Import guidance

I’m looking for guidance on importing – hopefully there is already a doc or topic that I overlooked that someone could link.

My goal is to not model standard industry parts that have been modeled by others many times already. For 3d importing, what are the preferred formats and what are the pros and cons of each. For context I’m looking to import parts from McMaster-Carr as well as other sites where they provide a variety of 3d and 2d formats. It is unclear what is the best format for Shapr3D. Another example is Swftparts which seems to lean towards Solidworks. My goal is preserve as much data as possible, ideally with any parametric data in a usable form.

McMaster-Carr supports 3-D EDRW, IGES, PDF, SAT, Solidworks, STEP, as well as 2D DWG, DXF, PDF, and Solidworks.

Swftparts seems to take advantage of a Solidworks feature that allows you to have a single model which can parametrized to come in sizes. For instance like a pipe fitting that comes in different sizes. I’m neither a Solidworks or Swiftparts user so I could be misunderstanding.

Hi @mhess ,

For McMaster-Carr, you want STEP files.

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