CAD + GamePad

[hybrid_vision]

Originally Posted by bvisness

If you have a good method, I would love to know what you recommend. I spent at least an hour this afternoon attempting to get one of our SolidWorks models into Blender for rendering.

Well, we use mainly Maya and Inventor, with some SolidWorks and 3ds Max here and there, so I can't say for sure about Blender. But well, it being open-source and Python-extendable and all, I'm sure someone's already written an import script that can read something produced by one of those programs....

Before you try anything below...are you using the student licensed version of SolidWorks like we are? Because if not, I think the full version has more export format options, one of which Maya (and maybe Blender) might be able to read directly.

Anyway, getting models from Inventor to Maya is pretty easy, since both are Autodesk. Maya has an Inventor format importer built in already, or you can use one of the other CAD formats it reads, like STEP and STL. So if you want to try a somewhat longer way, you could try opening SolidWorks files in Inventor and then opening up the resulting Inventor files in Maya.

We did work out a slightly less tedious path last year though in trying to import a model from SolidWorks to Maya. You should be able to open up SolidWorks' file in SolidWorks eDrawings, and then from there export it to STL, I think it was, which Maya can import.

Once you get it into Maya it's easy to export it in formats like OBJ that Blender will easily import.


There are some drawbacks with most CAD->3D Animation package conversions, namely that most of the major CAD tools work parametrically and with NURBS-like approaches which doesn't always translate that well if you try importing them as polygons; also if you set materials on the model it also doesn't always carry over that easily.

I assume that by 'rendering' you meant 'integrating into our animation'...otherwise you could just use SolidWorks' or Inventor' built-in rendering/presentation/animation features for that.

Edit: Also try this thread regarding Inventor->3ds conversion: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=111137