Upload CAD File

To upload CAD file to the platform please follow the steps below. For these steps you would need to download and use Rhino 3D.

1. Document Unit Setup

Make sure that Rhino’s units are set to cm.

To do this, lick on the Properties/Options button to open up the options.

Select Units under the Document Properties. If needed, you can open up the drop-down menu for Model units and select cm. Hit enter to close the window.

2. Import

Import the CAD file into Rhino by navigating to File > Import and selecting your reference file.

To set the correct unit settings for your model within the import options, ideally you would need to know what unit settings were used during the export of the model’s file. You can also try different values and measure the resulting model’s scale to check if it’s correct.

With this particular example we set the units to mm.

Warnings

The warnings displayed below can commonly appear during importing. For the first warning click Yes:

And for the second warning click Ok:

3. Positioning (as needed)

After the import is finished, check if the model is centered to the origin. If yes, then you don't need to do anything in this step.

If the views look empty at this point, that could mean that the model is placed far off from the center, and out of view. To find the model hit CTRL + A, then click on the zoom to selected tool. This will zoom in on the object on the viewport which is active.

Selected objects will be highlighted with bright yellow wireframe.

When you located your object, you can group the individual parts together by pressing CTRL + G (For ungroup hit CTRL + Shift + G). This will keep the parts of your model holding their position relative to each other during transforms.

Finally, while the model is grouped and selected, look for the align tool on the left side toolbar, click on the small triangle on the bottom right corner of the tool to make all the align options visible, and activate the align center option by clicking on it.

You can see that the tool is active when the model starts to follow the position of your cursor. To center the object to the world origo, hit the 0 on your keyboard or numpad, and then enter. The model is still selected. If it disappears from your view you can use zoom to selected tool again to locate it.

4. Remove Unnecessary Parts

In order to make the resulting file size more manageable, it is recommended to remove some parts of the product that are not visible from the outside (e.g. bolts, drawer rails).

To better see if there are any such parts within the model, you can click to the dropdown icon next to the Perspective viewport, and change the mode to ghosted. (edited)

To select the smaller parts inside the model, you can click and drag a selection box (starting from an empty area outside the object), dragging from Right to Left. This way the selection will only apply to parts that are completely included in the selected area.

When you have the unwanted parts selected, press DEL to delete them from the scene.

5. Meshing

To create a mesh, select the object, type “Mesh” in the upper command line, and press Enter.

The dialog box appears. You can choose between two types of dialog boxes: simplified or detailed.

Most of the time, the simple mesh options are enough to create the mesh model. Press Enter to generate the mesh model.

If you press the Detailed Controls you can also see the more detailed dialog:

The detailed mesh option is an advanced meshing dialog. You can define various parameters before meshing, such as density, simple planes, and jagged seams.

The resulting mesh would look something like this:

6. Export

In this case, the mesh and the NURBS model are in the same position. Go to the Selection menu and choose the “Mesh Select” tool

Then go to the File menu > Export Selected option, and export the model in your preferred file format. In order to make the file work on the platform please make sure to select .obj or .fbx.

7. Upload

When uploading to the colormass platform, make sure to select Convert to World Space UVs on the dialog that appears after upload:

This will make sure to correct the mapping issues the CAD file has.