Exporting a Polycam Scan for Fusion 360
The first step is sharing your file with your computer, and if you have a MacBook, this can be very easy to do with AirDrop, Dropbox, Google Drive. But my preferred method is the same one I would use for Mac or PC, and that's to open the cloud viewer of Polycam out in a browser. Log in, find your scan that you care about, and choose to export. You'll notice that there's many file types to export into, and when it comes to Fusion 360, I would recommend OBJ or STL. I've had the best luck with OBJ, so that's what I'll be doing. This download is now available for your Mac or PC.
Check out our Polycam to Fusion 360 YouTube Tutorial
Importing the Mesh Into Fusion 360
Let's open Fusion 360 on this machine, and we'll begin by inserting that download into Fusion 360. And the way you want to do this is with the Insert Mesh command, and this can be found on the Solid toolbar as well as in the Mesh workspace. Once the mesh imports, you're able to recenter where this will be located.
You can change the orientation for the XYZ. Once you've got this kind of where you want it in relation to, I like to put it near the origin, then adjust the visibility. I go to my visibility settings here and turn on shaded with edges, and I like to go to the mesh display and turn off the face groups. Since the units do not travel with the OBJ file, I'll need to make sure that this is scaled correctly. Going back into Polycam, I can do some quick measurements and understand the general size of my model and compare. Coming back into Fusion, doing a quick comparison, I can see that the ratio is off effectively just by one thousand. So I'll use a mesh scale to scale this up to the right size.
Cropping and Cleaning the Mesh
Now let's trim any unneeded mesh scan data.
So either use the tools provided in Fusion 360, specifically the Plane Cut tool is very helpful, or I like to use the Polycam tool. As you can see, you can manipulate it right in the mobile experience and crop it down to what you want. Do it the way you like. Share that with Fusion 360. But since I'm already in Fusion 360, I'll just quickly use the tools that are already available.
Repairing the Mesh
Now that you have the mesh body that you care about, let's start with a repair.
Choose the Repair tool on the Mesh command toolbar, and let's look at these different options. So first, you do have the ability to close holes, and this is the fastest operation. You can stitch and remove, which is similar, but will also attempt to remove any unnecessary facets. Wrap will do the same as stitch and remove, but will be a little bit slower, and it will remove inner structures. And finally, rebuild is the slowest as it uses one of the rebuild types. Using close holes is very quick and seems to solve. I have a nice mesh file, and it appears to be watertight.
Preparing the Mesh for 3D Printing
I can export this now into my 3D print slicer software. For example, I'm using Cura. I can export, export that right into Cura from Fusion 360 and begin the 3D print process from Cura. Instead, what you want to do is use this as a design tool. We can convert this into a solid body.
So the convert is found here in the Mesh toolbar, and first there is this choice of prismatic versus base file. And this really pertains to how large is the mesh scan data and how complicated it is. The base file will not maintain upstream parametric features, and it's easier to use with larger mesh files.
Now one thing to note, there's two options here, and you might have a blue icon. If you have a blue icon, that means you're in the hobbyist or free version of Fusion 360 and will not have access to the prismatic approach, which is okay. In this case, for a lot of these more complex curved scan files, we can simply use the faceted approach. So let's attempt a faceted approach.
But before we do that, I'm going to reduce the mesh and simplify the overall number of facets that are seen, but while trying to keep and preserve the intent or the geometry that is there. So doing a reduced mesh, I now can come back and do a conversion.
Using the Scan for Hybrid Modeling
We'll do the faceted approach, and once it solves, the solid body is now useful for hybrid modeling. You can attach solid geometry, for example, maybe building in a base, or we can use the scan data, uh, to design around. So for example, if we wanted to design a fixture that fits snugly to the scan data, we can extrude up to a surface and use cut with surface or a combine of bodies.