Neutral formats are designed to be easy for any vendor to read, and they are often the most reliable way to share work on GrabCAD. On the other hand, neutral files are great when working with customers and suppliers, because the different stakeholders can have different CAD systems. The reality is that if you want to share all of the features, history, and special objects stored in the files, everybody involved needs to be using the same CAD tool. On the other hand, neutral formats are only useful for entities that are supported by many CAD systems. The vendors need their own file formats because every time they add a new type of entity, it needs to get stored in their files. Proprietary versus neutralĮvery CAD vendor creates their own file formats, and they also tend to support neutral formats that are designed for interoperability.

That means we can often show the world the exact same graphics you saw when working in your CAD system, minimizing the chance of translation error. When we display them to you in the viewer, we use the tessellated information whenever we can access it. The reason that you don’t usually notice the triangles is due to a fancy lighting trick, but, if we disable the trick, you can see the difference in the picture, above.Īll of CAD systems that GrabCAD supports store both precise and tessellated geometry. If you’ve ever noticed that a circle in CAD is actually made of a lot of little straight lines, it’s because you are looking at this approximation. These “graphics,” “tessellated,” or “mesh” models are generated on-the-fly every time you modify your design, and most CAD systems store the graphics in their files along with the precise data. To visualize the precise solid on the graphics processors that are in your computer and phone, the models need to be converted to an approximation of the underlying design. These models are commonly called “precise solids,” or more technically, “boundary representation” (B-rep) solid models. Modern CAD tools can represent holes a micron in diameter on parts that are a kilometer long. The main difference between mechanical CAD products and the 3D tools used in other industries is that mechanical designs need to be extremely precise. Let’s take a look at some of the formats supported by GrabCAD’s 3D viewer, along with the strengths and weaknesses of those formats. Not only do most CAD systems create several different types of files, there are a myriad of interoperability formats that have different advantages when collaborating with your partners and customers.

Have you ever noticed that there are more types of CAD file formats than there are CAD systems?Ī precise gear (left) as compared to a tessellated gear (right).

Autocad file types