Which is better SolidWorks or Blender?

Blender is one of the most popular and versatile designing, rendering, and animation creation software. It ranks as the top free software under the designing category. With a blender, you can create 2D animations, 3d designing, and realistic graphic generation. Even product advertisers use this software to generate high-resolution and realistic quality images and videos. Designing sculpture, parts, and components are also a feature of this software. This software is used in many domains such as Mechanical, Civil, Gaming industries, Advertisement industries, and many more.

On the other hand, Solidworks is majorly used in mechanical, Electrical, and Civil Engineering. SolidWorks helps in designing various components and parts. You can also do the rendering in this software and also the basic animation. The plus feature which Solidworks has is CFD and FEA analysis which is not there in a blender.

Due to the uses and needs, the designer can pick any one software. But what if you have designed the part or component in Solidworks and want to import the file in Blender?. For creating animation, rendering images, or videos we can import the file in blender from Solidworks. How we can import the file we will see next.

Importing files from SolidWorks to Blender

Open the Solidworks software, click on View and click on Open.

Browse the file which you want to convert for Blender then open it.

After opening the file sure the geometry is correct and no changes are needed. Then go to the Standard toolbar on the left top corner. There you will see one icon for Save with a drop-down button. Click on the Dropdown button and select Save as an option.

One save as screen you have to select the file type from the drop-down button. The format which is compatible with a blender is STL (*stl) and VRML (*.wrl) if you import from Solidworks. Select any one file format give a name to the file and click on OK. In Save as the window, you will see one option that makes sure the resolution is set to fine. You can select the custom option also but in that you have you give some specific values.

After clicking on the OK you will see the pop-up. Just click on Yes as it tells the number of triangles formed if you select STL format.

Now, we have to open Blender software. At the start, the screen makes sure you delete the cube, or else it will overlap with the parts.

Click on Files > Import > Select the file type which we have for example we have STL (*.stl) file.

Browse the location of the file where we have saved it and click on Import STL.

The part will be Imported into the blender.

Correcting imported file

The coordinate system in Solidworks is different from the blender. So, we have to rotate the part or assembly accordingly. So rotate the part on the Right-hand side and click on the Object properties. In that, you will see many options from changing the coordinate distance from origin rotation abo0ut an axis. Make the changes accordingly.

Many a time the file is imported in the blender but it’s not visible to us. When you zoom out the object will appear and further zooming out it will disappear again. This happens because the Field of view is set at a lower value or the part size is very big. To correct this, you click on view > view > Enter a larger value in the End option. This will solve the issue.

Creating part is always fun and taking help of software like Blender adds value to the content. Weather you want to use that part for animation or for advertisement image/video.