How can I add my imported STEP part to an assembly?

benjamin_pelletier

I'm designing a play structure and I want to see how it's going to look in relation to my house and yard.  I modeled the house as a set of standard OS parts, but the yard itself is sloped and uneven and doesn't lend itself to OS-style modeling (as far as I know).  I have a 3D surface mesh of my yard generated from some drone images that I've managed to convert to an enormous 8 MB STEP file (there are only 10k faces) which I've successfully(?) imported into Onshape (I can see the 3D mesh in Part Studio and rotate it around and such).  However, when I try to insert it in my assembly, it's not listed among the parts I can insert.

So, how can I add my imported mesh object to my house+structure+yard assembly to see how things are going to look?

viru

@benjamin_pelletier, Currently this facility is not available in Onshape. You can vote for this improvement request which is already raised by some other user. Please vote for this improvement request by visiting below link.
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/1358/import-surfaces-into-assemblies
Workaround:- Surfaces are not yet supported in assemblies. Perform a thicken on the surface to get a part will definitely work for you.

Narayan_K

@ benjamin_pelletier,At this stage we can't insert surface to assembly.So you can thicken your surfaces of yard so that it can form a part.now you can insert that part to assembly.

viru

@benjamin_pelletier, Currently this facility is not available in Onshape. You can vote for this improvement request which is already raised by some other user. Please vote for this improvement request by visiting below link.
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/1358/import-surfaces-into-assemblies
Workaround:- Surfaces are not yet supported in assemblies. Perform a thicken on the surface to get a part will definitely work for you.

SquidLord

Also, you're not going to have much use from that surface mesh without reference geometry defining what "level" is anyway, so I suggest using Your Favourite Mesh Tool(TM) to make the surface define the top part of a broken rectangular prism/cube, with the bottom face representing "level." This gets you a volume to import to OS for the rest of the geometry to work off of as well as makes sure you have a stable and static reference frame.