Transcript:
In this video, I show you how to customize 3d print over phone cases with fusion 360 and we’re starting right now. Hello, my name is Daniel. Welcome to the Crosslink Channel. I would like to help you being more successful with 3d printing and if you hear for the first time, subscribe and hit the bell notifications. So you don’t miss anything, so it’s quite a while. I’ve been thinking about making a video How to customize 3d models in fusion 360 and what could be a better and more tangible way to do this by doing a customized phone case. So let’s get started. This is the Crosslink logo. And it’s a cutout in the back of this case. So you can see the back of the phone through the logo. So first of all, you should make sure that you have fusion 360 installed. I’ve put a download link in the description of this video, and I’ve also put a link to an introduction of video in this info card here. So I’m heading over to think of Erskyll and I’m going to try to find something for my iPhone 6s and I’m entering iPhone 6s case as you can see. There is quite a lot of results. I like to find one that is printable with flexible material to find out whether these cases are printable with PLA or CPU. Usually you have to check the description and hope the author put some information in there. How to print it, but sometimes it’s also quite visible, already seeing the model. This one here, for example, is clearly going to be printed in PLA. Otherwise, it’s just going to fall off off your phone, so that’s pretty obvious, but sometimes it’s not so easy to tell, so you have to check how much of the case is going around to fall on there. Any intentional gaps in the brackets or corners of the case, so it’s printable with harder material and so it will slip over the phone. So this is probably what? I want lets. Check it out! Oh, yes, so this looks like really promising, and you can clearly see that this has been printed in a very flexible material. Actual filler, flex something. I’m using Ninjaflex. So it’s pretty similar, so let’s take this one and let’s download the STL file for this case, and then we can take that to fusion 360 to customize it with our own logo. Okay, so the next step is to import this phone case into fusion, 360 and fusion 360 But I want to do now first is I want to create a new project and want to call it iPhone custom cases just to have it a little bit in a subfolder and so let’s open that, and now we have this new project here on the right hand side, and we are going to insert the phone case here the model and to do that you click on this. Pull down menu and click on insert mesh and here you can read. It’s already telling you you can either import all BGA or STL mesh files, so let’s click that and let’s locate the file that we just downloaded, so it’s here on my desktop here. It shows you the model, but it’s not finally saved, so you can still rotate it and think about how you want to Orient it that. I want to have it exactly like that, so I’m going to confirm this, okay, So now our object is in the workspace, and we want to modify it and treat, for example, a hole in the object to show the logo of the phone, but we cannot do this until we have converted this mesh object, which is represented here as this mesh body. We have to convert that into what’s called a so-called B rep and boundary representation. And if you want to know more about the differences of a mesh body and a B rep. I’ve put a link in the description of this video. That explains very well like what are the particular differences, and the fact is you have to convert it before you can modify it. And this option is normally visible here in this right-click menu when you select the body, but it’s not available until you do one more thing, and that is to disable the design history for a moment and this is an option in the top object of this three year. You go down and say, do not capture design history and give you a warning that all the timeline and design history will be removed. That’s fine for me, so I can now go back to this mesh body and right-click it, and now I’ve got the option to convert it to a beer app, so let’s do that and let’s say we want a new body and then it’s going to give us a warning that there is a large number of facets in this object and this might happen to you if you want to convert any kind of object, that is an STL file. If you want to convert that to be rap, the software is going to complain above a certain number. I actually don’t know the exact number, but it’s going to tell you well. This is a lot of facets and it’s not recommended to have that many facets, and it also depends on your machine’s performance whether this is a good idea or not, so I’ve got lots of memory, and I’m pretty sure that this is not an issue, so I’m just going to continue and what you can see now is that our mesh body has been disabled and we have a new body that is now also in a different color, so anything that is pink is usually not modifiable, because it’s these kind of mesh bodies and the gray one is something that is clearly distinguished, so we can know, okay. This is the kind of object that we need. It’s also got a different symbol here as a body symbol. So now we can continue and do our first modification, so let’s save that for now just to have it as an intermediate step and say this is the iPhone 6s custom case. Okay, as a next step, I want to import my logo into this document, and I want to convert it into a 3d model. The problem is, I can only insert so-called SVG files, which is a vector graphics format, but I only have a logo in a PNG file, so I cannot directly go with the PNG file. I have to convert that into a vector graphics first, and there’s various tools out there to do that. What I’m going to use is a free open-source software that’s called Inkscape and that’s a pretty straightforward process in Inkscape. I’m just going to open that file and importing that into my Inkscape document and one thing that you need to know, and we’re gonna start with the default logo here that I have. If your file that you want to convert doesn’t have any spacing between the corners and the start of your jek’t like this one there you can see here. There’s barely a pixel of difference here between the corner of the image and the start of this object. If that is the case, you should add a little more spacing to the corners because the edge detection that we are going to use is really not going to work otherwise, so instead of using this one. I’m using a one that I’ve just created, and I’ve increased the size of the canvas, so it’s not going to be a resizing, but it’s really just a canvas increase of the image, so I have a little bit of distance here between the corners of this image and the actual start of the object that I want to trace, so keep that in mind when you start importing these image files. The next thing I need to do is resize that down, so it’s a little bit smaller and fits into the document and lets. Do that quickly, yeah? I think that’s fine, and now we can start with the edge detection, and that’s a menu here which is called path and we can trace a bitmap here, so that’s where we have to start and we can see already. There is a live preview available. What’s going to happen so you have to enable that? So if you disable it, you always have to click on update if you change something on the parameter, so I’m going with the live preview and I’m using the edge detection here, which gives me just the edges of the object and it’s gonna create a path around that, and that’s what I want to use to create the 3d model from so let’s use that, and I didn’t change any of the parameters here and just went with, okay, and then I have to close this window to see the result and I can zoom in here. A little bit and you can see. There is, there’s a new black corner around this object, and if you click in the middle here and hit delete, what’s left is actually just a stroke that we want to use to create the 3d representation of this logo and the next step is to save this file as an SVG graphics. So I’m going to save it on my desktop as logo, Svg and I can now go to fusion and hit this insert menu and say insert SVG. I’m going to open my logo and I’m not going to insert it directly to this phone case. I’m gonna place it besides just to create a 3d object first, and then I’m going to use that new 3d object afterwards to stitch out something from the back of the phone case, so we can just hit finish and say, okay, basically. I’m fine, I can move it here and see if it’s like from size-wise. That looks good. I just keep it separate and say finish so now that we have imported this SVG, we can start extruding an actual 3d object from that, so let’s zoom in a little bit and look how that works, so I’m going to use the extrude menu here, and we have to select now a profile or multiple profiles. In this case, it’s two different profiles that we want to extrude so like second select the first one, then click on the second one, and then we have to tell fusion how high in this case the new 3d object should be. So let’s say we want a 5 millimeter extraction, so it’s 5 and hit enter, and then we can turn the view to the side and actually see that we have a 3d representation of the logo, which is really nice and we got two different bodies now and we can move that now and use it as a stamp, basically to stitch out something from the back of the phone case, so let’s select those objects and then hit the M button to move it to the center of the phone case. Just zoom in a little bit here to see if we are really in the middle, just be careful and with the iPhone I made once the mistake that I forgot about the Apple logo here above, so move it a little bit down, so we kind of really place it on top, but we probably should place it somewhere here in the middle and then make it equally distanced. And then say, okay. This is the move operation. Let’s see if that’s correct. And it’s sitting on top of the phone case. What we actually need to do now is to move it also in the set. Direction, a little bit into the phone case and then create this kind of combination sort of cut out. Let’s move it again and move it by – -. Let’s say move it by – three millimeters into the case, and it should look out at the bottom. Yeah, so we can see we can see it from both sides, so that’s good, because then we know it’s gonna really be cut through. And now the last thing to do is to do an operation that is called combined and we want to cut using the operation. The target body is our phone case, so we let’s select that first, and then we need to select two bodies. So in this case, it’s the two objects here, so we like to select both of them and we can already see what’s going to happen. They are going to cut out from the back of the phone case and hit. Okay, so why don’t we just go and print that with some ultra flexible material to see how is coming out so next thing here? I want to show you is how to export this into an STL file again, so we can use cura, for example to slice it, It’s very simple. That’s just a one. Click here, right, Click on this top element and then say save as STL, and then we again have the choice to export it in different qualities. I always try to go with high refinement, which gives me the most detail, so let’s just hit OK and then save it to this file named custom case. Ver -. Okay, so let’s check The result only just a few tries later and a few modifications to the extruder later. This finally printed out pretty well. We only need to do some cleanup here, so because some straining is gonna happen here with this profile that I’m using and one of the harder parts is really to get this off the print pad without actually destroying it. So this part here as I’ve told you already, I didn’t do any additional modifications, so they just connect it to the rest of the case here, just with this one binding string here, probably if I do this next time, I want to add some additional holder part that connects it back to this part of the case, But anyways, let’s take it off now carefully and try it on the phone, so let’s have a look, so this is. This is not very tight. You compare it with this one. Which is the salute? It’s much much tighter fit. It’s the exact same old same print design, and it fits much much better and it’s not prone to really slip off from the phone, so I would say this kind of material makes more sense for phone case. It’s still being quite flexible, so you can peel it off, but it’s not like just falling off, so I think you’ve seen that making custom phone cases is really quite easy if you have to write software and the right tools and the material choice is probably something that you have to be careful with the Ninja Flex is really a nice material, but it’s probably not the best for phone cases because it really slips off the phone quite easily. The zoom the material on the other hand is probably the right choice for me because the phone case flips over the phone quite easily and it’s still really flexible enough for a phone case. So up to you, what you want? I think for something like a squeezy. Benji, the ninja flex is quite a nice material and for other applications but prominent for phone cases. I hope you get value out of this video. If you have questions, use comment section down below, don’t forget to subscribe and see you in the next one [Music] [Music]!