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Technical Meshes (CAD)

Mode: Object Mode

Panel: Sidebar ‣ QuadGuide ‣ Surfaces (CAD)

Every face of a CAD part gets its own grid of quads, with an edge loop along each border.

Usage

  1. Set Style to Hard Surface, and set Quads.
  2. If faces also meet smoothly (fillets), press Prepare CAD Part in Surfaces (CAD).
  3. Press Remesh.
The housing with the surfaces Prepare CAD Part found, one color each The housing remeshed, the quads colored by surface
The flange with the surfaces found, one color each The flange remeshed, the quads colored by surface

Settings

Prepare CAD Part
Finds the surfaces, gives each its own material, and turns on Use Materials. Afterwards it reads Prepare Again: press it after a change below to find the surfaces anew. The line below the angle counts the surfaces and materials, and says when a wall is thinner than a quad.
Angle
Faces meeting sharper than this are separate surfaces. If a face is missing its own color, change it and press Prepare Again.
Details

Borders chooses what separates surfaces besides the angle: Sharp edges, Seams, Materials, Tangent (a flat meeting a curved face smoothly, a fillet) and Curved (two curved faces meeting smoothly, for parts whose fillets meet other curved faces).

Merge Thin joins strips narrower than half a quad to a neighbor. It is off for sheet metal, where the thin walls are the part. Keep Material Borders appears when the mesh has materials of its own and keeps their borders.

To Guides turns the borders into guides instead of materials, with Cut Lines across surfaces that have several borders. Clear Surfaces removes the colors and puts the original materials back.

Good to Know

  • A part with many small holes can land a little above Quads: each rim needs whole rows.
  • A hole needs about eight quads around to look round. Raise Quads or paint it denser.
  • Walls thinner than a quad are a limit of any quad remesher; the panel warns about them.

Examples

Plate Shaft Bracket
The plate, remeshed The shaft, remeshed The bracket, remeshed
Flange Housing Thin box
The flange, remeshed The housing, remeshed The thin box, remeshed
Dome Knob Sheet with slots
The dome, remeshed The knob, remeshed The sheet with slots, remeshed

Try It Yourself

These are the parts the pictures and the numbers on this page come from.

Part What it exercises
plate.stl holes in a flat
shaft.stl coaxial cylinders
bracket.stl bores and a bend
flange.stl a bolt circle and fillets
housing.stl bosses and bores
thin_box.stl 2 mm walls
dome.stl lens flats on a sphere
knob.stl a disc on a cylinder
sheet_slots.stl slots in sheet metal
  1. File > Import > STL, pick a part.
  2. Click Prepare CAD Part.
  3. Set Style to Hard Surface and Quads to 1500, then Remesh.

The bench also uses three public NIST test parts (the "NIST PMI STEP Files" of nist.gov, about 140 CAD faces each). They are not included here.