Version history

• Fixed, and this one only ever showed up in scripted use: glbx.exe could start talking to SOLIDWORKS before SOLIDWORKS was ready to answer. It now waits for the application to actually respond before sending it work, waits properly for shutdown when it is finished, and tells the three startup failures apart instead of reporting one generic error. If you drive exports from a batch file or a build step and have seen occasional failures that vanished on a retry, this is the cause and it is gone.
• Under the hood: the SOLIDWORKS session handling is now shared with the other Minos add-ins rather than being a private copy inside GLB Expert. Nothing changes in what you see — but fixes made once now reach every product instead of one, which is why the three above arrived at all.

• New: FBX export. The active part or assembly can now be saved as binary FBX 7.4 — the format Unity, Unreal, 3ds Max and Maya expect. It is written binary rather than ASCII on purpose: Blender refuses ASCII FBX without even parsing it, and Blender is the most likely free tool on the receiving end. Stated plainly, because it will save you a support ticket: FBX 7.x has no PBR. Metallic is not carried, double-sidedness is not carried, and roughness passes through Shininess with loss. If the materials matter, send GLB.
• Fixed, and this one hit every trial user of the command line: glbx.exe crashed on any machine without a licence. The product identity was never installed at that entry point, so the trial counter threw before the export even began. The add-in was never affected — only glbx.exe, and only when unlicensed, which is exactly why it never appeared on a development machine.
• Fixed: a valid licence could be reported as unlicensed. If the small metadata file beside license.dat went missing or unreadable — a new Windows profile, a cleanup tool, antivirus quarantine, or simply no write permission to ProgramData — its timestamps read as zero, an internal date calculation threw, and the exception was swallowed. The licence disappeared with nothing on screen saying why. The repair is now written back to disk, so it happens once instead of on every SOLIDWORKS start.
• Ribbon tooltips now name the add-in. Hovering Settings, Licence or About used to show just that one word; with several add-ins loaded you could not tell whose Settings you were about to open.
• File properties now show the publisher, Minos Makina Otomasyon San. Tic. A.S., where the product name used to be.
• Changed, and worth knowing if your network filters outbound traffic by host: licence activation now talks to license.minos.com.tr instead of glbexpert.com. The licence server is shared by the Minos SOLIDWORKS add-ins, so it no longer carries one product's name. The update check still reads www.glbexpert.com. Nothing to do on your side unless a firewall or proxy allows hosts individually, in which case add license.minos.com.tr.
• Under the hood, and worth knowing even though nothing changes for you today: your licence file can now be validated against either of two server signing keys instead of only one. Today it is still signed with the first one, so this changes nothing you can see. What it buys is the ability to replace that key later — if the signing key ever had to be retired, installations without this build would reject every licence issued afterwards and would need a full reinstall to recover. Installations with it keep working. It is the kind of thing that cannot be added at the moment it is needed, which is why it is here now.

• Fixed, and this is the important one: batch conversion could crash SOLIDWORKS. Converting a folder would stop after roughly ten to twenty files and take SOLIDWORKS down with it. The cause was ours — the export released the objects it borrowed from SOLIDWORKS too late and on the wrong thread, which corrupted SOLIDWORKS memory. Measured on the same 100 files: 9 converted before the fix, 98 after. A 500-file folder now runs start to finish without a single crash, and so does every output format.
• Batch conversion now prints progress. Long runs used to be silent, which made a slow job and a stuck job look exactly the same from the outside. You now get a line every 25 items telling you where it is.
• New option for scheduled jobs: --fresh. If SOLIDWORKS is already open, glbx normally attaches to it — and an attached session can stall indefinitely, which for an overnight job means it reports nothing at all. With --fresh the run stops immediately with a clear message instead. If you do attach, glbx now warns you and tells you what to do if it stalls.
• Fixed: SOLIDWORKS lock files were being treated as parts. When a document is open, SOLIDWORKS leaves a hidden ~$ file next to it. Batch conversion picked those up and reported them as failures. On one real project folder that was 25 spurious failures. They are now skipped.
• Fixed: a batch of individual parts could be cut short after 20 minutes by the stall detector, even though nothing was wrong. Progress was only being counted for assembly components, so a run made up of single parts looked idle. Every file now counts as progress, and SOLIDWORKS CPU is measured over the whole quiet period rather than a five-second window.
• Known limit, stated plainly: if glbx attaches to a SOLIDWORKS that was already running, large assemblies can still stall. We have reproduced this four times and the pattern is consistent — a session glbx starts itself works, an attached one may not. The stall detector now stops the run and names this as the likely cause. Use --fresh to avoid it.

• Batch conversion now checks the disk. Until now a file counted as converted once the geometry had been produced in memory — if the write itself failed, or landed a zero-byte file, the run still reported success. That mattered most when the output folder was on a network drive: you could be told everything was fine and be missing files. Each output is now verified on disk before it counts, and anything that cannot be verified is reported as a failure with the reason.
• Batch conversion now re-counts the input folder when it finishes. The work list came from a single directory scan, and the progress total came from that same scan — so if the scan came back short, the missing files were never known to exist and the run still ended green. The folder is counted again at the end and any difference is reported, so a file that was skipped can no longer pass unnoticed.
• Command line: glbx.exe now returns a non-zero exit code when an output cannot be verified or when the input count changed during the run. Scheduled jobs and scripts will see the failure instead of assuming success.
• Known limit, stated plainly: a zero-byte output is detected, but a file that was written only partway (shorter than it should be, yet not empty) is not — there is no cheap way to detect that. This change turns silent failure into a visible one; it is not a guarantee that every byte arrived.

• Command line: glbx.exe drives SOLIDWORKS from a script or a scheduled job. Same export engine as the add-in, same options — quality, units, up-axis, origin, formats, variants and batch. Installed alongside the add-in; tick "Add glbx to PATH" during setup if you want it on the command line everywhere.
• Chinese (Simplified) interface. The add-in now follows your SOLIDWORKS language in English, Turkish, German, Japanese and Chinese, and falls back to English elsewhere.
• Licence change: a licence now covers ONE machine instead of two. Existing licences are NOT affected — they keep the machine count they were sold with. If you move to a new computer, release the seat yourself from your account page and activate the new machine.
• Fixed: in the License window the Deactivate and Close buttons could be cut off at the bottom, depending on display scaling and interface language. The window now sizes itself to its contents.
• Fixed: the About window changed size after activation, and the licence key was shown twice — once in full, once masked. The key now appears once, and reopening the window shows exactly the same thing every time.
• Fixed: licences that are not yet linked to an account showed an empty "User ID" field. That label is now omitted when there is no user number.
• Note on the previous release notes: 0.9.0.76 said the command line was planned for v1.0. It is here now. v1.0 is reserved for the signed installer, which removes the Windows SmartScreen warning.

• Four new formats: STL, OBJ with materials, PLY and 3MF. 3D printing, inspection, DCC tools and point-cloud work are now covered — all included in the one license, with no add-ons.
• Every configuration, display state and exploded view can be exported to its own file. This combines with batch conversion, so a folder of parts becomes every variant of every part in one run.
• Full export options: tessellation quality, output units, up-axis, origin placement and a single-colour override — saved as presets you can reuse.
• Optional meshopt compression for GLB, glTF and the HTML viewer, for much smaller files when the viewer at the other end supports it. Off by default, because a compressed file needs a viewer that can read it.
• Fixed: the single-file HTML viewer waited until it was scrolled into view before loading the model, which could leave it looking empty. It now loads immediately.
• Website correction: the comparison table claimed a command line in nine of the ten languages. There is no command line yet — it is planned for v1.0. The English table was correct; the translations were not.

• Installer: if .NET Framework 4.8 is missing it is now downloaded from Microsoft and installed for you, instead of stopping with an error.
• Installer: detects your SOLIDWORKS version and warns before installing if it is older than the tested minimum.
• New page: full system requirements, including which Windows version each SOLIDWORKS release needs.

• Trial: the export counter is now kept on our server as well as on your machine, so support can restore your trial when you ask — for example after a disk replacement.
• Fixed: on some machines the trial counter was stored in only one place and could be lost.
• The privacy page now lists exactly what the add-in sends. Your CAD data never leaves your computer.

• The version shown on this website is now the exact build you download — no more guessing which build you are running.
• Supported SOLIDWORKS range corrected to 2022 and newer (it previously read as 2022 only, which wrongly excluded newer releases).
• The add-in now records which SOLIDWORKS version it runs in, so support can answer faster.
• Fixed: the download link could point at a file that was not on the server.

• Initial public beta.
• Export SOLIDWORKS parts and assemblies to GLB, glTF and a self-contained HTML viewer.
• Batch conversion: point at an input folder and an output folder; every part and assembly underneath is converted.
• Faithful PBR materials: appearance hierarchy, metal detection, sRGB-correct colors.
• True mesh instancing for assemblies (1 mesh, N nodes).
• Center-at-origin and embedded part metadata for web viewers.
• Interface in English, Turkish, German and Japanese — follows your SOLIDWORKS language automatically.

Older builds

The download page always gives you the newest build. Previous builds are kept on our server so that support can put you back on one if a new release ever causes trouble on your machine — write to support@glbexpert.comand we will send you a direct link. We deliberately do not list them for download: an older build is an older build, bugs included.

• Signed installer (no SmartScreen warning)

• USDZ for iPhone AR

• Live 3D preview in the dialog

• QR-to-AR: see the part on your desk
• web export presets

• texture baking
• share links