Jeff Ray recently commented about SolidWorks/CATIA relationship in an interview with R
Customers are fed up with not being able to share data between Catia and SolidWorks.
Grabowski then predicts, “at some point, a translator will be delivered.” But this apparently is not a comment made by Jeff Ray himself.
In the discussion that Jeff Ray had with the bloggers at the Blogger Event in early August, there was a hint that a translator between SolidWorks and CATIA isn’t good enough. Does this mean that SolidWorks needs to be able to natively use CATIA files (and vice versa)? Is something really coming that will address this long standing issue?
Meneze, in his article commenting on the Grabowski interview, goes on to list several reasons why making a translator between SolidWorks and CATIA is doable right now. Meneze does this in the context of his statement,
Dassault Systems has made laughing stock out of SolidWorks and its customers.
This was followed up by Matt Lombard who proposed,
This is of course a business decision, not a technical decision, ratcheting customers toward Catia rather than toward SolidWorks. Just like the version incompatibility ratchet.
Well, I’m not sure these are entirely accurate statements. I’m under the impression that Dassault Systemes is aware they are losing business because their two major 3D CAD applications do not fully communicate. Some large customers (who will not be mentioned here…but there’s a clue here) have standardized with CATIA for the high level 3D CAD work, but continue to use a 
list of other 3D CAD applications that does not include SolidWorks. One likely reason is that SolidWorks cannot use CATIA files, where their competitors can, as Lombard rightfully points out in his article. So, Jeff Ray is right. Something has to be done to correct this issue. Thank you to Grabowski for stirring the pot.
Ya’no, if Microsoft ran their business like this, we’d still see Lotus 1-2-3, Word Perfect, and Netscape lining the shelves at the local computer store. Why as Dassault Systemes allowed this gaping hole in their product line to exist for so long?
The motor-casing model that comes in the Samples folder of SolidWorks 2009 seems to tax SolidWorks a bit as is, all without any fancy features. In SW 2009, I used the Delete Face feature to remove all of the internal walls in the main casing. This was followed up with horrible Surface-Fill to patch the hole. (Please take note of the rather unnecessarily wavy Surface-Fill results.) After saving and Rebuilding twice, I checked the model’s Statistics. The image below represents one of the better Rebuild (CTRL-Q) results I was able to achieve in SW 2009. No surprizes. Surface-Fill is on top and Delete Face is near the top.
Strange…. I didn’t notice much of a difference. This was starting to look a bit like my previous round of tests on another model (See the previous article in this series). To check this further, another test needed to be done.
sheet metal parts, where Delete Face would generally be very bad practice? Well, as mentioned in the previous article, other areas have also been improved.
I set out to see just how much improvement one might expect from a simple example of Delete Face. (Reminder: I’m using SolidWorks 2010 Beta 2.) I found a rather basic model example available in SolidWorks 2009. Within SolidWorks 2009, I used Delete Face to delete one random surface. The options I used were Delete and Fill/Tangent Fill. It’s a self repairing deletion that would normally be used on something a bit more complex than a flat surface.
