STL File editing

[Muddybuddy]

I have a mesh stl articulated dragon file and am trying to uncurl it to print on a belt printer at a bigger size. How would I go about splitting and rotating each section in order to straighten the object out?

[TrippyLighting]

I would not do this in Fusion 360, but in Blender, or Autodesk Meshmixer

You can separate the mesh shells in Fusion, but then end up having to move each individual object manually, as there are no pattern tools in the mesh workspace. The solid/surface pattern tools don't work with meshes.

[hfcandrew]

Ya no way to do this automatically. This looks like a 'print' in place thing too, so if moving pieces around it will be very important to make sure there is clearance (gapping) to all the articulations. Meshmixer could do this no problem though, and rather than by hand eyeballing the replacement of each one, you could just do one piece, transform it, then duplicate the value change for each piece to save a lot of time.

[hfcandrew · Accepted solution]

I played around for you, found a work flow.

Use Analysis > Clearance to make sure your objects are not intersecting. I checked with a 0.2mm clearance tolerance. Best this model would get without modifying.

https://help.autodesk.com/view/MSHMXR/2019/ENU/?guid=GUID-AB7B130A-6E98-4B37-A4A6-8194A4B1F51F

Did a little math to find that they should be spaced 10.01mm apart, so I could just type the value in and not have to check clearance every time. See attached for the .mix, you can continue this and add hundreds of body pieces if desired.