You may have to wait. Established CAD leaders don't care for their files to be translated.
UPDATE March 12, 2024, 11:55AM PT: CADSharp removes SolidTranslate at Dassault SysteÌ€mes’ request.
Article revised to mention SolidTranslate’s unavailability.
It’s hard to get traction in a world with intractable CAD users. No one knows this better than the folks at Onshape, who despite reuniting the founders of SOLIDWORKS to form a CAD dream team (and creating the next generation of CAD) have been largely unsuccessful in prying users away from SOLIDWORKS. One reason is the tremendous number of designs that exist as SOLIDWORKS models. With no neat and complete way to translate them into Onshape, users remain bound to SOLIDWORKS.
In addition, Onshape is rarely used in parallel with SOLIDWORKS. Few engineers will work on an office workstation with SOLIDWORKS and then resume work on the design at a different venue with Onshape.
The productivity-sapping complexity of both switching CAD programs and working in parallel on multiple platforms has discouraged the adoption of new CAD programs.
Of course, this works entirely in the favor of established CAD leaders. But it’s a thorn in the side of CAD companies trying to get traction for their products. For example, PTC (owner of Onshape) would like nothing better than having millions of designers and engineers abandon SOLIDWORKS and use their next-generation CAD program … one that was created in this century and not the last.
As both SOLIDWORKS and Onshape are based on Parasolid, one might wonder why users would need a translator or how hard it would be to build one. Building one is more difficult than it would appear because of the non-geometric information solid models hold, such as the history tree (the order in which a solid model is constructed) and geometry solid models recognize as features, such as holes and fillets. While the basic geometry can be imported and exported since it’s common between MCAD programs with the Parasolid kernel, the non-geometric information is of a proprietary format, making translation between design software programs a challenge.
It’s a challenge Keith Rice, technical director of CADSharp, took on. CADSharp,
which bills itself as the “largest CAD customizer on Earth,” had already cracked the code on SOLIDWORKS backward compatibility, allowing users to save their models in formats compatible with previous versions of SOLIDWORKS.
What’s the problem with backward compatibility?
Consider why backward compatibility, well within the capability of every software developer, would be denied users — many of whom clamor for it. A need to save in a format compatible with a previous version has been a top user request since the first time a new version was launched. But CAD companies, as a rule, disregarded users’ need for backward compatibility, insisting that new features in the latest version made it impossible. The truth is that backward compatibility lets users keep older versions and prevents CAD companies from maximizing update revenues. CAD companies counted on the annual spikes in revenue from major updates.
But nowadays, with subscription the rule and revenue upgrades the exception, CAD vendors can relax and offer backward compatibility. Dassault Systèmes, owners of SOLIDWORKS, did just that. Finally, SOLIDWORKS users could rely on built in backward compatibility.
What was good for SOLIDWORKS users made CADSharp’s translator to previous versions obsolete. It was, however, earn CADSharp serious cred as a developer of custom solutions and considerable goodwill with users for catering to their needs when software vendors would not listen.
It occurred to Rice that his SOLIDWORKS to previous version translator, now obsolete, could be tweaked to become a SOLIDWORKS to Onshape converter. Both SOLIDWORKS and Onshape were very similar in the way they implemented Parasolid. How hard would it be to have each recognize the other’s features? So, Rice dusted off 10-year old code almost forgotten in BitBucket and built SolidTranslate.
We see a public demo by Cordell Hollingsworth, a SOLIDWORKS expert and the sole developer of SolidTranslate at CADSharp. He goes through the process of translating a SOLIDWORKS model. As he is working on the SOLIDWORKS model in one window, viewers see the Onshape model developing in another window.
SolidTranslate takes an initial crack at translating and creating features automatically wherever it can. It pauses when it has trouble recognizing a feature. For example, it would pause at SOLIDWORKS’
Dome feature, for which Onshape has no equivalent.
The dome must be manually created. In another case, a face that had moved in SOLIDWORKS was not translated and had to be moved manually.
Features not recognized were easy to spot. They appeared as red squares in the Onshape feature tree.
The model was validated by volume comparison, a common validation method
since a feature not translated would throw off the volume of the model. The percentage difference of volume
to pass validation is adjustable.
If users want to have less interaction and more automation during translations, they can simply increase the tolerable percent of volume difference.
Can users run SolidTranslate in batch mode?
Giving engineers a way to abandon their SOLIDWORKS licenses and have all SOLIDWORKS files automatically translated into Onshape models maybe PTC’s dream, but it’s dream yet unrealized for these reasons:
- Users still need a SOLIDWORKS and a Onshape license to operate SolidTranslate.
- CAD translators should work in batch mode (letting the user select whole folders of models for processing) to have every model file translated one after the other. In contrast, SolidTranslate seems intended for working interactively at this point in the program’s development.
- It’s early days for SolidTranslate. The program doesn’t handle assemblies or drawings made in SOLIDWORKS. Assemblies are coming soon, Rice hastens to add. He doesn’t think assemblies would be too difficult.
- Dassault Systèmes has asked CADSharp to not offer the translator with
being an official partnership status.
How much?
CADSharp was willing to provide SolidTranslate for free. What would CADSharp have to gain by giving away it’s translator for free? Filling a user need
creates good will, says Rice. Plus, it’s good advertising for the company’s more lucrative
customization.
Wait for it
Not long after this article was published, we heard from CADSharp that
they had been asked to wait for entry into Dassault Systèmes developer network
before offering SolidTranslate and it was no longer available as a download.
Let us know in the comments below if you think an Onshape/SOLIDWORKS translator is worth pursuing.
More information can be found at cadsharp.com/solidtranslate.
