CAD2CAD Flow ChartActify’s 3D CAD2CAD Translator™ enables multi-CADdata exchange supportformanufacturers. Manufacturers reviewing their data exchange activities have found over half of their design and engineering employees involved in the model conversion process either for their own needs or to meet the requirements of workers in QA, manufacturing, or other departments.  Plus, over one-fifth of the designers and engineers were found to invest time and resources towards re-creating model data in order to complete the task at hand.

The alternative has been to outsource the conversion process typically on a per part or need basis, which has a premium fee and also means user requisition, management decision and sign-off, plus purchasing’s repeated involvement adding costs and wasted resources and time.

For one low fee, your team gains the power to address these inefficiencies and convert complete 3D native mechanical CAD data, including PMI, tessellations and B-Rep from 20 file formats to the six most common formats for:

 

Enterprise 3D Model Interoperability

  • Many manufacturers have a daily need to support the varying model format needs of customers and suppliers—or the enterprise application needs that exist downstream of mechanical design, such as Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM), Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE / CFD / FEA) and Coordinate Measurement Machine (CMM) software.  CAD2CAD resolves this enterprise-wide model interoperability and eliminates the inefficiencies by alternative processes.

Migrating Legacy Data

  • As new technology evolves, manufacturers find themselves needing to migrate legacy data for continued product support.  When the new technology does not support the legacy format, the manufacturer’s alternative is to use a neutral format to bridge the gap.

Product Modeling Archiving

  • Data archiving represents the requirement to preserve and protect an organization’s intellectual property in terms of accurate 3D model data.  CAD2CAD offers the unique capability to store the original model-specific surface data in an open format that is aiming for ISO certification.  This allows manufacturers to ensure digital assets are protected for the long-term and can be made available at the original accuracy for future users.

3D PDF Publishing3D CAD2CAD Translator

  • Actify recognizes the varying data container needs from across a manufacturer’senterprise from PDF documents, to Microsoft Office documents, to line-of-business applications (ERP, PLM, SharePoint, etc…), and our own portable 3D viewing format.  Each container housing product information—Actify is the only vendor-neutral provider able to cost-effectively deliver 3D, 2D or meta-data to these varying formats.
  • If part of your business requirements is to share model data through intelligent 3D PDF documents to reach beyond your company’s firewall, than CAD2CAD can satisfy those requirements.

Supported Data Types

A resource and time-saving native 3D model translation is an indispensable prerequisite for the successful integration of all systems involved in your multi-CAD environment.  With CAD2CAD, you can work more efficiently by smoothly and accurately converting multiple 3D formats. Your team will benefit from the richness of the data that is translated, including visualization (tessellations), product structure, precise B-rep, Product Manufacturing Information (PMI) as well as attributes and metadata.  CAD2CAD enables you to share and integrate your product data into a variety of workflows by accurately converting it into common CAD formats.  Most of the data types stored by CAD systems are supported by CAD2CAD:

  • Assemblies and parts
  • Trees of 3D entities (coordinate systems, wireframes, surfaces, and solids)
  • Exact geometry representation for curves and surfaces
  • Topological structures for surface and solid models
  • Tessellated (triangulated) representation
  • Markup data including Product Manufacturing Information (PMI)
  • Metadata such as name, color, layer and other non-geometric data

CAD2CAD Formats

CAD2CAD delivers a single solution for converting the numerous native CAD formats to the industry standard formats needed across your extended enterprise for a fraction of alternative solutions.

Native 3D CAD Format Tessellation B-Rep PMI
Autodesk Inventor Check Mark – N/A
Catia v4 Check Mark Check Mark Check Mark
Catia v5 Check Mark Check Mark Check Mark
Catia v6 Check Mark – Check Mark
Creo Parametric Check Mark Check Mark Check Mark
I-DEAS Check Mark Check Mark Check Mark
IFC Check Mark – Check Mark
IGES Check Mark Check Mark –
JT Check Mark Check Mark Check Mark
Parasolid Check Mark Check Mark N/A
PRC Check Mark Check Mark Check Mark
Pro/Engineer Check Mark Check Mark Check Mark
Siemens NX (UG) Check Mark Check Mark Check Mark
Solid Edge Check Mark Check Mark –
SolidWorks Check Mark Check Mark Check Mark
STEP Check Mark Check Mark Check Mark
STL Check Mark N/A N/A
U3D Check Mark N/A N/A
VDA-FS Check Mark Check Mark N/A
VRML Check Mark N/A N/A

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Export 3D CAD Format Tessellation B-Rep PMI
IGES Check Mark Check Mark –
Parasolid Check Mark Check Mark N/A
PRC Check Mark Check Mark Check Mark
STEP (AP203 & AP214) Check Mark Check Mark N/A
STL (ASCII & Binary) Check Mark N/A N/A
3D PDF Check Mark Check Mark N/A