SolidWorks Assembly .sldasm
SolidWorks assemblies, read from their cached tessellation.
What an .sldasm file holds
An assembly references part files and places them, and caches the tessellation of the components it has drawn in its own container, already positioned. That cache is what we read, so an assembly comes out as one mesh per face with every component where the assembly put it. What it cannot give you is a component the assembly has never drawn: a part suppressed, or one whose file was missing when the assembly was last saved, leaves nothing behind to read. STEP AP214 exported from SolidWorks carries every component and its exact surfaces, and converts here too.
Commonly seen in: SolidWorks.
| Data | Stored in SLDASM |
|---|---|
| Geometry | Yes |
| Materials and colour | No |
| Texture maps | No |
| Animation and rigs | No |
| Scene hierarchy | Yes |
| Read here | Yes |
| Written here | No |
Tested against a real file
The last sweep loaded top-piece.SLDASM from Wilson lab open-hardware drives with its 2 sidecar files through the viewer on this site: 1,302 triangles across 26 meshes and 1 materials, in 1.9 seconds. Every format's result is on the test results page, run 2026-09-08.
Convert SLDASM to another format
Every pairing has a page saying what survives the trip.
Other things to do with an .sldasm file
Questions about SLDASM
How do I open an .sldasm file?
Drop it into the viewer on this site and it opens in the browser, with the scene tree, the materials and the mesh statistics. Nothing is uploaded. If you want it in another program instead, convert it to GLB, which almost everything reads.
Is SLDASM a good format to archive in?
SLDASM stores geometry, scene hierarchy. Anything outside that list will not be in the file at all, so archive the original alongside it if the surfacing or the rig matters.
Does converting SLDASM lose quality?
Geometry is copied vertex for vertex, so the shape does not degrade. What gets lost is whatever the target format has no field for: convert to STL and the materials go, convert to OBJ and the animation goes. The comparison table on each converter page says exactly which.
Written up on the blog
Formats that hold the same things
Or go back to the full format reference.