Designing in SolidWorks for an Inventor Company

[MattP]

I have a possible opportunity to be involved in the design of some equipment for a company whose engineer is a diehard Inventor kind of person. I have no interest in buying a seat of Inventor and learning it especially for a relatively small project. My question is this: Is there a reasonable method for communicating between the two software packages? Normally I would design in SolidWorks and export all of my drawings into dwg format so anyone with at least AutoCAD LT can open them. This particular customer appears to be more CAD savvy than many of my non SolidWorks having customers and it may be important that he have a model to work with. I know both packages can use "universal" formats such as iges or step. Is there a way to share an entire SW assembly and have it somewhat functional in Inventor? Any thoughts?

 

[btrueblood]

We have a similar problem internal to our company (actually now two companies co-located and sharing resources... sounds like a cluster-f*** to you?). My cohorts over the wall use strictly Autocad products. I use a little of both (SW for solid models, then export 2D geometry and build Acad flat prints). The other guys send me model files to analyze using the built-in CosmosExpress package in SW. Someday, they are going to spring for a real seat of Cosmos, so they say. In any case, the most reliable method we've found to go from Inventor to SW is the .sat file (acis). Iges files have a raft of problems due to solid-to-surface translations, i.e. the models show up with holes in them. The step files can't seem to coordinate in terms of units - inch system files import with mm units and such. In all cases, no "intelligence" in the models is possible, i.e. no features or trees are exportable/importable. Not sure about assemblies, but I think they can come over as "dumb solids".

 

[Heckler]

I had similiar opportunities and have always used whatever MCAD is native to the company. I personally wouldn't waste my money on Inventor! But I would work out a deal with the company that you do the design work and borrow a seat of their Inventor software. Trust me Inventor is easy to learn and it will make you appreciate SWx that much more. At eh end of my inventor project I was pulling my hair out at the lack of functionality. And to think companies get suck into purchasing Inventor IMHO because of name recognition since Autodesk has been around since almost the beginning of time.

Best Regards,

Heckler

"Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups" John Kenneth Galbraith

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Heckler ... does Inventor have a "feature recognition" function or module similiar to SW. If so, assuming btrueblood could obtain a copy of Inventor from the other company, would it be easier for him to continue creating models in SW, but then just use Inventor to do the conversion?

& all the best.

 

[btrueblood]

Limey,

If Inventor has such a utility, we haven't found it. And, by the way, I agree with Heckler: while the Autodesk product is a world of improvement over their old "Mechanical Desktop", it's still a pain to use on real world projects.