Opening Solidworks files in Inventor

[Drhinehart]

I am looking for information pertaining to the compatability of Inventor with SolidWorks.

1. Can you open native SW files in Inventor?

2. If not what format works best?

3. Can you access features when importing files? (similiar to featureworks in SW.)


Thanks ahead of time for everyones help


Dale

 

[DesignerMike]

You can open some older versions of solidworks, but nothing from the latest version.

I personally prefer to use .sat format, but others use .iges and .stp

If you import as .sat (or other format) you won't have any of the features from the original (it's just a dumb solid). You can cut into the solid or add to it, but their won't be any features from the original.

 

[btrueblood]

I've tried the .sat technique to import a solidworks model of a valve body into Inventor. The model would crash Inventor within one or two modifications. Anybody know a way to get inventor to stabilize on large .sat files?

 

[DesignerMike]

Once you open it, make sure you save it to your project location (which you are probably doing already).

Most of my experience has been very good with .sat files BUT they are usually not very large (about 5MB max I would say). I normally use an extrude-cut or revolve-cut to modify instead of trying to move faces etc. but that is just my workflow.

 

[btrueblood]

Thanks, Mike. Did both of those, but I fear the original model just has too much complexity (lots of small fillets) and size (8+ Mb) for Inventor to handle. Sigh.

 

[DesignerMike]

I would try to open the file in Mech Desktop. Save as a desktop file, and then try to open in Inventor. The translator in MDT seems to be much more stable with problematic files.

 

[btrueblood]

Mike,

I just tried the MDT trick with a colleague's computer having the "latest" version of Mech. Desktop loaded on it. MD read in the .sat file okay. However, when opening the resulting MD .dwg file, Inventor gave the error message "no inventor parts found", and closed the MD translator, dumping me back to the "file open screen". Sheesh...

Oh well, I already "rebuilt" my 2D cad drawings, manually changing all the features I needed to change, in AutoCad. Took me 4 hours, but at least the job is done, and I can move on.