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Hello There first post. I'm a retired Aerospace Engineer well versed with Catia V5 but no experience with Solidworks. They are quite different. Anyone have any tips on going from Catia V5 to Solidworks. Also is there any translation utilities available to read and translate Catia files.
Hi MB107,
Your mummy must be very proud of giving you such a unique name:)
I may be mistaken, but as far as I know there is no utility that enables you to translate Catia files to SolidWorks. However, In Catia you can definitely translate your 3D files into IGES or STEP files - both international standard formats - or into the proprietary Parasolid X_T format that is a defacto standard. The biggest problem with these formats is that you lose the engineering history of the designs (read "design intent") as well as the association to all (ALL, no exception) legacy files, including drawings, exploded views, assembly mates, analysis data, BOM's, alpha-numeric text data, variables, equations, texture mappings, etc...
Question for you: What are the standard file extensions in Catia? Don't build on this but I'll check if SW can read Catia files.
Jeffrey.
Thanks for the reply. My name is John, but I know that if I tied to select that as a name or just about any iteration of it I would not be successful. So that is the name of the cars I collect restore and modify. Mercedes Benz 107 AKA the 280SL, 300SL, 350SL, 380SL, 420SL, 450SL, 500SL, 560SL.
From what I understand there are three packages of Solidworks available at the purchase price of $4000, $6000 and $8000. Looks like the $8000 version has extra modules to read Catia files. The student version can read the CATPart and CATProduct files directly. but they are dumb solids just like step and IGES files. I will more than likely be purchasing the $4000 package shortly but the $8000 package is really out of range and I suspect that I will have any Catia files rebuilt from scratch before I'm ready. I don't have much to translate but the real problem for now is getting up to speed with Solidworks as everything is completely different.
I was in similar situation and found it was easiest to buy one of the become SolidWorks associate courses, which cost about $12 at Udemy. They teach all the basic functions after which you can find other features with your Catia background.
Seppo (e34)