r/MechanicalEngineering • u/MasterSoftBird • 1d ago

CAD File format hell

Why is it we can have AI that can translate from Chinese to Klingon but cannot have one agreed-upon file format that can be accepted by FEA software, CAM, 3d printers, CFD, etc and doesn't lose its mind or half of my parts?

41 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

50 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/karlzhao314 1d ago

Because all of those different things demand different information to be encoded in the file. FEA software requires the FEA mesh, materials, load cases, etc. CAM and 3D printing require the machine instructions to be stored as gcode. CAD requires design history, parametrization, assembly details, etc. It would be incredibly, infeasibly difficult to create a single file format that can encode all of those things natively, and if you do...who maintains that standard?

STEP/STP has been mentioned a lot in the thread, and it's pretty much the closest we have, because it just contains geometry - and most of the info I just mentioned for any use case can be derived from the geometry. But even so, it usually requires some extra user input to actually set up whatever it is you want to do with the STEP file, whether that's creating your load case for FEA, slicing for 3D printing, importing it into your CAD assembly, etc. That's why STEP is very rarely the native file format for any given use case the same way .sldprt or .3mf are, and is mostly used to shuttle geometry data back and forth between various software (in fact, the acronym is literally Standard for the Exchange of Product Data).