From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Mesh Tools

Importing geometry through open dialog - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Mesh Tools

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Importing geometry through open dialog

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- [Narrator] When opening mesh files in SolidWorks, it's important to go through the Open dialog box and not to just drag and drop them into SolidWorks. If we go up to Open, or conversely if we go to File > Open, you'll see here if we change this from All Files, we have a bunch of options related to mesh files and cloud data. So we can specifically filter by Scan To 3D Files if we want. So that's going to give us 3DS, OBJ, STL, WRL, PLY, and PLY2. These are classic mesh files we're all used to dealing with, and then point cloud data, such as XYZ, TXT file, ASC, .VDA, IGS file, and an IBL file. For most of the examples, we're going to be using a 3DS file as our mesh, but often, we're usually working with STL files when we're creating meshes and sending them out to vendors, to customers, or people on the shop floor who are doing, for example, 3D printing for us. So always make sure to open this way. It's going to give you options with how you import your mesh. Also, if you change it to All Files, select a mesh file, and then go to Options, you'll get even more options here for the STL file format, OBJ, PLY, PLY2, and you can try to open it as a solid body, a surface body, or a graphics body, and then it also has some mesh body options as well. So try to leverage these options when you're opening it, so that you can get closer to a solid body, instead of just having the graphics body, which is often nice to look at but not very useful when opening up everything in SolidWorks.

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