's done automatically which is probably why CAD apps don't deal with it, but it would be nice if when exporting a model those smoothing angles would be exported. The problem is stl files don't support smoothing angles so the CAD app would need to export .obj (or similar) files which I have brought up many times with the Fusion dev team. i don't think this is going to happen though.

You might want to post this to the ideastation though.

[TrippyLighting]

In Blende you can apply the EdgeSplit modifier.

If the automatic settigs don't work for a specisfic model, you can mark edged as sharp. This would be hard to explain and is better shown in a screencast.

If you can share the model, or just the .stl export I can take a look at it.