 Normally, I don't get that excited about slicer updates, but this one's different. PrusaSlicer just announced version 2.5 and there's one feature that I think is going to be a game changer. Okay, here's the list of the main updates to version 2.5. Can you guess which one I'm referring to? I'll give you a second. Step File Import. PrusaSlicer now allows you to directly import step files, which also means that printables is now also supporting step file uploads. And this is a game changer because step files are so much easier to work with than STL files, especially if you're using Fusion 360. I've created several videos on editing an STL file and if you watch them, you've noticed that it's a process. You import the STL file and you import it as a mesh and then you have to usually reduce the number of facets and then you convert it to a B-Wrap and finally you get a solid made up of a bunch of triangles that you can begin trying to edit. All of these steps, no longer necessary if you can just download a step file instead of an STL file. So let's say you download a model of a bracket and the hole is just too small and you simply want to make it a bit bigger. With an STL file, you're looking at like 10 steps versus like 2 steps with a step file. Maybe that's why they call it a step file because it's less steps. Let's jump into Fusion 360 and I'll show you some valuable tips when editing step files and you'll quickly see what I'm talking about. Alright, we'll begin by importing a step file, which I've already imported one to my folder here and that process is straightforward. Just navigate to the folder you want, click on upload, grab it from wherever you're saving it and then you'll see it here. So I can verify it's a step file, if I just click on this little drop down arrow and I can see the extension is .STEP. So let's go ahead and double click on our plastic chain here to open it up and you can see it brings it in and at first glance it's hard to tell that you just didn't actually design this in Fusion 360. You can see it's got fillets and the features here, it's definitely not a mesh. It's a solid here that we can work with. The background behind this specific model is this is a link to a chain that is downloaded from a robotics platform website. The idea is you can buy these from them and they give you the step files in case you want to create a CAD file of your design you're making in addition to actually buying the parts. But let's say you wanted to 3D print this, right? This wasn't designed to be 3D printed. It's designed to most likely be injection molded. So let's see that process of how that would work and then I'll show you why it's not going to work and how you can actually modify it so that it'll actually work. So first let's create 10 of these links here and to do that I need to create a rectangular pattern but I need to know the spacing that this would then line up into this part here. So let's do a quick inspection here and I'm going to click on this circle here and this circle right here. You see you get this straight line distances. I'll give you some few tips along the way of things you may not know but if you click here where it says XYZ Delta you didn't get your X, your Y, you know, and sort of guess what would be the hypotenuse here. But the distance I want to check here is this right here, the X distance which is 8mm. It'd be hard to see there but you can see it right here, 8mm and the reason I need that is because now I can just come in and grab a rectangular pattern here and I'm going to say bodies. Check this bodies and my axes. I'm going to grab my X here and select it right through it. I'm going to drag the arrow across and extent is going to be spacing and distance here is going to be 8 which I just verified and let's say we want 10 of those so I'll make it and I'll click OK. And now I have a link of 10 of these that I can, you know, try to print. Here's the problem though. I can tell you that if I try to print this I have no clearance between, you know, here. Let me expand these bodies here so that this wall here and this wall here so they're going to fuse together. This edge here is going to fuse to that edge over there and so will this one and this one and it's not going to be flexible or the joints won't be moving because everything will just be fused together. So the point here is to try to modify this so that we can actually print it and it will behave as a chain, you know, a print in place chain. So I'll show you the techniques that I would use for that. So you're going to get sort of a 2 for 1 with this because you're going to see some really neat techniques in creating a print in place model such as this and I'll also along the way show you some really neat step file editing tricks. So let me undo that pattern I'm here. Okay, so here we want to edit this. The first tip I'll give you is to start with deleting fillets. It's much easier to modify a part without any fillets because fillets create all sorts of complex geometry. That's just going to be a nightmare to try to work with. So let's say you want to delete these fillets. You may be tempted to just come in here and kind of start deleting these one by one. You'll see you'll get some errors and sometimes it depends on the order of operation so you can try a few different ones until, you know, some work and some won't. But this is really not the way to go. I'm going to undo all those steps I just did and okay. So now that we have our fillets back, I'm going to show you a really cool trick here. We're going to right click on bodies and actually this trick won't work once you start making changes. So I'm going to close this and just reopen it really quick to show you. So we're going to reopen it before I do any changes. I'm going to go into bodies here. I'm going to expand it. I'm going to click on body one and I'm going to click on find features here. So select find features and you're going to get this dialog box. Now this is really awesome. Look at this. We get a option to find features. So you can select what you want and uncheck what you don't want. So if you were just looking for holes, you can keep holes checked and uncheck everything else. Let's just keep everything there and I'll click okay. Now you have here on your browser every feature that it finds. So it sees a revolve there, an extrude, a mirror, another extrude, some mirrors and some fillets. So that way what you can do is find these fillets here and I'm just going to delete one and delete that second one there. Our fillets are magically gone. And now this is going to be a lot easier to work with. It doesn't work with just fillets. It works with all sorts of features that you want to find. Really neat trick there for editing step files. Okay, the next thing we want to do is you may have noticed that we have no timeline history here. So we'll need to turn it on. So we'll go up here, right click on the top of our browser, go capture design history and that will start our timeline. So now we can continue with the timeline and be able to go back and make changes if we need to. Let's begin by making some changes here to make this 3D printable. So a few things we'll need to do. One is the cylinder here. We can see that there's an overhang there. I don't want to deal with supports and that's not going to print so great with nothing to support it. So what I'm going to do is let's change how this, instead of being a cylinder, we're going to make it a cone. So to do that I'm going to first create a sketch on this surface here. And I'm simply going to project the outline of the cylinder here to give me that circle. And you'll see that there is a purple circle there. I'll click OK. I'm going to click on finish sketch and I'm going to take this surface and just extrude it back distance to object. My object is this surface right there. Click OK. Next I'm going to take the circle that I projected and E4 extrude. I'm going to bring that out one millimeter and I'm going to do a taper angle here of 45 degrees. Wrong. I'm going to do negative 45 degrees and it's going to go inwards and operation is joined. And there we go. We've got this cone right there which is perfect. And I want to do the same thing to this side right here. You can also delete features. Extrude is a little better because it gives you something you can go back to the timeline and amend. But just to show you I'm going to select this surface of that cylinder and hit delete and Fusion is able to heal that surface perfectly and know exactly what you were trying to do. And now we can just come in and create a mirror of this cone we just did. So I'll do features, select it and choose our mirror plane. We can select the right through the model there and I've got the same thing on the other side. OK. With that done we're going to do a few more things here that we need to do to make this 3D printable and that's basically to add some clearances. So we'll go ahead and extrude this surface here. I'm going to do a negative 0.3 millimeter clearance. I'm just going to type that in. Same thing with this one, negative 0.3 and I'm going to push this back a bit, these two walls and that's going to be negative 0.3 and we're going to do the same thing with this side here. There we have it. Next let's go ahead and change up these holes here. The basic idea is this cone shaped extrusion here will need to snap into here. So we'll just do the opposite version of what we did here. So first let me create a sketch on this surface just to project this circle in there. So we have the outline of that hole that we're going to need. I'll click on finish sketch and then I'm going to select the inner surface of this hole here. I'll just hit delete there. Bring that sketch back into view. Click that profile E for extrude negative 1 millimeter extrusion with again a negative 45 degree taper angle and there we have it. Click OK. Let's untaggle sketches so we can easily make this selection. We'll do the same thing on this side here. So let me first delete it and then we're going to go to create, go to mirror and we're going to select features as our object type and I can just simply select it right there on the model. My mirror plane is right there. If you have trouble selecting it just untaggle bodies and select this plane right here and then bring bodies back and then you'll see your preview there. I'm going to click OK and there we have it. So now I can go to create, down to pattern, rectangular pattern and select this body and my axis is going to be my red axis here. I know what that distance is already that I want and that's going to be 8 millimeters. Make sure spacing here or distribution is set to spacing. Let's make 10 of these and then we'll click OK. Now I have a 3D printable chain here with the right clearances that I need. So you can see here, these don't touch. We've got that 0.3 millimeter clearance here between these surfaces and this cone here. If we do a section analysis here, go to inspect, section analysis, well we can see it this way but that's not the side I want. So let's go ahead and click the X there and do this top face and let's go down. And the part I want to show here is the cone here. So you can see that it doesn't touch. We have a clearance right in the middle there. So when this begins to print, you can kind of see almost like a slicer simulation here how that works. Basically that cone part goes out and then in and being 45 degrees, it'll be able to handle that and you get a print in place chain. I'll be uploading these two files to my Patreon page. So my completed Fusion 360 model here if you want to download it and play with it. And I'll also include the original STL file so that you can try it on your own and then compare your results with mine. Patreon supporters, you'll have access to both those two files. And if you'd like to contribute to me creating more content like this and you enjoy my videos and find them useful, very much appreciate it. So check out the link below to consider becoming a Patreon supporter. This example here is actually an example from my Fusion 360 live class, my weekly live class that I do online through Zoom. And a student had a question about editing this exact file and I brought it in and I showed them exactly how to approach it. So if that's something you're interested in, I'm actually running a special right now. Link below will give you 50% off my weekly class and get some direct help with Fusion 360. It's a fun group. We meet once a week, Tuesdays at one o'clock. I'll have the link below if you're interested. Check it out for more details. All right. So that's basically what I wanted to show you guys today. Just some really neat techniques there in editing an STL file and you see the value in this. I mean, come on, try and do this with an STL file. I'm just going to headache even thinking about it, but step files, super easy, especially if you take advantage of your fine features tool I showed you there. So have fun with this play around with it. And I look forward to the day where we can go to these 3D printing download sites and they're all step files and not all these STL files. All right. I hope you enjoyed this one. You have any questions? Leave it in the comments below. I will see you here soon in another week or two.