Solidworks to Maya workflow?

[Binoman]

Hi
I am making a short movie of a machine of a client of mine. The client sent me the design from the factory in china. The file format I got had x_t extention. With Autodesk Inventor Fusion, I managed to convert it to an AutoCAD file, and import it into Maya (2013).
The amount of detail was insane. Maya got stuck every time I tried to view it shaded, and the render time had no end. Every plane and curve was seperated, and anything had thickness, with internal mesh that is not visible any way.
It was meant for production in a factory, with all the tiny pieces, nothing Maya could handle.
So I started cleaning up all the stuff I don't need, and after four days of work it was posible to work with, convet to polygons, add materials and more.
Now I have another client with even more complicated machines. Is there a right workflow to do such a thing? Is there anything the client can do to give me more appropriate design or format. Is there any way to make these 4 days shorter?

Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance
Binoman

[adebisiadesh]

Hello, I've had a similar situation. I don't completely understand the nitty gritty of the process but the workflow below works for me.

1. x_t is a parasolid file format. You can open it in solidworks then export the file as .fbx which maya can import. If you don't have solidworks installed, ask the client to export the file as fbx then import into maya. Maya for whatever reason processes fbx format better on my system.

2.  If you can't get the file in fbx format for whatever reason, ask for the standard solidworks part or assembly file. Again, if you don't have solidworks installed, you can import the part or assembly file into 3ds max and export from 3ds max as a fbx file. Maya imports .fbx files without error on my system.

Best Regards.

[mihirsbcc]

Any kinds of stl or dwg or autocad files will come as each poly separate. At that point if you select all the vertices and open the option box of Merge command, give a very low value like 0.0001 it will merge all the over lapping verts.

Yes the entire process is time consuming. If you have triangles then smoothing may not look correct in some places. So part hand cleaning part some tools may reduce your time.