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To answer your questions:

• yes, you need to create CAD models of your robot links
• the mesh formats that ROS understands are STL, DAE and Ogre
• both Autodesk Inventor and SolidWorks can export to STL format
• ROS (RViz etc.) understands both binary and ASCII STL
• SolidWorks produces binary STL files that look like ASCII STL files, thereby confusing ROS; but these files can be fixed (search previous questions tagged "stl")
• you can use ivcon to convert between binary and ASCII STL, and other formats
• the STL files from the CAD software should work as they are; if you need to do some tweaking (rescaling, rotating, whatever), MeshLab comes in very handy