Supported file formats

TeamCraft accepts files of any type. The formats below are recognised: labelled with program and kind, searchable by program, delivered with their registered content type. 3D marks the formats the preview shows; refs the formats scanned for referenced files. The complete, current list is on every server at /formats and GET /api/v1/formats (source: src/cadformat.rs).

Mechanical CAD (native)

SketchUp models (.skp) of SketchUp 2021 and later are a ZIP archive behind a UTF-16 header; src/mesh/sketchup.rs reads its model.dat, a tree of tag–length–value records (vertices, edges, faces with their loops, component definitions, instances with a 13-value transform, layers), triangulates every face with an earcut port (src/mesh/earcut.rs, holes and loops touching themselves included), places nested components and groups (up to 32 levels, mirrored ones with reversed triangles) and converts inches to millimetres. Hidden faces and instances, hidden layers and image entities are left out. Files of SketchUp 3 to 2020 (one MFC object stream) are read by the Rust port of OpenSKP (MIT), vendored unchanged in vendor/openskp, and placed and triangulated the same way. The thumbnail is rendered from the 3D preview.

NX parts (NX 1980 and later) are read through their stream container (SPLMSSTR, src/nxpart.rs): the referenced component files come only from its reference streams (not from the save history), the preview image from /Root/images/preview, and the 3D preview of parts from /Root/FastLoad/JT: a JT 9 file whose finest level of detail (topologically compressed tri-strip sets, src/mesh/jt.rs) is refined along its stored surface normals up to 3 × 3 (src/mesh/pn.rs, at most about 500 000 triangles) and shown in millimetres. Assemblies carry no such stream: their 3D preview is put together from the previews of their part files (src/nxasm.rs reads the components and placements from /Root/FastLoad/Structure, src/services/assemblies.rs places the parts). Components are found by file name, like file references – in the assembly’s revision first, otherwise in the latest revision of another item – and sub-assemblies are followed up to 8 levels deep; components that are not in TeamCraft are left out, and so are components on a layer the assembly’s layer settings hide (read from /Root/UG_PART/UG_PART), as in NX. Drawings have no 3D preview.

Stand-alone .jt files (Teamcenter visualisation, exports of NX, CATIA, Creo):

• JT 10 (src/mesh/jt10.rs) carries parts and assembly in one file. The scene graph (an LZMA-compressed segment) gives every shape occurrence with its transform, the units of the model and the nodes NX marks hidden (section and trace-line geometry). Each shape’s finest level of detail is decoded with the JT 9 topology coder plus the newer integer codecs, its hash checked, refined along the stored normals within the same budget as NX parts and placed per instance.
• JT 9 with topologically compressed triangle LODs, as NX writes them: an assembly (several shapes, or a placed one) is put together through its scene graph like JT 10 – the JT 9.5 field widths (I16 versions, F32 transforms), zlib instead of LZMA, metres unless the file names its units; a single part goes through the reader of NX parts as before.
• Other versions report their version. Not read: files that keep their parts in other .jt files (“shattered”), colours, PMI and the B-rep segments.

SOLIDWORKS files from 2015 on are read through their section container (src/swpart.rs). The 3D preview of a part is the display tessellation SOLIDWORKS stores in Contents/DisplayLists (src/mesh/sw.rs):

• each face is stored as triangle strips with a unit surface normal per vertex;
• the per-face vertices are welded on a 1 µm grid;
• the result is refined along the normals like NX parts and shown in millimetres.

An assembly is put together from the previews of its part files. The placements come from the component tree swXmlContents/COMPINSTANCETREE (swpart::placements), using the configuration that was active when the file was saved, with sub-assemblies resolved. Suppressed, hidden and virtual components are left out, and components are found by the file name of their stored path. Files saved before 2015 (OLE compound files) and drawings have no 3D preview.

CATIA V5 parts (.CATPart, container V5_CFV2) are previewed from the visualisation data CATIA saves with them (src/mesh/catia.rs). That data is the container CATCGRCont, a V5_CFV2 document nested in the file; its scene graph holds one uncompressed mesh per body. The reader takes:

• the vertices in millimetres, stored with prefix sharing;
• the exact surface normals of the curved faces;
• the triangle lists, strips and fans of each B-rep face.

The mesh is refined along the stored normals like an NX part. A part saved without visualisation data has no 3D preview, nor do drawings. Details are in Research: 3D preview of CATIA V5 parts.

CATIA V5 products (.CATProduct) are put together from their parts (src/catprod.rs, services/assemblies.rs). A product names no files. The object stream of its container CATProdCont holds per instance:

• the part number and the instance name (_InstanceName);
• a link to the UUID of the referenced document’s CATProdCont, which every CATIA file lists in the container table at its start;
• the placement (_Position): X, Y and Z axis and origin in millimetres.

A component is the CATIA file of the product’s revision (or a file found by name) with that UUID, otherwise <part number>.CATPart or .CATProduct. Sub-products are entered, hidden components are not recognised yet. Details are in Research: 3D preview of CATIA V5 products.

Rhino models (.3dm, versions 1 to 8) are read as openNURBS archives (src/mesh/rhino.rs): nested chunks, the object, layer, block-definition and settings tables. The 3D preview shows what Rhino stored for display – mesh objects, the render meshes of polysurfaces (one per face, welded at 1 µm), the mesh cache of extrusions (Rhino 6 and later) and the quantised meshes of Rhino 1 files – and refines SubD objects, which store only their control net, by Catmull-Clark subdivision (crease edges and corners kept, up to about 200 000 quads per SubD) onto the limit surface. Block instances place the objects of their definition with the stored 4 × 4 transform (nested up to 8 levels). Hidden objects, objects on hidden layers and block-definition objects themselves are left out; coordinates are converted from the model unit to millimetres. Polysurfaces, extrusions and NURBS surfaces saved without render meshes, curves, points, annotations, linked blocks and colours are not shown; such a model keeps the preview bitmap Rhino stored as its thumbnail. Fusion designs (.f3d) are ZIP archives whose entries are mostly compressed with Zstandard (read by src/fusion.rs with the pure-Rust ruzstd, sizes capped and checked against the stored CRC-32). Their 3D preview is the display scene Fusion stores for fast opening (OGS.BlobFolder/OGS/DefaultScene/world and stream_mesh_NNN, src/mesh/f3d.rs): the triangles of every body face, welded per body, refined along their stored normals like NX parts and converted from centimetres to millimetres. Sketches, edges, dimensions and work geometry are left out. The thumbnail is rendered from the 3D preview; a file without a display scene shows Previews/big.png, the image Fusion stored. The exact B-rep (ShapeManager .smb) is not read. See Research: 3D preview of Fusion designs.

Inventor parts and assemblies are OLE compound files whose data lives in zlib- or Zstandard-compressed segments below RSeStorage (src/invpart.rs; Zstandard in newer files, told apart by the magic bytes). The 3D preview of a part is the display tessellation in PmGraphicsSegment (src/mesh/inventor.rs):

• each B-rep face is an indexed triangle list (centimetres) with a unit surface normal per vertex;
• the faces of solid bodies are taken (all faces of a part without a solid), welded on their exact coordinates and refined along the normals like NX parts, and shown in millimetres.

An assembly is put together from the previews of its part and sub-assembly files (src/invplace.rs): the referenced files and the visibility of each occurrence come from the stream UFRxDoc, the placements from AmRxSegment, including the poses a parent gives the children of flexible sub-assemblies. Hidden and suppressed components are left out, and components are found by the file name of their stored path. Not covered: design views other than the saved one, weld beads, drawings and presentations.

Creo parts (.prt.N, src/mesh/creo/) store no display tessellation. The 3D preview is tessellated from the B-rep in the VisibGeom section: the table of contents and the LZW-compressed sections (container.rs), the self-describing tagged format with its compressed numbers (tagged.rs), planes, cylinders, cones and tori with their contours and the edges sampled in both faces’ parameter spaces (brep.rs), interpolating bicubic splines, rolling-ball fillets and ruled surfaces (freeform.rs), ear clipping of every face region in the parameter plane with every edge evaluated once on its most exact face, welding and PN refinement along the analytic normals (tess.rs). Lengths are converted to millimetres with the unit of the UnitSystemDef section (mm, in, …). Turned parts without a plane in the identity frame get their face parametrisations from a seeded face (see Research: 3D preview of Creo parts).

Creo assemblies (.asm.N, src/mesh/creo/asm.rs) are put together from their parts like NX, SOLIDWORKS, Inventor and CATIA assemblies: the section NeuAsmSld lists the direct components – model name, part or sub-assembly, the images of the component’s axes and its origin in the assembly’s unit – and each is found as <name>.prt / <name>.asm (the iteration suffix is not part of the stored name). Family-table instances show their generic; drawings keep their stored JPEG (see Research: 3D preview of Creo assemblies).

SOLIDWORKS files from 2015 on are no OLE files any more but a sequence of Deflate-compressed sections (src/swpart.rs; verified with SOLIDWORKS 2018 files). TeamCraft inflates only the sections it needs, with a hard size limit and a CRC check: the preview image from PreviewPNG, the component files of an assembly from its component tree (swXmlContents/COMPINSTANCETREE: direct components, without virtual components and without the old names of renamed parts that the rest of the file still contains). Files without a component tree (drawings) use the names in the document manager’s section (SwDocContentMgr/SwDocContentMgrInfo); this was not verified with a real drawing. SOLIDWORKS 2014 and older files are OLE files and are read as before. Assemblies stored with an older TeamCraft keep the references found then until the next check-in – or run teamcraft rescan-references once (see Operations).

Instance counts. For SOLIDWORKS 2015+ assemblies (component tree, instances with exclude from BOM not counted), NX assemblies (placed components, hidden layers left out) and STEP assemblies with external part files (NEXT_ASSEMBLY_USAGE_OCCURRENCE per child whose definition is linked to a DOCUMENT_FILE – through APPLIED_DOCUMENT_REFERENCE, PRODUCT_DEFINITION_WITH_ASSOCIATED_DOCUMENTS or DOCUMENT_PRODUCT_EQUIVALENCE; sub-assemblies inside the file count with their own occurrences) and Inventor assemblies (the occurrences of each referenced file from the file descriptor table in UFRxDoc, suppressed occurrences left out – a file with only suppressed ones counts 0, see the research note) the scan also stores how often each referenced file is placed (file_references.instances, instances in GET …/references); the desktop folder import uses it as the BOM quantity, Quantities from CAD… corrects existing lines with it. Other formats – Solid Edge, Creo, CATIA, … – store no count (null): their references are found by name only. The current versions of SOLIDWORKS, NX and referencing STEP files stored before this are read again once at the next start; for Inventor assemblies stored before run teamcraft rescan-references --format inventor-assembly once (Quantities from CAD… reads the counts from the file and works without it).

.prt and .asm are told apart by content (Creo’s #UGC: header, Solid Edge’s OLE container); .sc must be a SolidCraft ZIP or JSON design.

BIM / architecture

3D / DCC / animation

Neutral exchange

Meshes, visualisation, 3D printing

Point clouds and scans

Electronics, simulation, manufacturing, documents

KiCad (.kicad_pcb .kicad_sch .kicad_pro .kicad_sym .kicad_mod, refs), Altium, Eagle, Gerber and Excellon; OpenRocket, RockSim, RASAero, motor curves (.eng .rse); ANSYS Workbench, Abaqus, COMSOL; G-code; PDF, office documents, CSV, images and archives.

Simulation models and results (FEA, CFD)

Recognised and versioned (see Simulations). Model = setup or solver deck, result = solver output (kind Simulation result). Legacy VTK (.vtk, unstructured grid and polydata), VTK XML unstructured grids and polydata (.vtu, .vtp) and CalculiX .frd (ASCII) are shown in the 3D viewer, coloured by their result fields; the other result formats are stored, not parsed.

Extensions that other programs use too are decided by the file content:

• .sim, .fem and .afm starting with NX’s SPLMSSTR container are NX simulation files. Any other .sim is a STAR-CCM+ simulation when the beginning of the file names STAR-CCM+, otherwise an NX simulation file (older NX releases have no container signature). A text .fem is an OptiStruct/HyperMesh deck, another binary .fem and a non-NX .afm (Adobe font metrics) stay unclassified. The STAR-CCM+ marker is a heuristic; it was not verified with files of every STAR-CCM+ version.
• .dat counts with Fluent’s section syntax ((0 "…"), (1 "…")) as Fluent data, and as a Nastran deck when it is text with a line starting with SOL , CEND, BEGIN BULK or INIT MASTER, or a $ comment naming Nastran or Simcenter (Simcenter 3D writes its decks as .dat); all other .dat files stay unclassified.
• .msh is a Fluent mesh with Fluent’s sections ((0 , (1 , (2 , (10 ) and a Gmsh mesh with $MeshFormat; otherwise, and by name alone, it stays unclassified.
• .cas.h5, .dat.h5 and .msh.h5 need the HDF5 signature (at offset 0 or 512), .cas.gz, .dat.gz and .msh.gz the gzip magic. The HDF5 files are never opened as HDF5.
• .out is a Fluent report file when its first line is a quoted title and the second a header of quoted column names (by name alone: report-file-*.out); .java is a STAR-CCM+ macro only when its beginning names STAR-CCM+ or imports star.common; .op2 must be binary, .f04, .pch, .jou and .trn must be text.
• .e is Exodus II only as netCDF or HDF5 file; .db is not ANSYS when it is an SQLite database, an OLE file (Thumbs.db) or text; .rst text files are reStructuredText; .msg and .sta must be text (Outlook mails are OLE files); .odb ZIP files are OpenDocument databases; .bdf files starting with STARTFONT are bitmap fonts; .k must be text.

Result files are never treated as CAD files referenced by assemblies.

STEP in the 3D preview

STEP files (AP203, AP214, AP242; .step, .stp, .p21) are previewed from one of two sources:

• B-rep – CLOSED_SHELL / OPEN_SHELL of ADVANCED_FACEs with planes, cylinders, cones, spheres, tori, B-spline and Bézier surfaces (also rational), extrusions and revolutions, tessellated with the truck kernel. TeamCraft’s own Part 21 reader hands the kernel only the geometry and topology it understands, in a normalised form: PMI, presentation, product and unit data – where AP242 exporters write empty lists, escaped quotes or binary values that the kernel’s parser rejects – never reach it.
• Tessellated geometry of AP242 (TRIANGULATED_FACE, COMPLEX_TRIANGULATED_FACE, TRIANGULATED_SURFACE_SET, COMPLEX_TRIANGULATED_SURFACE_SET with their COORDINATES_LIST) when there is no B-rep or it is incomplete – no kernel needed. Tessellated PMI (dimensions and notes drawn as triangles, used by an …ANNOTATION…OCCURRENCE) is not shown.

Each shell is tessellated on its own; when the kernel fails on a face – an unsupported surface type, broken trimming, or a panic inside the kernel – the faces are tessellated one by one and only the bad ones are missing. The viewer then says partial preview: N of M faces.

Not applied: length units (the viewer shows model units as in the file) and assembly placements (MAPPED_ITEM, CONTEXT_DEPENDENT_SHAPE_REPRESENTATION – every shell appears in its own coordinates). STEP files above 256 MB are not previewed; the conversion has a time limit of 180 s and the usual triangle limit.

Why not every format is previewed

Most native formats are proprietary and undocumented; reading their geometry would need the vendors’ kernels. TeamCraft stays pure Rust and previews the open formats. For native CAD files keep a STEP export next to them – it is previewed, searchable and scanned for references.