stl

Form mesh (scan data) to T-splines by Sebastian Morales

This is meant to be a tutorial on how to convert a mesh (or scan data) into workable T-splines.
You will need a license of Fusion 360 and a license of ReMake (formally Memento) also by Autodesk. You can download the 15 day trial or buy a license (about 200 a year or so), I believe there is also a free version but I am not sure what are the limitations. 

Open ReMake and import your mesh. This might take a little depending on how many triangles/points you are working from. In this example I was using a mesh of over 2M triangles, a scan by Bernard Brits I found on GrabCad. I wanted something with complex geometries to really test the workflow and this has it all! 

Once the mesh finishes converting, we will go ahead and get it ready for Fusion 360, this might take a while depending on the mesh complexity but here the workflow.

First click on Analyze (the microscope) and select the Detect and fix model issues (the band aid). Detect the issues and fix them all. 

Export the mesh: 

Make sure to select Quads since Fusion will need the Quads in order to make the T-Splines. Select the number of quads depending on your needs, keeping in mind that Fusion will struggle with them later I went ahead and selected 100K.

And you are done! No not really...

Re-import the mesh into ReMake, this time use the quad based mesh you just saved. Repeat the Issue detection workflow and you will see there are a bunch of problems with the mesh. 

 

Once you are done, detect issues AGAIN just to make sure you didn't break anything while fixing it. This happened to me in more than one occasion. You can manually also delete some triangles or disseminate the mesh as needed. 

Export the mesh as quads again.

And you are done! No not really...

Import the latest mesh you saved and analyze it. You will notice that there are still some issues. Fix them and export the mesh.

Repeat this until you can't find any issues right after importing the mesh. As you can see from my file name this took about 4 times. This is how you know you are good! 

And you are ready for Fusion 360!
Open fusion and Upload your file to the cloud. 

Open the drawing and click on Convert from the Utilities on the Sculpting menu. 

Select the Mesh and this will convert it from a Quad Mesh to a T-Spline body. This might freeze Fusion for a while (as in a long while) but eventually should create the T-Spline body. Not quite what you need but definitely a step in the right direction. 

Once it is finish converting you should have two bodies inside your "Bodies" folder. One of them a mesh, the other the T-spline body.

Click convert again and this time select the T-Spline body, this will convert it into a Brep (a body)! Again, Fusion will freeze for a while but once it is done you are too!