Solidworks to Mudbox workflow

The most important thing for me to do right now before even touching the Unreal Engine (yeah, thats where all this is going. Games. Engineering is all fine and dandy but it can get boring as hell) is to get a workflow happening. How to get my models from one place to another, and into a game. Solidworks isn't exactly a powerhouse in the world of gaming development so there is a lot of trial and error. This weekend I had a breakthrough. Finally worked out how to get my stuff into Mudbox!
After screwing around with maya I came to a conclusion: the export plugins are bloody awful.
So I switched over to max and had another go. There was an option to export as .obj and optimised for mudbox. The send to mudbox feature didn't work, that threw me a bit. Doesn't matter. Time to experiment with all the 3ds max import options to find out what all the file types would do to my solid.
I imported to max as .stl, .igs, and .sat. Named them all so I'd remember what was what. Then exported to mudbox as .obj and had a look. Straight away iges files were ruled out. Kind of already knew they sucked. It only supports surfaces and the model can't be sculpted at all. Sat files and stl files are pretty much the same. They make a good mesh in max, and can be edited nicely. Leaning more toward stl for some reason.

My snes cart in 3ds max. I used the .stl import.

Didn't bother with any of the other file types, if they were any good I'd already know about it. The last thing I want to do is waste anybodies time with rubbish models that mess things up and cause problems with the engine. There is actually an option in solidworks to save as .obj but the amount of hoops you have to jump through is ridiculous and the end result is poor.
But what about if I save the solidworks model off as a dumb solid first?  That might get rid of a lot of nonsense in the file and prevent it from coming into max with way too much information attached to it. Or it might add more crap. Who knows? Tried it. Seems to work a bit better than just a straight import with all the feature tree stuff in there. Maya displays every single extruded face as a separate entity which really gave me the ache. I'm also toying with the idea of splitting symmetric models down the middle and mirroring them in max to get an even mesh.

In Mudbox. Some problems with the mesh. 

Anyway, Solidworks to Mudbox is done. Not completely happy with the results, I need to work out how to save my hard surfaces and corners when I up the poly-count. Having a UV might fix this.
Next thing to do now is to learn how to create a uv in max. Yeah, I'm actually going to learn something new. Max looks really complicated but we'll get there.