A connector for solidworks would greatly improve my workflow. Especially for production settings solidworks is an essential software. It is however particularly annoying and often impossible to export the right 3d files out of it for other software like SAP2000. A connector would be greatly appreciated!! Are there currently any plans to develop one?
Hi @Lupus, welcome to the forum! (Feel free to introduce yourself)
There currently isn’t any plan to develop a solidworks connector. The idea is interesting, though, because solidworks is a very popular software, but I don’t know if anyone on the team has much familiarity with it.
Would you mind going into more detail about your current workflow with SAP and solidworks and how you see speckle improving your workflow? It certainly helps us to know stuff like this when deciding which connector we should develop next.
4 Likes
Hey @Connor, thanks for the quick response!
We are using solidworks to create detailed architectural parametric models that allow us to change dimensions ergonomically. Our design process is very time consuming and we rely on exact measurements for precise manufacturing. In order to progress through a project we have to transition data of structures from “planned” to “as built” while ensuring our models stay intact. For this workflow solidworks is great and perhaps the only software that does exactly what we need. However we have found no way to export our models to SAP for finite element analysis which we do at least once for every model in a project. This means that our engineers have to remodel everything for SAP from the 2d drawings we provide them. A huge inefficiency! If an assembly has issues the engineers will send a report with drawings back and we change the model within solidworks. Another inefficiency.
Speckle integration would be a game changer for us.
2 Likes
Ah okay I do see the inefficiancies there. What are you designing in solidworks that needs to be analyzed in SAP? My impression (and you mentioned this) was that solidworks was mostly for modeling manufactured parts.
But there definitely are some other people interested in a solidworks connector as you can see in this poll that we took of the community a while back.
1 Like
Hi lupus, a speckle connect with SolidWorks developed in here :
5 Likes
We are designing and manufacturing reinforced and/or tensioned stone structures that have many curves and repeating parts, these structures have to go through finite element analysis as there are no fitting analytical calculations in the engineering process. Probably solidworks isn’t the absolutely right software but it enables our manufacturing workflow. For companies doing semi serial manufacturing of building parts it seems to be a popular choice (from what we know of similar companies in the field anyway).
@chuongmep Thanks for this, we will try it! What is the development roadmap for the connector?
1 Like
Hi lupus, a speckle connect with SolidWorks developed in here
2 Likes
Hi @Lupus, it from my friend in China collaborate with project revitlookwpf before. Unfortunately, I don’t have any experience with SolidWorks to help him, but you should look to open sources that, he is working hard with it.
2 Likes
Not utilizing Speckle quite yet (but very interested). A solidworks connector would make it very very compelling for our organization though. We design using a combination of SketchUp/Rhino but then engineer for fabrication using Solidworks.
4 Likes
So having started playing with Speckle for a week or so now I can say with certainty that having a Solidworks connector would be huge. Ideally it could pull in brep surfaces and solids from rhino, as well as meshes from sketchup.
When you bring a mesh into solidworks it gives you the option of just showing it as a graphics body for visual reference, or it will actually try and process each polygon as a surface. Even just being able to bring in graphics body meshes from sketchup would be huge for us.
If you need someone to test a solidworks connector let me know! 
5 Likes