 If you happen to be watching this video before December 18, 2021, then you'll want to join my live design session where I'll be creating this benchy model from scratch while demonstrating some very powerful design techniques in Fusion 360. You can join me live and ask questions along the way. See the link below for details and to register. Hey guys, Vladimir here. I've been meaning for a while now to do a series of tutorials on the new mesh workspace in Fusion 360. So if you haven't checked it out yet or if you weren't aware several months ago, Fusion released a big update and really introduced a lot of new tools giving us the ability to do a lot more with bringing in an STL file and editing it. So we'll jump into it today and I'll this actually would take or it would be one long video to explain everything. So I'll break these down into different videos that I'll release in the future. Before today, I just want to kind of just show you like a really quick example of what you can do. So let's bring in a model and that way I can kind of show you by example here. Since I'm in the holiday spirit, we're going to go ahead and bring in this Christmas tree by iDig3D. Really cool model especially if you print it in like a translucent PLA or PETG. It really shines and so what I want to be able to do is print this and if you recall from my last video, I showed these little LED modules that you can buy. Basically came as a part of this orb and they're called LED Orbs and so you can unscrew the little module and I want to actually put that inside this tree here and so I'll show you a couple of the tools and the new approach we're going to take is which is quite different from what we used to do. Okay so I've already downloaded it and now let's go back to Fusion. We can either go to insert mesh right here on the solid workspace or we can jump directly into the mesh workspace. Now you see the mesh workspace here. It's now its own workspace here in Fusion 360. Before it was only a feature preview so you had to go into your settings and allow the preview. Now it's permanently here so we'll click on that and then you'll see you have a whole new set of tools and icons up top. Okay right away we'll go to insert down to insert mesh and we'll grab our file open and it brings it in. So take a look at the dialog box here. Don't ignore it because there's some important information that'll save you some headaches later. So first of all since stl files are unit lists you can go ahead and set the units here. I'm going to choose millimeter and this prevents you know you probably may have dealt with this in the past where you bring something in and it's just really like tiny little thing because it might have been modeled in inches and you brought it in and software assumed there was millimeters and then you have to convert it over. Now you can just tell it what units it is and then here we have two options to center or move to ground. If I turn on my origin here you see that if I click on center it's going to position the model right on the center there of the origin. In my case here I'm going to go to move to ground because since I want to put a hole in the bottom here it's going to be a lot better for me to take advantage of that ground plane. So all right I'll click okay and the first thing I want to do here is actually scale it because it's too big and the way you can tell that size is if you right click on the model you can go down to properties and if you click on bounding box to expand it you'll see the length width and height. So it's 300 millimeters I want to bring it down to half that size so 150. So I'll click okay and what I'm going to do is go to modify and go down to scale mesh and okay an important feature here that I want to show you. So if I just select the model and then click on scale factor here let's say 0.5 to go down 50%. If I click okay you notice how it throws the model up here so let me just do that for a second and then now you know I can't really select the bottom of this plane to make a hole I would have preferred it to stay on this bottom plane here. So to do that let me undo and then go back again to modify scale mesh. So instead what you want to do is you want to click on point here and select your center origin point and then go to select for your entities and click on there and now when I enter 0.50 it keeps it on that plane so it's going to make my job a lot easier in a minute. Alright so now that I have that let me turn off the origin. What I want to do is sketch here on the bottom and this is where things are just flipped around okay. This part is really important so before your only option would be to convert this model into a solid and so there was this whole workflow we had to go through. We had to stop like capture design history and then we had to go convert to B-wrap and then this would convert and if it was a very high poly design meaning like I had a lot of facets here sometimes it just wouldn't work it would just fail right and then you would have to you know maybe try to reduce it in quality and then try to convert it and it was just a pain. We don't have to worry about that anymore because there's something really cool here and what you actually do is the opposite right so what we're going to do is we're going to go into the solid workspace create a solid model convert that to a mesh and then we're going to take advantage of the new mesh tools to amend or make changes to this design so let me show you what I'm talking about I'm going to go back to solid and I'm going to create a sketch and I'm going to select this bottom plane I'll grab a circle so create a circle down to the center diameter circle snap it right to the center and again this is why I wanted this on the plane right on center I'm going to make this circle 25.5 millimeters enter finish that sketch and now I'm going to select that circle and extrude it up let me untangle the visibility of the tree here so we can see it I'm going to go up three millimeters and I'm going to click okay so I want to take basically this little disc here and cut out the shape out of this tree so I'm working with two different types of bodies here right I have the mesh and my solid body so instead of converting the tree to a solid like I said we're going to go about it a completely opposite way we're going to take this solid and convert it to a mesh so we're going to go back to the mesh workspace and there's a new option here called tessellate so I'll click on tessellate choose the model I'm just simply going to click okay here I'm not going to worry about any of these settings and you can see now that our little puck there has been converted into a mesh now that we have these two mesh bodies here we can go to modify we'll go to combine again this is the sort of works the exact same way as your combined feature if you're in the solid workspace right you have your boolean operations here target body is going to be the tree the tool body is going to be our disc here that we made and the operation is going to be a cut I'll click okay and give fusion a few seconds here to think you'll see a little status bar here and there we go and now I have a three millimeter deep 25.5 millimeter diameter little hole cut out the bottom and that's it that's all I needed here so now I can send this to the 3d printer and I'll show you one important change that was made to that so normally when I 3d print an object I like to simply go to tools make 3d print and I'll select this and usually I'll send it straight to my printer by checking this box or sometimes I'll uncheck it and save it as an stl file but if you do it the other way by going to right clicking here and you save it as an stl you may be looking for save as stl and that will no longer exist because now it's called save as mesh right again because we have our three files that we can save it as so you want to choose save as mesh and you know select your model here and it's going to default to stl but you have the option of choosing 3mf or obj there so we're going to keep it as stl and then I'll go ahead and keep this button checked here to send it right to my printer if you uncheck it it'll just save it to a folder as an stl file fusion will just open up the app and throw it right in there and there it is and if I orbit to the bottom here you'll see there I've got that three millimeter opening there so okay the way I'm going to print this is I'm going to print an invasive mode and there's a trick here a little off topic but I'll show you this just in case so to print this invasive mode you'll go to print settings here and for layers and perimeters you just check the spot the spiral vase option here but let's I want to show you what happens if I just slice this and we look at the preview it does this right that's not going to help me with just one layer of filaments on the bottom there so what I'm going to do again I want to insert that little led so in order to make this functional allowing me to insert the little led module what I'm going to do is go to print settings and I'm going to change the number of solid layers now I'm going to print this at 0.2 millimeters and it's three millimeters that I need this to be so I'm going to go with 15 layers right so 15 layers there and then go back to a platter and then I'm going to re-slice this now watch what happens it gives me three millimeters so five layers per millimeter that's why I get 15 and now I have this solid base here where I can go ahead and pop in a little led module so that's kind of a little trick I wanted to show you there in case you want to do a similar thing okay and then you just export your g-code to your printer all right if you have any questions on the approach I take today leave it in the comments or if there is anything specific in the mesh workspace that you'd like me to cover let me know by leaving them in the comments as well all right two things for you one if you haven't checked out my Fusion 360 sketch constraint cheat sheet I've got the link for that below where you can grab it and two again if you're watching this before December 18 2021 I've got a live design session I'm hosting this Saturday so click on the link below for details and to register all right guys I will see you in a few