Follow Along: CAD and Mesh Export

In this lesson, we will show how to export a mesh or a CAD body out of nTop. So, if you plan to follow along, please download and open up that starter CAD and mesh export file below this video. This file has a completed topology optimization on a bracket that we can see here that is already implemented in this file and we will export it as a mesh and a CAD body.

First, let’s export this as a mesh. Since this is an implicit body, we’ll have to convert this to a mesh, which we can do in our search blocks or in the Utilities tab. We’ll go to that Conversion tab and choose the Mesh from Implicit Body. I can add my part to export into the body. I can choose a tolerance of, let’s say, 1 mm, and we will have that mesh. So, this will be a clean, non-self-intersecting manifold mesh. We can also add that minimum feature size. We can see there’s some rounding of this part, so you might want to check the sharpen or simplify this as well. Though both of these options will take a little bit longer to run when choosing those, but you’ll have that simplified part like so.

We can also go to our Block Overload next to that title and choose this second option. So, if you wanted to sharpen a portion of your mesh, you can add an implied body here, have sharpened areas, and have those rounded areas, and you can define that sharpen iterations as well. But we’ll go back with our implicit body. We’ll just keep that tolerance of one and that body, which is our part to export. We can double-check that this is a clean mesh by going to our Block Details under properties and we can see that it is closed, it’s manifold oriented, and it’s not self-intersecting. So, that can be a good check and you’ll get a little warning if that is not the case for any of these options.

And if I wanted to export this part now, I will right-click and make this a variable, which I will label mesh. Then, I can go to my Exchange under Utilities tab and I will choose Export Mesh. So, I’ll place this in as my mesh. We can have millimeters as the units. And then for the path, we can save this with our file name and we can save this as an OBJ, STL, or 3MF.

If we go to our Conversions, we can then convert this from a mesh to a CAD body if we want to export this as a CAD body. So, I’ll click on this block and it’s important to note with our CAD Body from Mesh is this is really created for our topology optimization or a design that is not as complex like that lattice structure. So, if you are creating a complex lattice structure, this CAD Body from Mesh will not work as effectively because it has all those extra surfaces and edges. So, really use this for our topology optimization or simpler parts.

And before I can place this mesh into our CAD Body from Mesh block, I’m first going to quadrangulate that mesh as we discussed in the text lessons. So, I’ll place this mesh in here and it’s going to add that target count of 2,000. So, I have 2,000 of these quads creating this part. So for finer details, increase that target count, and you can decrease that target count to save on time, but you won’t have as fine features. So from this quadrangulated mesh, I can click on my CAD Body from Mesh and turn that visibility on, and now we have this part with those different surfaces and edges.

Now I can go to my Exchange and I’ll choose to export a part. This part will go to our Change Block Overload, and instead of exporting a curve, we can choose to export a part. So I can place my CAD Body from Mesh right in there and under file path you can see I can save it as a Parasolid, a Step, or IGS file. So that’s how you would export this CAD body or a mesh out of nTop.