CAD Forum

We have to dismiss an old legacy 2D/3D CAD (an obscure Japanese ACAD14 like monstrosity with the UI of bank terminal from the 90s) and I am exporting all the legacy data made with it to parasolid.
Once the machine that used to run it is dismissed we lose the node locked license and there is no more support available. =)

Assemblies alone should be sufficient, as they contains also the components data, but to avoid problems in the future I am going to export everything parts included.
More or less 1k asseblies and a total of 25k files garbage included and all of them have the Z axis up.
To open them in SW with a decent orientation the only simple option I found is to set the views (space bar shortcut for the view panel) switching from Y up to Z up.

I tried to export an assy parasolid with a different CSYS rotated with Y up: as expected the top assy is imported in SW with Y up, but all its components stay Z up making it useless.

I would like to reuse some data made with that CAD, but mixing its Z up and SW Y up is not appealing me.
Any other idea?

Try export the assembly as SW part, and then convert that multi bodies part into an SW assembly.

We ran into same problem with dumb solids imported from Solid Edge. SW is the only 3D system where I've Xperienced Y-up. There's no good way to make SW be Z up, naming views, naming planes in templates, etc., it will not do it. We ended up rotating the part with rotate body command in Solid Edge before importing to SW. Well, some of them anyway, the rest of the models are face down on the floor.

This article may help. Has instructions for SolidWorks 202 and up to change the view to "Z up" on data imported from a "Z up" system.

https://www.gsc-3d.com/blog/which-way-i ... nate-icon/

The easiest way to do it (other than a macro) on a individual part basis is the following:

Add a coordinate system in the part where you want 0,0,0 to be with the proper orientation (z up).

Then, save the part out as a parasolid, but select the output coordinate system as the one you added. Then re-open the parasolid. The only thing that you lose is any feature tree history.

I ran across this on Reddit last night:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SolidWorks/com ... hancement/

I didn't dig too deep, but might be hope for the future.


Solidworks link:
https://my.solidworks.com/solidworkspreview

With the "new" z up setting, if you sketch on the front plane, does it still default to Z down?

I haven't been able to test, 3DX is not recognizing my active subscription. Yay.

Z up is just view setting in SW (and other CAD). Set your templates to Z up first then import.
Unless the model imported to different coordinate.

SW25 seems to have something that may be of interest based on this bit of Beta feedback.

https://r1132100503382-eu1-3dswym.3dexp ... Tt8DkScF1Q

It looks like you have to be a member of the pre-release community for that link to work. Can you please summarize?

Seems like templates have a Y-up / Z-up tickbox option. I'm wondering if importing parts from a Z-up system could easily be rotated to Y-up by getting tricksy with the templates.