Getting a DXF out of your CAD

Studio reads DXF, and only DXF. Every CAD application an architect is likely to own can write one, usually in three clicks. This page is that click path for each of them, plus the handful of things that decide whether your drawing reads cleanly or reads wrong.

Nothing here needs a plugin, a converter or a purchase.

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Why DXF and not DWG? DWG is Autodesk's own format and its specification is not published — reading it means licensing someone else's library, and the commercial licence for that is five figures a year. That cost would end up in your credit price. DXF is the interchange format Autodesk publishes precisely so other software can read it, every CAD writes it, and the geometry inside is identical. So we read DXF and keep the price down. The export takes about ten seconds.

Your application

Menu paths below are for current versions. Older releases put the same commands in the same places under a different-looking menu.

AutoCAD

and AutoCAD LT
  1. Make sure you are in Model space, not a layout tab.
  2. File › Save As
  3. Set Files of type to AutoCAD 2018 DXF (*.dxf) — or the newest DXF in the list.
  4. Save.

The command DXFOUT does the same thing without the menu. If it offers Select objects, you can export just the floor plan and leave title blocks and details behind.

Revit

and Revit LT
  1. Open the floor plan view you want. Not a 3D view, not a sheet.
  2. File › Export › CAD Formats › DXF
  3. Under Export, choose <Current view/sheet only>.
  4. Set Files of type to the newest AutoCAD version offered, then OK.

Revit exports what the view shows. If you have a crop region on, the export is cropped too — turn it off first if it cuts rooms.

Archicad

Graphisoft
  1. Be on the Floor Plan window for the storey you want.
  2. File › Save as…
  3. Choose DXF as the format.
  4. Leave the Translator on the default, and save.

If you only want part of the plan, draw a Marquee around it before saving — Archicad exports the marquee if one is active.

BricsCAD · ZWCAD · GstarCAD · DraftSight · NanoCAD

the AutoCAD-alikes
  1. Model space.
  2. File › Save As (or type SAVEAS).
  3. Pick the newest DXF in Files of type.

These read and write the same formats as AutoCAD by design, and the DXF they produce is fine.

SketchUp

Pro only
  1. Set the camera to Top and the style to Parallel Projection.
  2. File › Export › 2D Graphic
  3. Set the type to DXF, click Options, and set the drawing scale to 1:1 (full size).

SketchUp Free and Web cannot export DXF. A 3D DXF from File › Export › 3D Model will not read as a floor plan — we need the flat one.

Chief Architect · Home Designer

Pro tiers
  1. Open the floor plan view.
  2. File › Export › Export 2D DWG/DXF
  3. Choose DXF and the newest version offered.

Home Designer's lower tiers do not export DXF. If yours does not offer it, the plan can still be redrawn in any free CAD.

Only have a PDF or a scan? Studio cannot read it, and we would rather say so than pretend. A PDF of a plan has no walls in it — only lines that look like walls to a person — so there is nothing to measure and any area we reported would be invented. Tracing it in a free CAD such as LibreCAD or QCAD and exporting DXF gives you a drawing that measures correctly, and it is worth the hour on a plan you are going to sell from.

What makes a drawing read well

You do not have to do any of this. It is what separates a plan we read perfectly from one where you have to correct us at the confirmation step.

Every read is free. Upload as many drawings as you like and check what we measured against what you drew. Credits are spent when an image is generated, and not before — so getting the export right costs you nothing but the ten seconds.

What we take from the drawing, and what we don't

From your drawingFrom the model
Wall positions and thickness
Room boundaries
Floor areas
Door and window openings that are drawn		 Materials and finishes
Light, time of day, mood
Furniture and styling
Everything you type into the prompt
Heights are the one thing we ask you for. A plan is flat, so floor-to-ceiling, the door head and the window band are not in it — they are assumptions, and every one of them sits beside the drawing where you can change it. The defaults are 2.8 m floor-to-ceiling, a 2.1 m door head, and a window from 0.9 m to 2.1 m. If your slab is 10 ft, say so: it changes the proportions of the room and where the camera looks. Re-reading with different heights is free, and the fields show feet next to metres so you do not have to convert.
We do not add openings you did not draw. If a room has no window in your DXF, the generated image has no window. A windowless room is sometimes a mistake and sometimes a service core, a store or a stairwell lobby — and it is not ours to decide which. You see the extracted room before anything is generated, and if an opening is missing you can go back and add it in your CAD.

Common questions

My areas came out a thousand times too big. Why?
The drawing is in millimetres and the scale was inferred as metres, or the other way round. This is the dimension-line problem: with no dimension text inside a room, we score the candidate scales against what rooms normally measure and pick the most plausible — which is usually right and occasionally is not. Add one dimension to the plan, re-export, and it will be exact. The confirmation step exists so this never reaches a paid render.
Some rooms are missing.
A room is found when its walls close a loop. If a wall has a gap in it — a line that stops a few millimetres short, common after a lot of manual editing — the room leaks into the next one and both disappear. Running AUDIT in AutoCAD, or the equivalent overkill/cleanup in your CAD, usually closes them.
Furniture and fittings were read as doors.
Tell us — that is a bug on our side, not yours, and the extraction is what we fix. Openings are found from the marks architects actually draw for them, and a fitting drawn with a similar mark can be caught up in it. The confirmation step is there to catch it before you pay.
Is my drawing kept? Can I get it back later?
Yes. Your drawings and the images made from them stay in your account under Your projects until you delete them, and we do not purge them on a schedule. Deleting a project removes the drawing and its images from our disks. Your credit history is not affected by deleting a project — that is the record of what you paid, and it stays.
Does uploading a drawing give you rights to it?
No. It stays yours. We read it to produce your images and for nothing else — we do not train models on it and we do not show it to anyone.
How large can the file be?
30 MB. A single-storey floor plan is normally well under 1 MB; anything near the limit usually means the whole drawing set or an embedded raster came along with it.
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