Mesh Workbench

From FreeCAD Documentation
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Introduction

The Mesh Workbench handles triangle meshes. Meshes are a special type of 3D object, composed of triangular faces connected by their vertices and edges.

Many 3D applications, like Sketchup, Blender, Maya and 3D Studio Max, use meshes as their primary type of 3D object. Since meshes are very simple objects, containing only vertices (points), edges and triangular faces, they are very easy to create, modify, subdivide, stretch, and can easily be passed from one application to another without any loss of details. In addition, since meshes contain very simple data, 3D applications can usually manage very large quantities of them without using a lot of resources. For these reasons, meshes are often the 3D object type of choice for applications dealing with movies, animation, and image creation.

However, in the field of engineering meshes present a big limitation: they cannot accurately define curved surfaces. This is why FreeCAD relies on Brep instead. The Mesh Workbench offers some commands to directly manipulate meshes, but it is most often used to import 3D mesh data and convert it to a solid for use with the Part Workbench or PartDesign Workbench.

Tools

All Mesh Workbench tools can be accessed from the Meshes menu. Almost all are also available in one of the Mesh toolbars.

  • Close hole: Fills selected holes in mesh objects.
  • Add triangle: Adds faces along a boundary of an open mesh object.
  • Boolean
    • Union: Creates a mesh object that is the union of two mesh objects.
    • Intersection: Creates a mesh object that is the intersection of two mesh objects.
    • Difference: Creates a mesh object that is the difference of two mesh objects.
  • Merge: Creates a mesh object by combining the meshes of two or more mesh objects.
  • Unwrap mesh: Creates a flat representation of a mesh object.
  • Unwrap face: Creates a flat representation of a face of a shape object.

Preferences

There are some export preferences related to Mesh Formats but these are not used by commands belonging to this workbench. They are used by the Std Export command.

Mesh Workbench preferences can be found in the following categories of the Preferences Editor:

Notes


PartDesign Workbench/tr
Part Workbench/tr