How often has this happened: you find your CAD software can't do something, though it seems so obvious that it should. You have promised that it could. A deadline looms, the boss comes by to ask "How's it going?" too often, failing to mask his desperation. But you can read his thought bubble which quite clearly says "If you don't make this happen, the customer is going to walk, I'm going to look bad, but you are going to pay." There's no time to call your VAR for support. So you scramble Google, hoping -- no, praying-- to find that miracle that will allow you to finish the job.
Something like that happened in our office, as our modeling division had promised a repair on a STL file, only to discover to its horror, that SolidWorks had no ability to edit STL geometry. We googled "STL SolidWorks conversion," said a short prayer, and found SYCODE's STL Import for SolidWorks, just such a product. A download, a quick install, and bam, we had converted the STL mesh to a solid, edited it in SolidWorks, and spit out a file for our customer. Done. Whew!
As it turns out, SYCODE has built a business of rescuing users. Its repertoire includes several utilities that fill in the gaps for SolidWorks, Inventor, AutoCAD and other CAD programs. I only tried two programs (the SolidWorks add in mentioned above and the standalone Mesh to solid) but the site has earned a bookmark on my browser. The programs are available fully functional on a trial basis so you can use them in pinch for real work. The ones I used allowed 10 uses, so if you need them for ongoing production work, you will have to buy them but the seem to be moderately priced (compared to the cost of your CAD program).
Programs seem to work as promised...mostly. Run into a snag and you can email SYCODE. You'll probably reach Deelip Menezes, owner and CAD insider. However, don't expect Deelip to be able to fix everything. Though the programs I used worked on smaller models, when I tried to use them on a more complex model (a 10MB STL file), they balked. One program displayed the hour glass forever, and I had to abort the program. Deelip says such big files routinely cause problems for his utilities. Still, overall I'd recommend a look at SYCODE's utilities, for when they do work, they are little miracles. Besides, it costs nothing to try.
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