Our solution is to create a SolidWorks assembly containing 3 parts. Our mechanical engineers couldn't get a 3D PDF to work.

But, I may be wrong, I was not really investigating this deeper, I only had a brief look as I would like to get a nice 3D model from Altium. Just an idea, is it possible to import 3D PDF to Solidworks? I think I have seen very nice Altium 3D models but generated from 3D PDF instead of the ugly step files from Altium. And our computers aren't exactly low grade. The two different plugins that claim to do this aren't on the table at this time but I'm still open to hearings about other people's experiences.ĭoes anybody have any other ideas? How is this done for large motherboards and graphics cards? I know for a fact that there are larger and more dense boards than ours out there. I will post how this test goes once the mechanical engineers have done it. This method will reduce a lot of the detail, but shouldn't be as bad as the IDF files. We are going to try importing the step file into Blender overnight (or maybe we have to convert it to a mesh file first), decimate the file, and then try importing the result into SolidWorks. Or sometimes, we need to align a flex board with an FPC connector. It's common for us to need to know where the component body ends so that we can place a mould section next to it, sitting above its legs. Since our moulds need to wrap tightly around components, this solution doesn't work. the bodies are just bounding boxes (as intended by the file format). However, the component bodies get expanded to cover the legs and whatever other details. These take a very long time to import into SolidWorks, but once there, we can save the files as a SolidWorks part which is the most optimised solution that we've seen for PC performance.

We also tried using Altium's IDF Board exporter with several different file formats. Jokes aside though, these files are unworkable. It's funny how the number of duplicate IC models seems to correlate to how much precious board space they take away 😂. Parasolid works much better than Step, but both make our mechanical engineer's very sad. Step and Parasolid files on a board this size destroy SolidWorks.

Altium solidworks