SolidWorks Drawing .slddrw
SolidWorks drawings, read from the model cached behind the sheets.
What an .slddrw file holds
A drawing is sheets, views, dimensions and title blocks, all of it two-dimensional, and none of that converts to a model. What does convert is what sits behind it: to generate its views a drawing caches the tessellation of the part or assembly it was made from, in a stream of its own, and that is a real mesh. So dropping a .slddrw in gets you the model the drawing describes rather than the drawing itself. Not every drawing carries one, because the cache follows the views that have been drawn; when it is missing we say so rather than guessing.
Commonly seen in: SolidWorks.
| Data | Stored in SLDDRW |
|---|---|
| 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.SLDDRW 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 2.1 seconds. Every format's result is on the test results page, run 2026-09-08.
Convert SLDDRW to another format
Every pairing has a page saying what survives the trip.
Other things to do with an .slddrw file
Questions about SLDDRW
How do I open an .slddrw 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 SLDDRW a good format to archive in?
SLDDRW 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 SLDDRW 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.