Transcript:
In this video, we’re going to discuss exporting. STL files out of fusion 360 for 3d printing sounds simple. Well, maybe it’s not as easy as you think. Let’s get started. Welcome back to makers. Muse goes so exporting and STL file for 3d printing is the backbone of your workflow from modeling in fusion 360 to then printing out your model on your 3d printer. So you might be singing yourself, OK? Angus, why are you making a video on exporting STL files? It’s pretty darn easy. Well, yes, initially it is, but there’s definitely some settings that newcomers for 3d modeling definitely need to know about in terms of print quality and also in terms of exporting multiple bodies for 3d printing. And I’m going to go through them in this video today. So start with the simplest example. Shall we? What I have here is a wheel hub from the Robot Off-road platform I recently announced on the Channel and made a video on made in poly maker PC Max and basically I want to export this file as an STL file, so in fusion. You can do this in a couple of ways. The simplest is probably to select your body over on the left hand side, right-click and select save as STL. You can also do it by selecting on the top left hand side, the file and 3d print or finally, you can select make here all of these options. Bring up the same dialog box. Alright, so, in the 3d print menu, and when you open up a new file, it has this output center 3d print utility automatically ticked, and that’s very useful. If you want to go straight to your 3d printing slicer and print your object. But for us, we just want to save in STL file and work with it later. So I’m going to uncheck that. So now now to select your model for printing, you need to just basically click it, And in this case, we only have one body, so it’s quite simple. You just select it either. Clicking it in the the interface, or you can also select it here under the drop-down, so it selected our hub now print quality and this is important. It’s called refinement in fusion 360 Let’s go and define. How many triangles your 3d model your? STL file has so more triangles means more details. Great, right, But it also means more file size, a bigger file size and longer slicing times, so it’s set on medium as a default and honestly, for the most part, this is fine and we can actually preview our mesh by hitting the preview mesh icon and here fusion gives you a really nice breakdown of what triangles will generate because an. STL file is built up with triangles. It’s turning all those curves, Those nice, curved surfaces into facets, so it’s really important. If you’re designing something that you may be scaling up in future, you might be increasing the size of those triangles. They might become quite obvious in the 3d print. So in that case, you might want to go to a different setting, for example. Hi, and here. We see what the detail is. When we refined on high setting, however, unless you’re playing to scale your model up or print on a very high detail system like an SLA resin system, you’re unlikely to see any gains, making the print quality higher than the medium default on SEM machine. So that’s why I usually leave it on. And if you really want to delve into things, you can actually change all the different options yourself without going on default through here, so service deviation and normal deviation and all those other things. Each of those settings will increase or decrease your triangle count and increase or decrease your file size and quality, But I’m happy with my medium settings, so let’s just say okay, now it’s going to take us to me to save it as an STL file, and it’s going to call it real hub like that now, although I did offer to open it Straight up into mesh mixer, which is also owned by Autodesk. I didn’t do that. I just opened it up separately, but you can see here. It was at a very nice. STL file, no errors and ready to go and be sent to your 3d printer. Okay, that’s the simplest example out of the way. Now, let’s go into the more complex ones here. I have a catch which I recently showed off. In my 3d printed hinges video. And in this case, it’s a two-part design, But you can’t print it all in one. We don’t want to do that. We want to you want to print them separately, but I have modelled them all in one two bodies in the same file because I use one model sketch to offset the internal part. So you can do that really, really. It’s really powerful to do that. Within infusion 360 we’re not modeling them separately in two files and trying to guess the dimensions were actually using one part to influence the other partners. It’s actually a really good way to model, but in this case, we don’t want to save them as a scene, Les. TL you want to export them separately? Which, thankfully is also really easy to do so again. Let’s go to file 3d print. I’m just going to uncheck preview mesh again Because I’m not really interested in that right now and basically. I’ve got the job down here on the left hand side for bodies, and I just select which one I want. You hover over it to highlight it so that export this one to start with so okay, and I’m going to call it catch inside tight, very uninspired name and again file 3d print and I’m going to select the outside part like that and call it catch outside part, so then we have two separate STL files, but they keep the same origin and we can print them separately now and then combine them afterwards. So what if you have multiple bodies that you want to export in the single STL file because an STL file can have as many parts as you like in it, and they don’t exactly have to be touching. I could export this all in one and minus TL file, but I didn’t want to, because it’s not printable like that. This file, however, is it’s a rotational torture test that I have been working on some time. It’s still not perfect, so I’m not going to release the files for it as yet, but it’s designed to be printed all in one go and all the separate components. If I drop many down here are separate, but they’re designed to be printed at one. So how do we go about exporting this file? Well, what we’re going to do when we go to? 3d print is instead of selecting individual parts we’re going to select the bodies Drop-down itself and it will look a little bit strange. It will do this sort of semi highlighted appearance, but don’t despair, it will work, so we’ve selected that, and we’re now going to say OK, and we’re going to call it rotational torture or test test, so here’s the torture test in mesh mixer. So what it’s done is it’s exported all these separate parts as we want a steel file. I can break them out. Further by separating shells in mesh mixer, so you see, there are all separate parts, but by selecting the body drop down itself, not the individual bodies in fusion 360 It’s exported all of them at once. This is a great way in fusion to export. Everybody you’ve got within that one file, so if you have loads and you’ve got like tank tracks and you’ve patent the same thing around and around around, then you can explore that all in one shot as one. STL file and again it’s very powerful because I’ve modeled these parts in relation to each other. So if you sketch offsets and intersections, that sort of thing to make sure they’re all perfectly parametric with each other and you can only really do that if you model them as bodies within the same file. Alrighty, then so for most of you, you would have already heard what you need to hear in terms of exporting STL files out of fusion 360 But for you power users out there. This one is for you. So what I have Here is a dual color. Make a coin that I’m going to be doing a tutorial on in future into collaboration with my buddy. Joel, that’s really pretty nerd over on his channel, but I’m going to show you how to export separate bodies into separate STLs from the same fusion 360 file. But why would I want to do this well? This is a dual color print, which means. I need to end up with two STL files. I’ve designed it with two different colors. You see a color them green here and gray, though they could be any color you want when you print them. And the intention is to export all the gray parts as one STL file and all the green parts as a second STL file, but they share the same origin so Joel can just drop them into his slicer and they’ll share the same origin and they will perfectly match each other so they can be imprinted with your color. Unfortunately doing this isn’t all that simple in fusion 360 but it is still possible, so let’s get into it. So if I drop down my bodies menu here on the left hand side, you can see. There is a load of bodies because I’ve sliced this file up, and I’ve got to leave the construction services again. That’s going to be a tutorial coming soon. Don’t worry too much about that. But all these separate parts are disconnected from each other, So I can hide them like this. See, they’re all separate so to export them. One by one would be extremely tedious, and I don’t want to do that because it’s a chance they’ll lose their location in terms of the origin for the model. So what I want to do is somehow group together, the green part and group together the gray part and export them into their own respective STL files and it is possible, but it is a little bit tricky so initially what I tried to do was to create a group of bodies, so a group like this and I would, for example, call this gray and then selecting the ones I wanted in that group. So for example, I can just click, and it underlines the bodies I’ve selected so these are the three gray ones and then drop them into the gray group and then when I export, then I want to just export that group right, so export, okay, and it seems to work, however, when you import to model, it’s very much broken, I mean, that is completely trashed. It’s not even close to what we wanted, and it seems to have tried to work, but no, it’s a it’s a glitch, and that’s not very useful to us at all, so the way I got this to work was to convert my bodies into components and infusions 360m I’m going to go into it too much, but you model bodies. But then you convert them to components to use them in assemblies and assembly might have hundreds of components that are linked to each other using mating services. And that sort of thing, but basically, you need to convert these bodies to components -, then export them combined into their own respective SEL very confusing to word it. It’s better off for me to just show you so. I’m going to do is I’m going to select all of my bodies that I want to convert to components, right, click them and then create components from bodies. There we go so now these are components and they could be mated to each other and that sort of thing, but we don’t want to do that, really what we want to do is just now group them as components, so I’m going to select one component. That is gray. That Sisco, where’s this one again? It underlines it, which is handy. I was going to call it three, and I’m going to select the other ones that are gray, so that would be this one and inside the P those two. I’m holding down ctrl to select both of them like that, and I’m just going to drag them into the other grey one, so that’s now risen together and I can verify it by hiding it and they all disappear and bring it back like that. And similarly with the green, I’m going to select any of them and call it green like that, and it selects all the others. I’ll hold down shift this time and I was one more. Oh, that’s that’s the original sign, so I’m going to select those and then drag them into the other green and again I can verify. I’ve got them all by hiding that you can see. They all disappear and then. I’ll bring it back, so we now have our two groups of components that we can now export into error free STL files and it works, so let’s go to 3d print and select at some green. You can see they all select nicely. Okay, and that’s just call it green that works and again we can go to the gray 3d print and gray. Okay, and they’re happy and we can now go back into Meshmixer import and bring in green like that. And there you go, guys. So these are all of our bodies that were converted to components and now they form individual parts of our STL file for jewel color printing and I can demonstrate why we went through all of that effort by bringing in both of them at once so green and gray, and you can see here that they line up perfectly, which is exactly what you need the multi color or dual color printing. So you don’t worry about aligning them manually, They’re going to come in perfectly lined up themselves, so you can get a perfect result, so thank you so much for watching guys. Have you found this video on Fusion 360 exporting of STL files Interesting as I said at the so this video, it sounds simple, and for most part, it is, we’re going to do complicated things like this dual color print because it has to be modeled in the same file. You can’t try to guess where the interface would be. You have to do it in the one file bringing those. STL files out separately to then assign different colors on your jewelry to set up is quite difficult unless you do it properly and this is how they’ll the method. I’ve worked out to do it properly, so don’t. Forget, guys, if you enjoy this video here and make some using 1c T-shirt’s, 3d printing tips, tricks and reviews definitely hit that subscribe button. There’s a lot more fusion 360 tutorials coming, actually, a whole series to look out for that sort of thing again, Very shortly here on maker’s news. Catch later, guy’s, bye. Half of the 20th century bandit has run into the deep layer displaced satellites in the level.