From the course: Meshmixer Essential Training

Overview of Meshmixer user interface - Meshmixer Tutorial

From the course: Meshmixer Essential Training

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Overview of Meshmixer user interface

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[Instructor] Let's go over general UI peculiarities with Meshmixer. As I said in the previous video, you really should have a three button mouse in order to best use CAD products. The right mouse button, holding it down rotates around. The middle mouse button pans, the mouse wheel scrolls in and out, and the left mouse button does things. If you go to file, to preferences, the default is to have the navigation mode set to Fusion 360, which is what I am using. You can also turn on Anti-Aliased Rendering, which makes your models look a little bit nicer and you have to restart Meshmixer for that. And if you ever have any issues with performance, you can also try to enable basic rendering as well. But I don't have that on right now. Now we have a, kind of a shell here. This is just from the bunny, from going to file, to import bunny, like that. The bottom part has kind of an open area, if you want to see your open areas a little bit more easily you can go to view, to show boundaries. As is highlights all of the open parts of your mesh in kind of a blue highlight with makes it easier for you to see. Speaking of the letter C, you're going to use that a lot. I talk about that in other videos, but if you hover your mouse over any specific part of your model and press the C key, C for center, your view will center right on that place and you're rotating around it. So if I click right here and press the C key, now I'm rotating around that part of the model. Very very useful to navigate around. If you hold down the space bar, you get another menu and then holding down the space bar. Now this bar up here allows you to change how Meshmixer kind of moves models. And everything in Meshmixer that is enabled is shaded in. So in these ones down here, the middle one is enabled. In these two right here the right one is enabled. If I turn on Snap, so I clicked on that, it is now darkened and I let go of the space bar, you can see as I move around that I get some free movement but that once the bunny hits kind of a cardinal point, it snaps there. So it snapped there and it snapped to the top. I am now looking at the bunny directly from the top. Sometimes it's fairly useful, so I wanted to point that out. But if you want to go back to just rotating the bunny everywhere, you can also turn on free and now rotate the bunny all directions. If you want to change the color of your background, I'm still holding that space bar, I'm going to click on this color right here and I'm going to let go of the space bar. This allows me to change the color of the background. I don't really tend to keep it in colors up here but I put it down here and put it somewhere between white and black. If I want to have kind of a lighter color I can go like that, hit space bar and I have a lighter color, or a darker color. Some people like lighter, some people like darker. Now I'm going to select an area on this and I'm going to go to Modify and say create face group. Now this is something that you'll do later in the class but I just want to share this with you now. Face groups are terribly important inside of Meshmixer to kind of help segregate and keep parts of your mesh separate from others, and if you can't see those it's because you're in a different coloring mode. You want to hit the space bar and make sure that this right one is enabled. So in the lower right here and you will see face groups. If you are in the left one, what that allows you to do is paint on your model, kind of cool colors. And I'll show you what that is in a later part of this video, but for the most part you want to stay on this one with the Meshmixer shader. So you click on shaders, click on this one, and this is the shader that you want to stay in. If you do want to paint, you would hit the space bar, click onto this color, go to sculpt, brushes, page vertex, and then choose some colors like this, like that, this other color, and you'd be doing just some color painting, you're not affecting the geometry but you're changing the color, and you can always hit the space bar, go back to this and switch back and forth if you'd like. If you want to do this via a menu option, you can go up to file, to preferences and the mesh color mode is either group color or vertex color. Vertex is the painting color, and group color is for face groups. Also When you're in there is tools like the sculpting tool, this is the draw tool you can hit the space bar and use this to change the color, sorry, change the size of your brush, you can see like this, and change the strength. You also see on the left hand side that the strength slider is moving on the left hand side and the size is also moving. So this is just a short cut, if you want to change the strength or size of any of this you can go over here, but it's just kind of nice when you see size right here. You don't actually see your brush changing, whereas, if you're right here and you hit the space key, you will see your brush size change so it is kind of a nice thing. So that is a general overview of the UI for Meshmixer and I invite you to play around and look. Also trim this off, this will be a 3D printer of some sort, you'll have a different one than I have probably. And if you don't like that up there all the time you can just double click on it and it will kind of disappear into the right hand side right there. But it does show that Meshmixer really really does care about 3D printing, so much so that it has a bar up here all the time to help you with 3D printing. Now that you know the UI, let's start learning the program.

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