Mesh Workbench: Difference between revisions

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=== Cutting === <!--T:20-->
=== Cutting === <!--T:20-->
* [[Image:Mesh_PolyCut.png|32px]] [[Mesh_PolyCut|Mesh PolyCut]]: Cut meshes along a line
* [[Image:Mesh_PolyCut.svg|32px]] [[Mesh_PolyCut|Mesh PolyCut]]: Cut meshes along a line
* [[Mesh TrimMesh|Trim mesh]]: Trims meshes
* [[Mesh TrimMesh|Trim mesh]]: Trims meshes
* [[Mesh TrimMeshWithPlane|Trim mesh with a plane]]: Trims meshes with a plane
* [[Mesh TrimMeshWithPlane|Trim mesh with a plane]]: Trims meshes with a plane

Revision as of 18:41, 19 February 2020

The FreeCAD Mesh Workbench Icon

Introduction

The Mesh Workbench handles triangle meshes. Meshes are a special type of 3D object, composed of triangular faces connected by their vertices and edges.

Many 3D applications, like Sketchup, Blender, Maya and 3D Studio Max, use meshes as their primary type of 3D object. Since meshes are very simple objects, containing only vertices (points), edges and triangular faces, they are very easy to create, modify, subdivide, stretch, and can easily be passed from one application to another without any loss of details. In addition, since meshes contain very simple data, 3D applications can usually manage very large quantities of them without using a lot of resources. For these reasons, meshes are often the 3D object type of choice for applications dealing with movies, animation, and image creation.

However, in the field of engineering meshes present one big limitation: they are only made of surfaces, and have no mass information, so they don't behave as solids. This means that all solid-based operations, such as addition or subtraction, are difficult to perform on meshes. The Mesh Workbench is useful to import 3D data in mesh format, to analyse it, detect errors, and finally convert it to a solid, for use with the Part Workbench.

Tools

The Mesh Workbench has a simple interface; all its functions are grouped in the Mesh menu.

General tools

Analyze

Analysis of curvature, faces, and check if a mesh can be safely converted into a solid

Regular solid

File:Mesh RegularSolid.svg Regular solid... Create mesh primitives, like cubes, cylinders, cones, or spheres:

Boolean

  • Union: Does a union (fusion) on meshes
  • Intersection: Does an intersection (common) on meshes
  • Difference: Does a difference (cut) on meshes

Cutting

Other

Preferences

More mesh tools are available in the OpenSCAD Workbench.

Meshes can also be handled via Python using Mesh Scripting.

Links