Smooth surface for 3d printing.

[maris_l]

Apologies if this has been asked before, but I'm struggling a bit to understand which way to go.

I'm trying to build fender of a car in fusion 360 for 3d printing. I want to attach some stuff to an existing shell. What I'm struggling with is - getting a smooth surface in fusion 360. 

Here's how it looks in blender: 

And this is what it looks like when I import it into fusion 360 as a mesh.

My idea was to convert this into a T-spline so I can get rid of the triangles, add some width to it since it currently has none and convert it into a smooth object, which as I understand is not possible since there are triangles. If I add some thickness to it in blender and then import it into fusion 360, it becomes boxy. If I remesh it in blender - it rounds the corners of the model. Blender itself fails to fully convert this into a quad mesh. 

One of the options I've found is to reverse engineer it using forms. Was wondering if there is an easier way to convert this into a smooth surface in fusion 360 without having to remodel it from scratch? My goal is to get a 1mm thick smooth solid object, so I can add some brackets to it etc. Thanks.

[SaeedHamza · Accepted solution]

My advice is to recreate the whole thing in the form workspace using the mesh as reference, maintaining quad faces and avoiding N-Gons, while also using a reasonable face count, as the face count increases when the curvature is high and decreases when the curvature is low.

You could try converting the mesh into a t-spline body using Rhino Quad Remesh command, but that won't get you the smooth geometry you're after, so recreating it is going to get you a much better result if you consider the things I mentioned above.

[maris_l]

Alright, thanks!

[adam.helps]

This mesh is simple enough that you might be able to convert the mesh directly to a T-spline and then edit it to get rid of the triangles. That's a bad workflow if your input mesh has a large face count, but that's not the case here.

Once you have it in the Form workspace you can delete edges to merge many of those triangles into quads. You may want to stay in box mode for that step so that it won't be constantly trying to compute the surface as you're in the middle of fixing the topology. Rebuilding it from scratch is also an option, but this one looks like it would be easier to just go directly to T-splines and edit it into what you want.

[etfrench]

I've found that exporting as a step file, then importing into the slicer will give much finer results than exporting as an stl.