Freehand Cropping STL File

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03-16-2021, 05:55 PM
Valhalla519

Freehand Cropping STL File

Hello everyone,

New to the forum! I have been scouring the internet to find an easy answer and my search has led me here.
Hope I can get some help. :)

I'm trying to free hand crop an STL file. To add more context, I'm looking to pull a landscape of a European country and crop the landscape file to shape it as per the country.

What would be the easiest way to do this? If there is any...if not, what's the way?

Thanks for your time!
03-16-2021, 06:55 PM
fred_dot_u

Can you provide a link to a source for this type of file? I'm picturing that you have an STL topographic type file covering a large geographic area and want to extract a specific country by the border lines.

I won't call it easy, but I suspect one of the easier (not-easy) methods would be to import the file with Fusion 360, convert it to a BREP and use the desired border to convert all the unwanted segments to a cut.

Blender would perform the task, but I lack those skills. Meshmixer is very much a free-hand program, but would be more difficult, in my estimation.
03-17-2021, 12:40 PM
Valhalla519

Quote:

Originally Posted by fred_dot_u

Can you provide a link to a source for this type of file? I'm picturing that you have an STL topographic type file covering a large geographic area and want to extract a specific country by the border lines.I won't call it easy, but I suspect one of the easier (not-easy) methods would be to import the file with Fusion 360, convert it to a BREP and use the desired border to convert all the unwanted segments to a cut. Blender would perform the task, but I lack those skills. Meshmixer is very much a free-hand program, but would be more difficult, in my estimation.

You're absolutely correct about the file and my needs. I have heard of Fusion360 before but didn't know it could do that.I was thinking, and correct me if I'm wrong, would I not be able to take the border of a country and sort of like use a cookie cutter tool to place it on top of this BREP file you mention and have it cut out the excess that way?Thanks for your reply.
03-17-2021, 12:49 PM
fred_dot_u

You're pretty close in your description. The STL file becomes a BREP file in order for F360 to edit it. The border does become a cutter, in a manner of speaking.

How about a screen shot of the STL file in a viewer, if you don't want to share the STL file?
03-17-2021, 01:17 PM
Valhalla519

1 Attachment(s)

Quote:

Originally Posted by fred_dot_u

You're pretty close in your description. The STL file becomes a BREP file in order for F360 to edit it. The border does become a cutter, in a manner of speaking.

How about a screen shot of the STL file in a viewer, if you don't want to share the STL file?

Oh no problem! I've attached the STL.
03-17-2021, 01:25 PM
fred_dot_u

that's an impressive topographic section. Do you have the border in an SVG or other vector format? Of course, it has to be at the proper scale or it has to be scaled to match. One might expect that the tile has a real-world dimension? How does one determine the placement for the border, once it's scaled?