Mesh Workbench

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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.

Using the mesh module

The mesh module has currently a very simple interface, all its functions are grouped in the Mesh menu entry. The most important operations you can currently do with meshes are:

Import Mesh: Import meshes in several file formats
Export Mesh: Export meshes in several file formats
Create Mesh from shape: Convert Part objects into meshes
Harmonize Normals: Harmonize normals
Flip Normals: Flip normals
Fill Holes...: Fill up holes
Close hole: Close holes in meshes
Remove components...: Remove components of meshes
Remove components by hand...: Remove components of meshes by hand
Add triangle: Add triangle
Smooth...: Smooth mesh

Analyze curvature, faces, and check if a mesh can be safely converted into a solid
- Evaluate & Repair mesh...: Evaluates and repairs meshes
- Face Info: Gives info on faces
- Curvature Info: Gives info on curvature
- Check solid mesh: Checks the solid if it can be converted to a mesh
- Boundings info...: Evaluates the bounding box of a mesh

Regular solid... Create mesh primitives, like cubes, cylinders, cones, or spheres:
- Create a mesh cube
- Create a mesh cylinder
- Create a mesh cone
- Create a mesh sphere
- Create a mesh ellipsoid
- Create a mesh torus

Do Boolean operations with meshes
- Union: Does a union (fusion) on meshes
- Intersection: Does an intersection (common) on meshes
- Difference: Does a difference (cut) on meshes

Merge: Merges meshes
Select Mesh: Selects meshes
Cut mesh: Cut meshes along a line
Split Mesh: Splits meshes
File:Mesh MakeSegment.png Make segment: Makes a segment
Trim mesh: Trims meshes
Trim mesh with a plane: Trims meshes with a plane
Create mesh segments...: Creates mesh segments
Curvature Plot: Creates a curvature plot

Preference ... Import Export

These are only some of the basic operations currently present in the Mesh module interface.
More mesh tools are available in the OpenSCAD Workbench.
But the FreeCAD meshes can also be handled in many more ways by scripting.