- [Instructor] When importing geometry into SolidWorks,
without a doubt you'll run across the step file format.
This is one of the most common universal
or vendor-neutral file formats that's available today,
and it's commonly used by vendors, customers,
and all other types of fabricators and manufacturers
to share complex 3D data
in a universal format that can be shared easily.
Now, the difference between this and its predecessor,
the iges file,
is that the step file is still fully supported
and is updated regularly.
So this means that the files that you import
will have better geometry
and maintain more of the original geometry
as you send it between different file formats.
Let's go ahead and open up an example now
and see what I'm talking about.
So first we start by going to the open dialog box
and navigating to our step file.
You can see here I have my step file located in the folder,
and below there's not really too much I can do.
I don't have any options here to select from.
I'm going to go over to the All Files dialog drop-down
and switch this over to step and see what that does for me.
So immediately you see it'll filter out
all of the file types but the step file.
So if you're working in a large directory
with multiple files,
this could be very handy.
It also brings up the options menu
so that we can change how the step file is imported.
So I'm going to go ahead and click on options,
and here we see all of our import options
and systems options.
Going down from the top,
we can see that we have the surface solid entities checked.
This means that I want to try to form a solid or surfaces
when importing this geometry.
Some geometry types will be 3D point cloud data
and other forms that don't necessarily have
the surfaces and solids that we're used to in SolidWorks.
Ideally we always want to push imported geometry
to a solid body so that we can get the most out of it
for copying and utilizing that geometry
and not have to redo a lot of work.
So here there are a few different options
when doing this import,
so again, we're going to try forming solids.
You can also knit the surfaces together
if you just want a collection of surfaces,
or do nothing.
I also have here the option Merge Entities selected
so that I can try to create one solid imported body
out of these features.
If you're doing something like a large assembly, though,
that's in a step file format,
you might want to uncheck this
so you can have separate imported bodies
that you can then save out to different SolidWorks parts.
As far as the other options,
I'm going to just leave these in their default for now,
and generally you're not going to have to mess with these.
So go ahead and click okay,
select the step file that I want to open,
and let's do some work.
Now, once SolidWorks is done translating the file,
we get a representation on our screen of the 3D file.
Now, every time you import a file,
it's going to ask you if you want to run import diagnostics
on this part.
As a rule, I typically select no
and do that after the fact if it's necessary.
This is going to physically change the geometry in front of you
to repair it if there's any issues.
So we're going to click no.
And then the next option that usually comes on
if you have the add-on activated
is the FeatureWorks option.
So this is actually going to go through this part,
and if it was made in SolidWorks, for example,
before it was converted to a step file,
it'll go through and rebuild the entire feature tree,
giving you more options to edit this file
going down the road.
But again, I'm going to select no
and just leave it in its native format
so I can see all the geometry
that I was originally sent.
So here I've got two bodies.
One's the main body of the part
and one is the safety for the valve to slide down.
It looks like I have very good geometry with no errors.
Now, if we were to open this as an iges file,
as shown in some previous videos,
we would've had errors in the threads and other areas.
But because we opened it as a step file,
we have almost optimal 3D geometry in front of us
to leverage moving forward in our design.