Export assembly into STL’s with the setting “On File Per Body” results in duplica

[wagener_olivier]

Also here the same question in English:

Hello Fusion 360 community,

I am currently experiencing a strange behavior, and I am not completely sure if this is intended or if I do something in an unexpected way that triggers this behavior.

In short, I model up bigger assemblies in smaller components which I then reuse multiple times. When I export the complete assembly into STL’s, with the setting “On File Per Body” I get on file for each body in every assembly times the number I copied the assembly.

E.g. in my minimal example shown here, I would expect getting 4 files as a result, but I get 4 x 4 files. So if I open all the files at the same time e.g. in Blender, it initially looks like I have 4 blocks, but every block is 4 times the same body which I then have to clean up…
In this example, the clean up work is manageable. But my current real project results in 800+ single STL files and it is just a pain to clean up.

Thanks for reading and helping out,
Olivier

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@wagener_olivier 
Topic moved from the German boards and Title edited by @hazem.adel  for better feedback and findability

[Phil.E]

Thanks for posting. I can repeat the issue and have logged a bug report for this.

Just to confirm:

• In your example, there are 4 instances of the same component/body
• You expect Save as STL, one file per body, to produce 4 STL files on your local hard drive

Is that correct?

[wagener_olivier]

Sorry, I did not get a notification that you replied to my question. Today, I ran again into the same issue I had back then and wanted to bump this thread. Good to see that you have filed a bug report. Is there any outlook on when this might get fixed? For me, this breaks my workflow since I often need to export assemblies as single files for 3D printing.

To get back to your questions:

* In my examples were 4 instances of the same component

* Exporting the assembly to STL with one file per body, I do expect to find 4 files being exported to my disk.

Best,
Olivier

[JeromeBriot]

@wagener_olivier You can try the ExportIt add-in.

You can use the GitHubToFusion360 add-in to ease the installation process.

[wagener_olivier]

Hello Jérôme,

Thank you for your reply. I tested the exporter add-in and unfortunately, it has different quirks which are deal breaking for me. To be more precise, the position of the duplicated components gets messed up during export and if I import all the exported files at once into Blender, some pieces are unfortunately not at their final position.

Best,
Olivier

[Phil.E]

Hi @wagener_olivier thanks for responding.

The ticket is not yet fixed, although there has been some investigation. 

The question I have, and need some clarification about, is this:

To get back to your questions:

* In my examples were 4 instances of the same component

* Exporting the assembly to STL with one file per body, I do expect to find 4 files being exported to my disk.

Have you tried using copy+paste on your hard drive to create 4 instances of the same component, after exporting just one of them?

[wagener_olivier]

Hello @Phil.E 

Copying the files by hand creates the new issue that the absolute position of the mesh is then lost. When I reimport all the single exported files in Blender (or any other 3D program), I need all the single parts to be at the exact location where they were in Fusion 360.

My biggest assembly consists of several hundred single parts. Touching up positions by hand for copied entities is unfortunately not an option for me.

Exporting as a single mesh and splitting the mesh up is also not an option since then the name references get lost which I still need though.

Best,

Olivier

[Phil.E]

Thanks for clarifying. (ref: NC-14248)

[wagener_olivier]

Since I had to clean up my exports so many times, I created a small utility that does it automatically for me. I just wanted to share if anyone else runs into the same issue. It works due to the fact that the wrongly duplicated files have the same MD5 hash.

https://gitlab.com/0x3b29/clean-duplicate-fusion-files

Best,
Olivier