Importing files from Magics 18 for use with FEA in NX

[DJdrivesafely]

Hi Guys,

First post here after a long time browsing for help and excellent tips.

I am currently working on a project where I am trying to optimise the design of a bike crank for use with direct metal laser sinterning. I have modelled the part with NX 9 and successfully imported it into magics, where I have turned the surface model into a lattice mesostructure. As magics is primarily for creating STL files for use with 3D printing, I am having a hard time getting a file that i can re import in to NX to use the Nastran solver to run FEA on. Currently I have managed to get the file into NX by converting the magics file to DXF, this has two issues though, the file is huge, and I can't seem to do anything with it in the advanced simulation? The part just disappears.

the file types that I can export to are:

.magics
.stl (doesnt work)
.MatAMX
.amf
.mgx
.matPart
.mdck
.ply (doesnt work)
.dxf - very large files, cannot mesh?
.zpr
.wrl
.vrml
.pdf
.igs (fails import to nx)
.udm
.asc

Any help on this will be really appreciated. Thanks

Simon