Bring a building from Revit, ArchiCAD or Vectorworks into 3D Studio

3D Studio reads **IFC**, the open building format that Revit, ArchiCAD, Vectorworks and Bentley all export. In your authoring tool choose Export and pick IFC, then drag the file onto the 3D Studio viewport or press Import model.

**It asks how you want it, because there are two right answers.**

**Editable parts.** Every wall, window, door, slab, stair and column becomes its own object, carrying the name you gave it in your authoring tool, at its real size in meters. This is the one to pick when you are designing in front of a client -- it is what lets you select a window and say "shift this out six inches", or ask Wally to, and have something actually move. See "Change the 3D model while you are still talking to the client".

Parts come in as blocks at each element's true size and position, not as your exact geometry. That is a real trade and worth knowing before you pick: a single detailed wall is thousands of triangles, and a whole building's worth of them cannot be edited object-by-object in a browser.

**Full geometry.** The building exactly as you designed it, as one object. Pick this to walk a client through a design. Individual parts cannot be moved, because there are no individual parts -- it is one model.

You can import the same file both ways. Nothing stops you keeping a presentation copy in one scene and a working copy in another.

**A large building will tell you what it left out.** Editable parts keeps the things a meeting is actually about -- walls, windows, doors, floors, roofs, stairs, columns, beams and furniture -- and past a few hundred elements it leaves out the smaller fixings. A note above the viewport says exactly how many came in and how many did not.

That limit is not about what your computer can draw. It is about how much building Wally can hold in mind at once and still pick the right wall. A house or a single floor comes in whole. For a whole federated model, either export one building or one discipline from your authoring tool, or import it as full geometry, where nothing is left out at all.

**Re-importing a revised model.** Elements keep the identity your authoring tool gave them, so a re-export of the same building describes the same objects rather than a new set of look-alikes.

**Why not .rvt or .dwg.** Revit's own file format has no published specification, and the only open reader for DWG carries a license we cannot ship in a commercial product. IFC is an ISO standard your tool already exports, and unlike a plain mesh export it carries what each thing *is* -- which is the whole reason a wall can be named "wall" here instead of being one nameless lump of triangles.

**The first IFC file of a session takes a moment longer.** The building reader is close to a megabyte, and it is fetched only when you actually open a building file -- so it costs nothing to anyone who never imports one, and nothing again for the rest of your session.