Hey everyone!
I’m looking for someone who could help me create 2D drawings / blueprints from a few STL files.
I need the drawings with basic dimensions and views, mainly for reference and manufacturing purposes.
If anyone is interested or knows someone who could help, please let me know.
Thanks!
If you designed it in Fusion360 just create a Drawing of your design. I have a couple of examples in my Things.
There is an F3D file in the linked project. If you have Fusion, try opening the F3D file and doing what @ksihota suggests – create the drawing from Fusion.
Or if you are a rank amateur like me… well… brace yourself. @ksihota, you might want to turn away. Or brace yourself with a stiff drink. In fact, you might want to have a few shots through all of this.
Download the STL files.
Import the STL files into Tinkercad (shot!).
Position the object so that the cross-section you want intersects the base plane.
Export the object as an SVG. This gives you a slice of the object where it intersects the base plane.
Open the SVG in Inkscape (shot!), a free vector editor.
Measure the dimensions and make your drawings in Inkscape.
You’ll have to export the objects in a few different orientations to capture all of the features this way, but the two STLs from the liked project are very simple and this would not take long to do.
This is not the best way to do it, but it’s how I would do it without Fusion (shot!).
Yeah, but if I recall AutoDesk owns both TinkerCAD and Fusion.
I tried TinkerCAD before I went to Fusion but I found TinkerCAD more difficult to do anything other than the basics. They use TinkerCAD in a lot of schools. My Grandson learned to use it in his middle school ADST class. My Daughter is teaching ADST so she is learning TinkerCAD so she can work with the students that have already been using it. I actually taught the old DOS AutoCad to some Tech Ed (drafting) teachers who wanted to start using the computer but that was decades ago. In those days a teacher was lucky to have a single computer in their class.
One of my beefs with TinkerCad when I started testing it out was that you started with primitives and grouped them in different ways using joins and cuts etc. It was slow and cumbersome. I also was not a fan of web based apps. Internet connections were problematic. When I tried fusion it allowed 2D sketches and you could extrude from them. It also allowed multiple extrusions using the same sketch. That was one feature that FreeCAD didn’t have so I was forever getting lost using the layers of sketches and extrusions. I believe that FreeCAD is planning on implementing the use of a single sketch to produce multiple extrusion but last time I checked it was not implemented.
AFAIK TinkerCAD now uses sketches as well but when I tried it out I did not find it very easy. I believe the big advantage for TinkerCAD for the classroom is it requires low computing overhead which Fusion does not and it has a simplified menu system which I believe you could customize in Fusion but it would require some work to only provide the items you wanted the kids to use and when they went to use it on their own those custom menus might be hard to port over to multiple accounts.
However, I also compare that to programs like Word or Excel that have so many features they can do almost anything you want but most users only use about 1% and then when they can’t see how to make it work they find some other program to do what Word or Excel can already do.
I like your idea about slicing a mesh. You could also do that in Fusion and you could skip the export to Inkscape (another program I taught in middle School, along with GIMP) and just use the sketch tools that come in Fusion to sketch your model using the mesh as a tracer. I assume this could also be done in TinkerCAD?
Once you have a sketch you can choose to dimension the parts you want, or constrain the sketch completely depending on what you want to do with the model later. You could use that method to help reverse engineer that drone in one of the other threads.
PS. are those shots coming from the Vonda Hotel bar?
@ksihota Not sure if you’ve ever looked at my things on Thingiverse, but all of those are done in Tinkercad. I do the sketches – elevations – in Inkscape, save SVGs of the various things that need to be extruded into 3D objects, then import them into Tinkercad to make them 3D. I then get the STLs out of Tinkercad. It works surprisingly well and I can hold tolerances that are more than fine enough for HO scale models of buildings. But all of the heavy lifting is really done in Inkscape. I really should learn a real CAD program, but my current approach works so well that I’ve not yet felt a compelling need to do so.
I agree with you that Tinkercad would be completely impractical for the sort of things I make. Laying out individual bricks with Tinkercad primitives would be an insane way of doing it.
But… umm… that said, that’s exactly what I do for my rusticated brick models. A single rusticated brick comes out of Blender and then I build my walls, brick by brick, in Tinkercad. Now that I have written that out and actually see it on screen I have to admit that I am embarrassed – I need to find a better way!
Onshape is now free for 6 months and you can import the stl then create a drawing from there
Fusion360 is free for hobbyists. You only have a small amount of cloud storage, but I don’t use that anyway. I just export all my files as f3d files to my PC.
