From the course: Meshmixer Essential Training

Overview of Meshmixer areas - Meshmixer Tutorial

From the course: Meshmixer Essential Training

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Overview of Meshmixer areas

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- [Instructor] First off, I want to welcome you to Mesh Mixer. This is the opening screen of Mesh Mixer, and you will see all of this. You may have a different 3-D printer listed up here. But this is the opening screen. You have a couple different buttons here, import and open. Open is talking about Mesh Mixer's default file extension, which is a dot mix, m-i-x. And Import is for normal stl, obj, all sorts of different models. You can also start with a bunny, a sphere, or a plane. So if you click on the bunny, you will get a bunny. And if you notice that I'm rotating around, I am right-clicking and holding down the right mouse button to move around. The middle mouse button, when you hold it down, pans. And the mouse wheel moves in and out. I highly recommend that you use a 3-button mouse because that makes everything with CAD so much easier. On the left-hand side, you have all of your menu options. Import is what I just talked about where it allows you to bring-in, appending, or replacing different objects inside. You can click on Mesh Mix, which brings up a lot of very neat shapes that you can drag and drop onto your mesh, and dynamically move them, and add them, and append them on. Very fun. Selecting allows you to select when you're clicking and dragging over certain parts of your model to do very interesting things. Anything where you need to affect just one part of your model is done in the Select tool. Sculpting allows you to play with digital clay. You have all sorts of tools here that allow you to create and destroy and flatten. And in this case, smooth different parts of your mesh. All sorts of really fun tools inside of sculpt. Stamp allows you to create stamps on your mesh. Like that. Stamps can then be used with something like the select tool to extrude those out and make awesome, neat, fun shapes on the surface of your mesh using stamps. Edit is where you change your model all at once. Or you could do all sorts of things with aligning, or transforming, hollowing, cutting. All sorts of different things with all of your model all at once, which is done in the edit tool. Analysis allows you to understand what's going on with your mesh. You can measure, do a mesh query to see how much curvature is in your model, all sorts of different things you can learn about your model in analysis. Under shaders, you have different ways of just viewing your model. These are not the final color that your model will be printed in, but more help you kind of visualize and look at your model as you work with it. The default shader for Mesh Mixer is up here at the top. And it's the first one. So you go here and you get some different colors. I'll talk about these colors in different parts of the class. But these are face groups right here, there's special kind of helper colors for Mesh Mixer that you see when you use the Mesh Mixer shader. There's other ones like this, this is called the X-ray shader to see through your model. All sorts of neat ways to just visualize your model. If you click on export, it allows you just to easily save your model out in many different file formats. And finally, the print opens up a 3-D print interface where it allows you to visualize your model on a virtual printer bed. Again, welcome to Mesh Mixer, and I hope that this short little introduction to the different areas that you see on the left-hand side in Mesh Mixer, opens up a world of possibility to you that you will unlock in the rest of this class. Thanks so much.

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