Catia V5 now imports natively into Inventor with the help of a new translator on the Autodesk Labs site (labs.autodesk.com). Now more than ever, save time from remodeling or dealing with tricky export translations. Available for import are the .CATPart and .CATProduct file types. I have included one for sampling with the translator here: www.rand.com/imaginit/manufacturingBlog

What about export? Well, Inventor will not translate out a Catia file yet. But don’t rule out the tried and true .sat filetype that can be put in a large majority of software including Revit, 3DsMax, AutoCAD and all its flavors as a “dumb” solid.

Overall, this is great for those users who have mechanical designs or parts of their mechanical designs in Catia but need to somehow get them into their Autodesk product.

Mark Flayler
Application Engineer - Manufacturing Solutions Division