Mesh2Solid Beta

What it does

Not every shape can be recovered — but simple parts work very well. Bores, pins, shafts, fillets, plain machined geometry: that is exactly what it is built for. Free-form surfaces, organic shapes and scan data are not — anything that does not fit a cylinder, cone, torus or sphere stays a planar face, so the body still closes, just without the analytic surface.

• Real geometry, not a triangle cloud: A bore stays a bore — the add-in fits cylinders, cones, tori and spheres to the facets and builds a solid from them, so you can measure, fillet and cut against it like any other body
• Mesh body or STL file: Pick a mesh body in your design and the solid is added right next to it, mesh switched off. Pick nothing and you get a file dialog — the STL opens as a new document
• Choose what gets detected: Cylinders, cones, tori and spheres each toggle on and off; everything else becomes planar faces. Distance and angle tolerance decide how eagerly facets are merged into one shape
• Reduce first, recognise better: Fine meshes are slow and recognise worse. The built-in reduction slider runs Fusion's adaptive reduce before detection — on a test bracket 184k triangles down to 10k turned 46 shapes into about 90, and 35k faces into 3.5k

How to use it

1. Run Mesh to Solid from Solid → Modify
2. Select a mesh body — or leave the selection empty to pick an STL file instead
3. Check the triangle count shown, and drag Reduce to left if the mesh is fine
4. Set distance and angle tolerance (defaults: 0.05 mm and 2°), pick the shape types, click OK

Above 100,000 triangles conversion and import take minutes — the dialog warns and suggests reducing. The result reports how many cylinders, cones, tori and spheres were found, and says so if the body did not come out manifold.

Installation

Mesh2Solid is an add-in (not a plugin bundle) and goes into the AddIns folder:

macOS

1. Quit Fusion 360
2. Unzip and copy the Mesh2Solid folder to
   ~/Library/Application Support/Autodesk/Autodesk Fusion 360/API/AddIns/
3. Start Fusion 360 — enable the add-in under Utilities → Add-Ins

Windows

1. Quit Fusion 360
2. Unzip and copy the Mesh2Solid folder to
   %APPDATA%\Autodesk\Autodesk Fusion 360\API\AddIns\
3. Start Fusion 360 — enable the add-in under Utilities → Add-Ins

The detection core ships as a native library: macOS on Apple Silicon and Windows on x86-64. Intel Macs are not supported.