CATIA V5 Tutorial – How to Migrate CATIA V4 Data to CATIA V5 Format

You can’t edit CATIA V4 model files in CATIA V5. You can only open them without access to V5 functionalities. Hence you need to migrate it to V5 for using the CATIA V5 functionality. There are many ways to migrate or convert CATIA V4 parts to CATIA V5 format. CATIA V4 parts have .model file extension. We shall show you the different ways of migrating CATIA V4 data to CATIA V5 format.

1. Copy Paste Method

This is a quick way of converting files from .model to .CATPart. This method is handy for quickly converting one or two .model files. For migrating a bunch of files, use Method 2 described next.

Follow these steps:

1. Open the .model CATIA V4 file in CATIA V5.

2. Right click on "MASTER" in the specification tree and select Copy.          

3. Open a New Part (File–> New –> Part).

4. Right click on "Part1" in the specification tree and choose Paste Special… option.

5. Now CATIA V5 gives you two options of pasting the copied V4 data – Paste as CATIA_SPEC and Paste as CATIA_RESULT.

CATIA_SPEC: This option converts CATIA V4 data to CATIA V5 data keeping history as much as possible. This applies to parts modeled using basic features like Pad, Pocket etc,. All other not compatible features will be pasted as dumb features.
CATIA_RESULT: This option converts the entire V4 data to V5 dumb data. No history will be present.

For a complicated model both the options will give the same result.

2. Batch Utility Process

Another method suitable for performing batch migration from CATIA V4 to CATIA V5 is using Batch Utility Process.

1. Go to Tools–> Utility…

2. In the Batch Monitor Window, double click on "MigrateV4ToV5".

3. Click on Browse button and multi-select all the CATIA V4 models which needs to be migrated to V5.

4. Click on Options button.

5. In the Batch Options window, select the Migration Batch tab.

Here you can specify the format of conversion.

– "As SPEC" is same as pasting as "CATIA_SPEC" (Discussed above).

– "As RESULT" is same as pasting as "CATIA_RESULT" (Discussed above).

6. After setting the desired parameters, click OK

7. Now specify ‘Target Directory’…  This will be the folder where CATIA will save all the migrated data.

8. Make sure the "Migrate" radio button is ON. Click "Run".

Wait for the process to complete. After the process is completed, all your CATIA V4 data will be migrated to V5 format.