Export texture, UV, and color data with STLs. Maybe even smooth normals?

[i-make-robots]

I've been exporting my fusion360 files for use in my robot simulator

http://imgur.com/8PJBqt6

https://github.com/i-make-robots/Evil-Overlord

It would make them far easier on the eye if they retained the color and texture assigned to them in F360.  I currently use "Export as STL" and choose ASCII to load the files.

I'd love to have a way to export the color at each vertex.  Also good would be an unwrapped texture of the model and UV texture coordinates so that I could load and draw the model as it was.  Throwing away good data?  Noooooooo!

Lastly please, when an STL exports a curved surface, it would nice to have the option to smooth normals so that various shading techniques would correctly interpolate.  I cannot generate an algorithm that correctly finds and merges similar normals without getting false positives and false negatives.

I'm sure game developers are asking for this stuff.  Is there a plugin that already does the job?

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Yes, especially the UV's. In fusion when I make something and apply a grid, the UV's are pretty much where I want them but it never carries over on export.

[TrippyLighting]

Folks, perhaps, before posting and voting, use 5 minutes of googling to povide yourselves with some basic education of what the .stl format is used for.

The .stl format was initially devoped in the late 80s for a one directional data transport to a 3D stereo lithography printer by 3D Systems. It does not and cannot contain any infrmation about color, texture or UV coordinates. 

.stl is is about the most basic and worst format to exchange 3D data between applications. It is usually a dense and fully triangulated mesh with no quad surfaces.

No, any Game developer worth their money most certainly don't ask for 3D data in .stl format because Game developers usually work with subdivision surface modeling software, which requires quad surfaces. Formats such as .obj can contain color, texture and UV information.

Formats such as Collada can contain riging data for animation.

Please, that information is at your finger tips. Use them!

[i-make-robots]

I guess I've been out of game development too long.  When I started we didn't even have video cards. 

Had I known what to search I would not have wasted your time or mine.  Thank you for the education.

Wavefront OBJ looks like it will work.  Any chance they'll make an export tool that doesn't force me to jump through those hoops and mess up my part history?

[TrippyLighting]

That is difficult to answer. you can export .obj from Fusion 360 today when you are modeling in the Sculpt environment. But those exports also don't contain colors, textures, or UV information.

If you are creating solid models in the modeling environment there is a way to turn these into meshes and expport these as well but it's a lot of manual work do do this.

What application do you use for working with Exports from Fusion 360 ?

[Anonymous]

The .stl format was just in the title, for me it's more a case of havng *some* straight forward export method of converting each body to quads, keep the self generated UV's and heirarchy. Materials are not compatible across different 3d and rendering programs so leave that out, color info would also be useful for base assignments like Fusion can generate per component. 

Manually doing this is a massive PITA. Autodesk has a bazillion formats to work with, material linking with max/maya with an 'export to' option or just a most compatible generic for standalone renderers (of which there are dozens). Autodesk has the biggest cachet of functionality on the 3d planet, what we'd like is for some of it to migrate into fusion via plugin, core function or script. 

This is something I've been asking for since I started with fusion. The self generated UV's are a perfect jumping point and would cut out dozens of hours of manually making them.

[TrippyLighting]

As far as I know there is no straight forward method that converts Solids into Quads in whatever format.

Formats that convery solid geometry such as .step and .iges use a difernt way of reperesenting geometry than mesh based formats such as .obj.

Mesh based formats also usually don't contain any hierarchy and solid based formata also often don't contain that as this is application specific.

This is not about the format, it is about the math and algorithms that can turn a Solid Model representation into a quad mesh surface. I am not saying that this is impossile, it's just not trivial, or straight forward.

[Anonymous]

To do this right now I export iges and use Moi 3d to convert to fbx. It does this with whatever level of detail you want as n-gons, quads and triangles or triangles, and it does it in a matter of seconds and they render perfectly in Adesks fbx viewer. It's not rocket science, and that whole, brilliant program is written by one guy. Fusion could do this internally referencing it's own tree and parameters.

[Anonymous]

To expound, a brep is a representation, it's already present as points, edges and faces which is why they are faceted and not perfectly smooth, this also contains UV's, the conversion is already in place and what we 'see' is brep, under that is basic geometry. 

[TrippyLighting]

I would suggest that you make that a separate Idea with a clear title.

[Anonymous]

Sorry to necro this thread, but I think you need to consider Fusion 360 to be just the start of a game asset workflow.  You don't want those meshes in your game engine as they are just too heavy.  I have just started using Fusion 360, but for me the workflow is:

1. Create high-poly model in Fusion 360.
2. Export to .STL file.
3. Import into 3D-Coat.
4. Optionally add detail in 3D-Coat Sculpt Room.
5. Repto to low-poly mesh.
6. Generate UV-Maps.
7. Bake normal map and ambient occlusion.
8. Paint and add fine detail.
9. Export low-poly model and texture to game engine as .FBX and .PNG.

I think this is a pretty standard workflow, however the applications involved will vary.

[colin.smith]

We have had the request for exporting an OBJ file with UV and texture.  It is in our backlog but likely not a high priority item in the next year. As for the STL request - this is something that would have to be supported by our translator.

[emailGS28V]

Hi, was the feature already implemented? I have a certain use case - I model robots in Fusion and have a custom simulator software. I would like to supply models from Fusion to the simulator to get accurate results. However, to get nice looking renders, the normal map is required.