All depends on what you want to do and what you want back as data. You'll want to stay away from .asm and .prt at these are Assembly and Part natively common to apps like Solidworks and Pro-E.
.Igs will give you surfaces. If you have Maya this is a reasonable choice as Maya will read this as NURBS surfaces where possible. .stl will produce a reasonably good faceted file. But the application or converter you are going to needs to be able to read this. .wrl is an older but reliable web based geometry format that is also faceted. It is highly compatible and readable but you may run the risk of losing groups or material ids. This tends to be a format for virtual environments or web use so exports are often tuned to low poly counts. If exported with a high tolerance(resolution) this can be very useful. .3dxml is similar but newer and inside an xml wrapper, I think. ACIS, Catia, and Parasolid are native cad formats, unless you have something to convert them with, I'd avoid them. In general the list provided suggests to me that the user is strictly a CAD engineer with very little fundamental knowledge of what you do, how you do it, and why. Else he would not be suggesting some of these formats. This is quite common. Most CAD folks are very good at what they do and very knowledgeable about their software but they don't often spend much time trying to reduce their data to usable information for 3D animation software. Which is ironic and odd given the similarities in the two professions, but still quite common. A couple of things to be aware of. Solidworks is a solids modeling software capable of generating "watertight" geometry for stereo lithography output, engineering or other high end geometry construction. The geometries are constructed using primitives and other methods which produce "solids", or geometry which has no gaps or seams in theory. Solids can be converted to surfaces, but this can be a difficult and error prone process if the operator does not understand how the geometry is needed. This has more to do with the way solids models are broken down into UV surfaces than with the operator or engineers. We, as animators, use surfaces a very specific way and people who build solids models have little reference as to why. Solids can produce extraordinarily high quality facet models, with geometry evenly distributed, no gaps or seams, and at an incredibly high facet tolerance. But the operator needs to be aware of what your requirements are when converting the geometry else you can end up with too little or way too much detail. A shrinkwrap and tolerance process is often used, depending on the software, to manage the export. For these reasons you want, as much as possible, to have the CAD engineer convert this geometry to a usable format directly out of Solidworks. This is the point where you will get the most control over your export. To my knowledge Solidworks can also export Rhino and DXF. I'd avoid DXF if at all possible. A high rez STL or WRL will probably work well. Same with Rhino, but IGS is known for being a somewhat volatile format depending on what exports it and what the importer is. Its kind of like OBJ, it can be written so many different ways that one companies export is only as good as someone else's import. I typically use Maya for CAD geometry import and send that to Soft. Maya has a lot of support for CAD via it's DirectConnect plugin. It a really great way to go because it can read formats like Catia, UG, and PTC. -- Joey Ponthieux LaRC Information Technology Enhanced Services (LITES) Mymic Technical Services NASA Langley Research Center __________________________________________________ Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and do not represent the opinions of NASA or any other party. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of olivier jeannel Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2013 4:50 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Dealing with CAD files format Thank you guys :) Do you have a favorite CAD format ? For the moment Polytrans is still a bit too expensive (according to what I'm paid for the job). Maybe Moi3d would be a better choice. There is something called FreeCad, which I might try. I wonder if 123D Design would offer some Translation... Still on vacations ^^; so I can't really test. I'm trying to anticipate... Thank you ! Olivier Le 13/08/2013 22:38, Eric Turman a écrit : Deep exploration is great but $$$$ we ended up having to use polytrans as well. MOI3D looks very interesting if it works well though, thanks Ludo. -=Eric On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 3:31 PM, Mirko Jankovic <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Also deep exploration supports bunch of formats and converts really nicely as well On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 10:26 PM, Byron Nash <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: We deal with receiving CAD files and ended up having to buy a license of Polytrans. It works pretty well. Before that I tried Rhino demo and some other free options but always wasted tons of time with poor results. On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 4:15 PM, olivier jeannel <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi guys, Next week I shall receive a mecanical pieces generated with Solidworks. Because I'm dealing with an agency, they might won't be able to send an obj or fbx file. They propose various formats : Assemblage or Assembly (.asm) Part (.prt) Parasolid (.x_t) Iges (.igs) Step AP203 or AP214 (.stp) IFC 2x3 (.ifc) ACIS (.sat) STL (.stl) VRML (.wrl) Universal3D (.u3d) 3Dxml (.3dxml) Catia Graphics (.cgr) So my question is, what format should I ask and what software would you recomend to open and save it in a classic polymesh format ? (preferably free...) I have an old Deep Exploration, I was thinking giving it a try. But if someone has a cool winning format + software to advice... Thank you ! Olivier -- -=T=-
