Based on components from Dassault Systèmes (the developers of the CATIA 3D modeling software) and Spatial Corp, the importers provide the most accurate, rock stable and the highest quality import conversions possible since they share the same runtime code as used by the CATIA v5 modeling software and the Spatial ACIS modeling engine.
The CATIA stand-alone program (made by Dassault Systèmes and distributed by IBM) is an integrated suite of Computer Aided Design (CAD), Computer Aided Engineering (CAE), and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) applications for digital product definition and simulation. It allows manufacturers to simulate all the industrial design processes, from the pre-project phase, through detailed design, analysis, simulation, assembly and maintenance. CATIA is primarily used by the automotive and aerospace industries for automobile and aircraft product and tooling design (it is well known for being used by Boeing to design their massive airplanes, or NASA to help design the Space Shuttle). There are roughly 20,000 companies worldwide using CATIA with roughly 30,000 seats sold per year.
Spatial's ACIS is the prominent 3D modeling engine used by hundreds of software developers in more than 14 industries worldwide, including CAD/CAM/CAE, AEC, animation, and shipbuilding. ACIS provides some of the world's most recognized software developers and manufacturers with the underlying 3D modeling functionality necessary for creating innovative, high-performance applications. Okino's new importers use the ACIS kernel as a key component to handle the BREP solids from the CATIA and ACIS SAT files. "SAT" is the native file format supported by the ACIS modeling engine and is supported natively by many third party CAD modeling programs.
When combined with Okino's CAD data optimization routines (for hierarchy & part count simplification), very complex assemblies can be imported, optimized, reduced, composed, then loaded into 3D packages and 3D file formats such as 3ds Max, Maya, Lightwave, Softimage|XSI, Cinema-4D, AutoCAD, Adobe Director, Quest-3D, Rhino, Visual Components 3DCreate, Collada, DWF-3D, FBX, HOOPS HSF, JT, NGRAIN 3KO, OpenFlight/Creator, PLY, Sketch Up, STL, U3D, X3D/VRML2, XAML-3D and many others.
Major Benefits of the CATIA and ACIS CAD Importers to Users of Okino's Software
Supports CATIA v5 parts (.catpart), assembly (.cadproduct) and mesh visualization (.cgr) files, as well as the import of the assembly structure information.
Supports CATIA v4 .model and .dlv (mainframe), .exp (export) and .session files. The .model files are generally used for one part files while .dlv and .exp files are used for multipart creation.
Supports ACIS SAT (text) and SAB (binary) files up to ACIS R19 (the current release from Spatial).
Many options to control the import of the data. Import by body, face, bodies + faces or bodies + shells + faces. This allows rendering materials to be applied at the finest granularity (faces) or the coarsest (bodies).
Extensive tessellation controls (see WEB page references below for explanations).
Model healing (for CATIA v4) and erroneous surface repairs (for CATIA v4 & v5).
Selective layer import for CATIA v4 and v5 files.
Importing via the CATIA and SAT "solids-based" file formats ensure that adjacent NURBS patches are "stitched" together via topology information (BREP data) and thus creates "crack free" tessellation when the NURBS or parametric solids are converted to a polygonal mesh.
Imports CATIA and ACIS SAT CAD file formats directly into the user interfaces of 3ds Max, Maya, XSI, Adobe Director, Cinema-4D, Visual Components, Quest-3D (and other third party programs) via native PolyTrans plug-in systems. These are by far the most refined, developed and best methods to directly import solids-based CAD files into these programs.
The CAD importers include a vital built-in Okino hierarchy/part optimization tool to reduce the complexity of the imported CAD files before re-exporting to other 3D animation packages and downstream file formats. This processing is particularly important when importing large CAD assemblies into 3ds Max, Maya, XSI and Lightwave.