From the course: Meshmixer Essential Training

Importing and saving files - Meshmixer Tutorial

From the course: Meshmixer Essential Training

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Importing and saving files

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- [Instructor] Let's talk about how to get files into and out of Meshmixer. Meshmixer has a native file format called a .MIX file, so if we look right here, this is a Meshmixer document, if we look at properties, it's a .MIX, M, I, X. So what that does, if I actually open this, is it preserves all of the face groups and all of the specialized information that you would use inside of Meshmixer to organize and work with your model. What you can do with Meshmixer is import files of all different file types. If you click on import, and I'm just going to say I'm going to replace this, going to go to a scan that I made actually out in a park near where I live, and this is just of a normal OBJ file, but it has color information on it. Kind of zoom in here, and you'll be able to see what this is, it's kind of a forge that I did some photogrammetry on, essentially used my cell phone camera to create this model, and this comes in as an OBJ with some color information on it. The nice thing about Meshmixer is that you can do things to this model and preserve the color information, and then export that out. So as you can see right here, I can select part of the model, after it selects, it might take a little second because this is kind of a large model, but I can select areas on my model, do some editing, preserve those textures, and then export the model back out for other uses. Meshmixer's actually very, very powerful with working with full color meshes to keep the color, the texture information all correct, and even painting in new information when you might want it. You can see right here, I just very, very quickly selected this model, cut a good bit out, and now it's smaller and much more manageable. You see it's still a shell based model. When you say file to save, you see up here it says forge1.obj, I can't save this as an OBJ, I would need to save this as a .MIX file. If I wanted to save this back out as an OBJ, I could either go down here to export, or go file to export, and then when I do that, it allows me to save it in STL, OBJ, 3MF, might not be able to see that, let me move this up here, STL, AMF, 3MF, PLY, VRML, many, many different types of file formats you can save this in. Some of those will preserve the colors and some of them will lose the colors, but you can import and export many different file formats to Meshmixer, as well as the .MIX file format, which is Meshmixer's standard one.

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