Using Inventor for design, have to export as Solid Works..

Okay so I am really new to CNC I haven't even made a cut yet, I am setting my limit switches tonight and zeroing the machine, but I was working on exporting my designs from Inventor to Visual Mill and VM will not load the DWG standard CAD file. It works when I export my drawings as STP file for Solid Works. I was just wondering why it does that, its really not big deal but I was wondering why it was doing that. If I can get some feedback that would be great.

DWG is a proprietary and undocumented file format owned by Autodesk (which makes Inventor). Since they don't release the specifications, and can change them at will, it's difficult for an unrelated company to offer full compatibility with it. Here's a document from some folks who have tried that: http://www.opendesign.com/files/gues....dwg_files.pdf If you don't like using STP, you could try IGS, or if you're exporting meshes, the STL format, which is generic and pretty universal (if not particularly compact).

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Originally Posted by awerby

DWG is a proprietary and undocumented file format owned by Autodesk (which makes Inventor). Since they don't release the specifications, and can change them at will, it's difficult for an unrelated company to offer full compatibility with it. Here's a document from some folks who have tried that: http://www.opendesign.com/files/gues....dwg_files.pdf If you don't like using STP, you could try IGS, or if you're exporting meshes, the STL format, which is generic and pretty universal (if not particularly compact).

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Thanks for the reply! Yeah I don't mind exporting as STP at all, I was just curious as to why DWG gave me issues. thanks for clearing that up I appreciate it!