Who said it's Impossible, for a plain yellow pumpkin to become a golden carriage. I'd have to disagree with that and side with Rogers & Hammerstein's Fairy Godmothers and say "Impossible things are happening every day." Part of the reason is with two daughter in the house we get wrapped up in the Magic of Disney, the other part probably has to do with the fact that I've made the impossible happen growing a 872lb. Pumpkin and seen bigger pumpkins reach almost a Ton.
So now you're probably asking yourself what do Giant pumpkins and Disney magic have to with Manufacturing? Disney's Fairy Godmother said it best, "The thingmabob that does the job is bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!" So read on if you want to what to see what bibbidi-bobbidi-boo magic Autodesk has to offer…
I think it's Magic, or at least it feels like it. I'm talking about taking a photo, or better said a series of photos, and turn them into a Machined Part. What makes this possible? What is the magical software of combination of software's? Have you heard of Reality Computing. Taking scan data (point clouds or photos) and transforming the real world into as-built 3D data. But historically that data has just been for reference in the 3D CAD solutions. What people want to do with it is use that data for manufacturing or reverse engineering… (The fariry Godmother waves her magical wand and Autodesk Memento enters stage right.)
Autodesk Memento is an end-to-end solution for converting any captured reality input (photos or scans) into high definition 3D meshes that can be cleaned up, fixed, and optimized for the Web, mobile or 3D printing/fabrication.
Memento is part of Autodesk’s Reality Computing portfolio and is great companion to ReCap. So if you have a suite you have ReCap, many of you probably haven't used it. Well, I'm here today to show you why you should think about using Reality Computing.
How do we do it:
1) Start with a series of photo Graphs. No we are leaving you alone in this process. Autodesk has a webinar recording you can watch for some tips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=425&v=WLXqNXOWLLo
2) Upload you Photos into Autodesk Memento an it will then; upload it the photo to the cloud, notify you when its down, and give you a 3D mesh of your object. No, there is nothing for you to buy yet at this point. You can download Memento for free from the Memento page. https://memento.autodesk.com/try-memento.
3) You can choose to Clean up the mesh, I didn't and I only used 30 photos for my example. Part of the best practices that you will learn is the more photos you use the better your Mesh model will be.
4) This next step is the missing link. We have other reality computing technologies, like Recap and 123D Catch, but neither of them could give me an output in a CAD format I could manipulate. The output option you will wants is OBJ (Quads).
5) Now we need to get that OBJ file into Fusion 360. Fusion 360 is our cloud based 3D CAD/CAM tool. Many of you have it as part of your Subscription benefit with Product Design suite. If you don't have it sign up here. http://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/overview
Fusion360 is based heavily on our T-Spline technology. It allows you to Sculpt you surfaces to create some very complex surfaces not easily created with traditional 3D parametric CAD modeling tools. It also comes with a feature set to edit those curves and to convert mesh data, like the OBJ (Quads) data we obtained from Memento, into T-splines surface or solid.
7) Once we have a T-spline surface, we'll need to do some inspection to made sure we have a closed surface, if your purpose is to turn it into a 3D solid body. Depending on the quality of mesh, remember the more photos you use the better your mesh output will be from Memento, that will determine how much editing you will want to do to your surfaces inside of Fusion360. With this model I only need to fill one hole in my surfaces to make it a water tight solid. Here are a few of my favorites Fusion Command you should get to know just in general for modeling/Editing T-Splines bodies in Fusion 360.
a. Edit form
b. Weld Vertices
c. Merge Edge
d. Delete (Face or Edge)
e. Fill hole
f. Bridge
g. Create Face
h. Subdivide
i. Repair Body
8) Once any holes in the body are filled we have ourselves a 3D solid body. The we can set up our CAM tool paths right inside of Fusion 360 embedded CAM environment.
Impossible you say, for a plain yellow pumpkin to become a 3D Capture... Challenge excepted!
I invite you to try it out and give me some feedback because "It will do magic believe it or not…Bibbidi Bobbidi boo!"
-Travis @travis36evans
Subscribe