Opening, Inspecting, and Repairing CAD and Mesh files

Welcome to this book, 3D Printing with Fusion 360. Fusion 360 is a great tool to create and edit designs using parametric or direct modeling methods. With the addition of automated modeling, generative design, and topology optimization technologies, Fusion 360 users now have a plethora of methods to design for additive manufacturing. This book will provide the necessary steps for you to manufacture your designs with Fusion 360, using common 3D-printing technologies such as fused filament fabrication, stereolithography, selective laser sintering, binder jetting, and metal powder bed fusion. You will also get valuable tips and tricks on how to set up Fusion 360, which will allow you to get the most out of the software for your 3D-printing needs.

Fusion 360 is a cloud-based 3D modeling, Computer Aided Design (CAD), Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM), computer aided engineering (CAE), and Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design software platform for professional product design and manufacturing (https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/overview).

It is available for both Windows and macOS, with simplified applications available for both Android and iOS. Fusion 360’s initial release dates back to 2013, which is around the same time that 3D printing became mainstream. During the 2010s, the maker community quickly adopted Fusion 360 for designing and manufacturing.

When manufacturing designs using 3D printing, mesh (STL) files were the only file types that early 3D printing slicer software would accept as input. As the maker community created and shared their designs publicly using STL files on web pages such as thingiverse.com, the number of 3D printable designs increased exponentially. Unfortunately, the STL file format has many problems and limitations. To fix those problems, the 3D printing community needed reliable and easy-to-use software.

Fusion 360 always included functionality around working with both CAD and mesh files, making it a great tool for 3D printing. However, Fusion 360’s mesh functionality was offered as a technology preview and needed to be turned on within Fusion 360’s preferences. Autodesk – the parent company of Fusion 360 – releases new updates for Fusion 360 regularly. With the July 2021 update of Fusion 360, Autodesk made significant changes to the mesh workflows, by graduating the mesh workspace from being a part of a tech preview to being a part of Fusion 360’s Design workspace.

Today, you can use Fusion 360 to open, inspect, and repair mesh files that you can download from numerous third-party sources.

In this chapter, we will start by looking at the various ways we can bring CAD/mesh data into Fusion 360 by introducing you to Fusion Team and the Fusion 360 user interface. We will go over how to create projects and folders to better organize our data. Next, we will show numerous methods to insert mesh files such as STL, OBJ, and 3MF into Fusion 360. We will end the chapter by inspecting the mesh data we insert into Fusion 360 for potential defects and repairing those defects automatically and manually.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Opening and uploading workflows for CAD models and mesh files
• Inserting Mesh workflows for STL, OBJ, and 3MF files
• Inspecting Mesh bodies and repairing them

By the end of this chapter, you will have learned how to open models created using other tools in Fusion 360. You will have learned how to insert mesh files into Fusion 360. You will also know how to inspect and repair mesh files using automatic and manual methods.