Using stl files and other imports

owen_morrison_

Hello my name is Owen and I just got a subscription to the onshape software as a student. Lately I have been trying to import files from thingaverse (only stl format) and in the workspace I have no way of editing the imported file. Any help on this topic would be greatly appreciated. 

bradley_sauln

Please read the comments from @philip_thomas in this Forum post:

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/8089/is-there-a-way-i-can-edit-an-stl-after-importing-it

tony_459

STL is mesh and Onshape is not mesh-editing software.

You can import STL files and snap to vertices on the STL mesh---useful to constrain sketches---but I don't think you can do much beside this.

Your best bet is mesh-editing software. Blender is free and powerful, if you can take the steep learning curve. Meshlab is free too, and I hear it's great, though I frankly haven't used it enough to say.

If you need to model CAD parts around STL mesh geometries, Autodesk Fusion 360 beats both pure CAD and pure mesh software... because it actually supports both... and it's sort of free.

GWS50

This is a fantastic Featurescript written by MBartlett called BooleanPlus. Works really well and very clever. Click on the + custom feature at the top to add it.

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/84d939daceef6a928b8abcba/w/9e0dafb21fbe2ec8b983bbdc/e/7c5dcdb503f7e2f6ddba9d30

roberto_mozzicato

GWS50 said:

This is a fantastic Featurescript written by MBartlett called BooleanPlus. Works really well and very clever. Click on the + custom feature at the top to add it.

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/84d939daceef6a928b8abcba/w/9e0dafb21fbe2ec8b983bbdc/e/7c5dcdb503f7e2f6ddba9d30

Thank you, this is awesome!

It's not as having a real part reverse engineered as in Fusion360, however this allows to do basic boolean manipulation on meshes, which is great, a little bit as using Tinkercad on steroids!