Inventor to Solidworks Translation

[cobra46]

We are partnering up with another company that uses Inventor 2019 while we use SW v2017. They need to share files with us but we're having difficulty. 3D Connect doesn't work because SW2017 can only work with Inventor v2016 and older. Next, we tried STP files and most of the assemblies only produced an error when attempting to open them.

We are currently looking into them exporting in .X_B format which others have said works.

As a parallel and maybe better option, I'm looking into 3rd party file translation apps. Does anyone have any thoughts on good ones or ones to stay away from?

I did a search here already and didn't come up with much and nothing new.

Thanks for your input.

 

[AP087]

Hi!

Much depends on the amount of files you need to translate and how complex they are.

I dealt with software from Elysium (i.e. CadDoctor and CadFeature), which are both sound. CadDoctor I know for a fact that is being used in firms to migrate molds from several CAD format to SolidWorks. CadFeature is usually employed to migrate big amount of files between CAD formats, while retaining features (and drawings dimension relations as well!! very nice).

But again, it depends a lot on what we are talking about. As a rule of thumb: many files + complex files = expensive solution.