FreeCAD 0.19 - Converting STL files to Solid models
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- Опубликовано: 15 июл 2024
- Hello and welcome to another tutorial with me, Andrew!
Today I'm showing how to covert an STL file into a solid model within FreeCAD! This can be a highly rewarding, but it doesn't always work out due to problems with STL files. Hopefully my video can shed some light onto how to get around some of these problems!
If you have anything to share which could help other FreeCAD users, leave a comment below :)
Thank you for taking the time to watch my video, I really appreciate it! Have an awesome weekend! :)
realthunder mod - github.com/realthunder/FreeCA...
For those looking for further reading on what I've spoken about, follow these links to the FreeCAD wiki:
Import from STL - wiki.freecadweb.org/Import_fr...
Mesh import - wiki.freecadweb.org/FreeCAD_a...
Macro - wiki.freecadweb.org/Macro_Mes...
PC specs:
Intel Core i7 - 6700k CPU 4.00 GHz
16.0 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card
Maximus Ranger VIII motherboard
Freecad version - 0.19
AWESOME !!! Very clearly described procedure. Best of all, it works --- even for some of my complex STL files. Thank you --- you've saved me countless hours and a lot of frustration.
love this tutorial. I didn't have to sit through an agonizing 5-10 minutes, but had my questions answered in the first 3 minutes.
Thank you so much for this video! I have been looking for days on how to convert a mesh to soild that can actually save to a .step file!
For everyone having issues decreasing the sewing tolerance, go to edit - preferences - units and increase the number of decimal to 3. This worked for me.
Great, Tank you very much. I had the same issue: not possible typing in a value
Oh god you helped me man . Thankyou.I am struggling as default value is at 1 and it is not changing
Thxs!
Thanks, now it works and doesn't crash the program!
thanks
Great stuff ! I will use this ! Cheers for the help ! )
This was a great deal of help for me. I only downloaded FreeCAD because I needed a way to turn OpenSCAD models into CNC router toolpaths, and yours was the first tutorial I found that I could actually follow. I learned more than I really wanted to, but thank you.
GOD JESUS TOLD US TO LOVE GOD AND TO LOVE ONE ANOTHER! LET'S NOT DESTROY THIS WORLD! NO WAR!!! БОГ СОЗДАЛ ТАКОЙ ПРЕКРАСНЫЙ МИР! НЕ БУДЕМ РАЗРУШАТЬ МИР! ПОЛЮБИМ БОГА И ВСЕХ ЛЮДЕЙ! НЕТ ВОЙНЕ!!
I wanted to add that, by this video, you have saved me MULTIPLE dozens of hours. Thank you!!👍👍⭐
But you still think that 0.5 is less than 0.1 - right? (if-so - don't enter a design career).
It took me 1.5 hours to do the first 3.5 minutes but I got the hole! Thanks. I went super slow and finally did it right. Your presentation is solid.
"Presentation is solid".... I see what you did there..... 👻
I'd much rather have someone explain in a concise way, and pause or back up when I need to, than have to either speed up playback or skip forward when they're saying the same thing multiple times. Yeah, solid.
Outstanding video! Thank you so much!
Very good. Thanks Andrew. Jim
Thank you, very helpfull video, simple and quick 🙌
the ONLY tutoriall that explained create body step !!!! FInally i can edit ffs !
This is fantastic! I just got a 3D scanner and want to scan a sculpture I've made and turn it into an animatronic. Being able to bring it into FreeCad and hollow it out, manipulate it, etc is wonderful.
I think increasing the sewing tolerance increases the number of areas to evaluate. The larger the tolerance the more potential gaps to fill. That would be my guess anyway.
GOD JESUS TOLD US TO LOVE GOD AND TO LOVE ONE ANOTHER! LET'S NOT DESTROY THIS WORLD! NO WAR!!! БОГ СОЗДАЛ ТАКОЙ ПРЕКРАСНЫЙ МИР! НЕ БУДЕМ РАЗРУШАТЬ МИР! ПОЛЮБИМ БОГА И ВСЕХ ЛЮДЕЙ! НЕТ ВОЙНЕ!!GOD JESUS TOLD US TO LOVE GOD AND TO LOVE ONE ANOTHER! LET'S NOT DESTROY THIS WORLD! NO WAR!!! БОГ СОЗДАЛ ТАКОЙ ПРЕКРАСНЫЙ МИР! НЕ БУДЕМ РАЗРУШАТЬ МИР! ПОЛЮБИМ БОГА И ВСЕХ ЛЮДЕЙ! НЕТ ВОЙНЕ!!
THANKS!
I watched this tutorial a few months ago, selected a converting tolerance of 0.01, it is still computing to this day.
I can't set it any lower than 1 on my Mac.
I haven't inspected how the sowing tolerance works in FreeCAD, but spontaneously I'd think it's something like how far apart two vertices or edges may be while being merged, similar to Blender's Remove Doubles tool (now named Merge By Distance, I think). A higher tolerance thus means more geometry needs to be considered to find which to merge. A fully compliant STL should work with a tolerance of 0, while a vertex list format like Wavefront OBJ doesn't need this check, since connecting faces share a vertex rather than just have identical vertices.
STL is a very minimal format. It only holds triangles, and that's why you get so many facets. The Refine tool merges tangent faces, e.g. coplanar for planar faces (STL triangles are planar, unlike AMF triangles which can bend), but for the cylinder surface the tesselation in this case wasn't quite that way. This is a challenging problem akin to image vectorization. The short of it is, if you want precise shapes, don't use mesh formats like STL. Use e.g. STEP or IGES. Better still is source formats, but exchange formats have their purpose in moving across tools.
When exporting STL from FreeCAD, it has to tesselate all geometry, as well as when displaying it. The View property group Object Style has parameters that affect this, like Angular Deflection and Deviation.
Woah! Thank you for the detailed explanation LoneTech! 😀
In a similar manner, at 5:05 you have the vertical edges, and the diagonal edges are another angle. With twice the bends, it is a much better fit for a circle than if you got rid of those diagonals. If you up the threshold it probably will put them together into rectangles, but you'll have a twice as poor cylinder in the process since you got rid of half of the edges for the curve.
Of course recognizing and fitting curved surfaces is better and maybe it can with tweaking. Really nice would be assisted conversion, so you can tell it to fit a curve to this surface and similar ideas.
I think that cylinders that were built as cylinders originally should behave properly - I tried this with a part that was made from cylinders, and the mesh looks much different from the one Andrew showed that didn't clean up: in mine, there were straight lines connecting the points on the circles, and then there were lines made by connecting one point on one end with the next point in the circle on the other end. This means that these two triangles really are in the same plane, so the refine operation is able to reduce them to a rectangle. In his, I can see that the points on the upper and lower circle don't line up with each other, so none of the triangles are coplanar, and refine won't try to fix them. It's all about what the developer thought was best. In the case of OpenSCAD, cylinders are just extruded polygons, where you can set the number of sides with the $fn variable, so the sides are always rectangular, or at least parallelograms, for tapered cylinders.
GOD JESUS TOLD US TO LOVE GOD AND TO LOVE ONE ANOTHER! LET'S NOT DESTROY THIS WORLD! NO WAR!!! БОГ СОЗДАЛ ТАКОЙ ПРЕКРАСНЫЙ МИР! НЕ БУДЕМ РАЗРУШАТЬ МИР! ПОЛЮБИМ БОГА И ВСЕХ ЛЮДЕЙ! НЕТ ВОЙНЕ!!
@@AndrewCAD GOD JESUS TOLD US TO LOVE GOD AND TO LOVE ONE ANOTHER! LET'S NOT DESTROY THIS WORLD! NO WAR!!! БОГ СОЗДАЛ ТАКОЙ ПРЕКРАСНЫЙ МИР! НЕ БУДЕМ РАЗРУШАТЬ МИР! ПОЛЮБИМ БОГА И ВСЕХ ЛЮДЕЙ! НЕТ ВОЙНЕ!!
This was a very helpful and well-balanced tutorial. Thanks very much.
tHANKS
on the tolerance processing speeds, in my case it's perfectly normal: a smaller tolerance takes longer to process. My mesh is a somewhat complicated boat from a computer game.
Here’s my thought on the macro. I noticed that the macro contains .obj as the mesh variable. Not all stl files are obj defined which is why I think you’d be getting errors on some stl files. I could be wrong. But it’s just a theory.
this is great help! the issue I have is I am trying to import an item into an existing project yet I'm having problems with the angles as the STL is set to one plane and I can't seem to set it to a new plane so to have both models have the same angle? any ideas here?
I found that the up/down arrows for sewing tolerance went from 1-10 integers. Increasing the number increases computational time a lot. On that basis alone, a higher number should give better results.
GOD JESUS TOLD US TO LOVE GOD AND TO LOVE ONE ANOTHER! LET'S NOT DESTROY THIS WORLD! NO WAR!!! БОГ СОЗДАЛ ТАКОЙ ПРЕКРАСНЫЙ МИР! НЕ БУДЕМ РАЗРУШАТЬ МИР! ПОЛЮБИМ БОГА И ВСЕХ ЛЮДЕЙ! НЕТ ВОЙНЕ!!
Hai bro when I am trying to generate solid from mesh the tolerance is given default at 1 and not .1.how to change
Thanks for this. I just wish I had a more powerful computer. 🙄 I get "input vector has zero zoom" when I try to make refined copy. 😥
How do you get the create shape from mesh to be less than 1?
So I may have just found a workaround for my problem. I went to General under Preferences and chose Part as the module/workbench to load after startup and now I have a Part menu on my menu bar. It still doesn't appear as an option in the workbench dropdown.
I can't get the Part workspace to open/load. I go to edit/preferences and add workbench Part but it comes in as Part Design. So I can't seem to get to the Create Shape From Mesh Command. I don't see what the issue would be as it Says Part in workbenches and there's a separate workbench for Part Design.
I am unable o boolean text on refined shape from stl.pl help.
So I downloaded this animated car a Mazda miata and when I opened the file in free cad it is 500 mesh pieces.. how would I even begin to stitch them into 1 solid 3d printable piece? There is so many errors. Is there a way you can just like sketch a mesh around the thinglike wrap 1 big mesh? Instead of combining every part? I can just fill the inside?
Andrew I use Solidworks in my professional and hobby life Importing stl files is a total pain have you any tils ?
Hey, when i use the clipping plane, i see the inside of the final body is empty, can someone explain to me why ?
I have a 3d scan of an engine block and I am now completely bald LOL
The mesh repair tool didn't delete half of the model there... It appears the normals were simply flipped
Realthunder branch allows multi-solid bodies. Try this: create a sketch of two non-intersecting circles and try to pad it. It will work on realthunder branch and fail on original 0.19 with "Pad: result has multiple solids. This is not supported at this time"
Hey Bozo! Thank you, I'll give it a go! 😀
Any tips for if the program keeps crashing?
This should be an area where future AI enhancements tied to CAD should get us what we want.
steps:
1.
select model,
select "Part" in the top menu,
select "create shape from mesh.." in a dropdown
2.
click on a new piece of geometry
select "Part" in the top menu,
select "Convert to solid"
hide previous items
3.
click on a new piece of geometry
select "Part" in the top menu,
select "Create a copy"
select "Refine shape"
4.
click on a new piece of geometry
select "create a new body and make it active" in the top long menu
5.
export file as step or else
I need help, the tolerance sewing by default is 1, and is not allowing me to choose blow 1?
Edit>Preferences>Import Export>Mesh Formats and then change the maximum tolerance to 0.1mm
Convert to solid result:
08:58:28 MultiFusion failed
09:06:57 Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 2, in
: Shape is not a shell
09:06:57 Cannot convert pommeau_de_vitesse001002 because Shape is not a shell.
When i click convert to solid
It shows " cannot convert because shape is not a shell"
Can you help me with this
why does it not do anything when I click convert to solid?
even after refining my geometry is showing meshes . why is this happening please help
Thanks for the video but that doesn't work for me. The choice "create shape from mesh" is grey (i selected of course the model and I'm on part)
I don't have part menu.
I have a dumb question. I have FreeCAD 0.19 installed (Windows) and I don't have the same menus, no tool window, what am I missing here?
in the middle row of options (next to the big red circle), you can switch between workbench menus and you have to choose part. then it appears.
To good to be true :(
when i convert to solid i get loads of errors
During initialization the error "No module named 'Show.FrozenClass'" occurred in C:\Users\owner\AppData\Roaming\FreeCAD\Mod\Part-o-magic\InitGui.py
11:37:27 Please look into the log file for further information
11:44:46 Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 2, in
: Shape is not a shell
If anyone can shed some light , it would be fab.
Need a little help guys, i cannot convert any mesh in to solid - there is error stating that the object is not shell. What to do?
Same issue here
@@kalfoxx7749 year later I still have it even on newer windows and different machine...
@@bonvi2896 @bonvi2896 I found that the mesh repair tool actually worked, but as I had a composite STL made up of multiple other STL's I still got the error as Freecad (as mentioned in this video into) cant handle composite STLs. The only solution was to treat each component separately which was more work than redrawing the design from scratch. The search still continues for software that can make my workflow more efficient.
Am I missing something? It says solid from stl! Why is the stl from the solid?
I want to 3d print model
the lowest tolerance mine will let me use is 1. not .1. I can't go below 1
pl see gee fish answer
how many is a lot of faces for freecad? maybe this is why I stopped using freecad before. I have today 9800 and it is taking a very long time.
I hate this software LOL
Why can't any software remove the faceted/mesh from models and leave them smooth? Not sure why this is not a thing. ??🤯
Blender can. You can then remesh with more facets.
i would just make a mesh of it Lol
Nevermind. The command still isn't working.
for me was enough
Be far better to pull up an stl that cant be solidified as it has too many points...
Then you get to show what "decimate" does.
Took me a while to figure that one out.
Hello sir i m stl file to convert solid file please help contact nombar send please