Product demonstrations and a Special Workshop for SolidWorks Resellers

LEUVEN, Belgium, January 29, 2009 - Capvidia will showcase its Gold Certified product FormatWorks at SolidWorks World in Orlando, Florida February 8th -11th in booth # 123. Capvidia will demonstrate tools and workflows that allow SolidWorks users to maintain quality standards for data import and translation of CAD models into SolidWorks. Capvidia will also provide a free workshop to SolidWorks resellers showing them how FormatWorks is driving new sales in the automotive and aerospace industry.

The new FormatWorks 2009 product family (32- or 64-bit version) is offered in the following configurations: FormatWorks 2009 Standard, FormatWorks 2009 Professional, FormatWorks Server, and FormatWorks 2009 Ultimate. The new product packaging provides an affordable solution range for small to large companies. Especially for those companies that need to work with CATIA data in SolidWorks. FormatWorks 2009 Professional is tuned to deal with large native models and complex assemblies.

Repair and Healing versus Conversion

Many products on the market offer CAD data conversion, which means the data is simply converted from one format into  another  format that SolidWorks can import. The forming of valid skins and solids is left to SolidWorks and the user has no control over this process.  This often results in thousands of surfaces that don’t knit, deformation, missing geometry, and numerous import errors that cannot be fixed in SolidWorks. Figure 1 shows the results of CATIA file “converted” into SolidWorks, whereas figure 2 shows this CATIA file translated with FormatWorks technology.

CAD Converter	FormatWorks

The key to Capvidia’s success is the repair and healing module in FormatWorks. It detects and repairs over 70 common conversion errors automatically. These repairs allow SolidWorks to form valid models and more importantly maintains the original model design. But FormatWorks offers much more. It contains tools and functions that allow SolidWorks users to develop an efficient workflow for using the imported CAD data in SolidWorks.

We’ve tried all the products on the market for importing data to SolidWorks.  Many of these products convert the data to SolidWorks, but the results were unusable. Our customers found themselves with thousands of surfaces that would not form solids, missing geometry, deformed models, one-to-many conversion, and in many cases SolidWorks would run out of memory or crash. We ended up with unhappy customers we could not support” said Mark Hilty, Regional Sales Manager for 3DVision. “FormatWorks provides a great set of tools with repair and healing to solve these problems. It is the only translation product that we can confidently present to our customers that adheres to the high level of service we provide.”