Imported Bodies Video Series – 1. Troubleshooting an Imported Model [VIDEO]

There are lots of reasons why models imported in SolidWorks from IGES, STEP or Parasolid files have topological errors. The simplest analogy I can make is that the various CAD products used for creating geometry speak different languages and, in order to understand each other,  they need translators. These translators are the neutral formats mentioned before.

That being said, whenever you get a middleman in the communication chain, bits of information could be lost and as a result you get topological errors like:

• gaps in the body
• self intersecting faces
• faces with more than one closed contour
• faces that are piercing the solid body

Once the errors are identified they need to be repaired before using the model for anything else.

In this series of articles, I will present the process for troubleshooting and repairing a challenging model supplied by Joy Liu on the SolidWorks Forum.

One of the interesting things about this model is the absence of any error on the feature tree. So how do you even know you have a problem?

Watch the first video of the series for the answer:

Read the next installment of this series of articles here.