What Happens to Your DWG When You Import It

You drop a DWG into Archify and get back walls, doors, windows and named rooms you can edit — and a 3D house you can walk through. This post is what happens in between: each step the importer takes, what it fixes on its own and tells you about, what it leaves out, and what you can send back out. Every result quoted here was measured on the drawings in our import test suite — built to look the way offices draw — not on customer files, and the tests fail if one of these numbers stops being true.

1. A DWG becomes a DXF

A DWG is first converted to DXF by an outside converter service, then read exactly like any DXF. The file goes to that service for the conversion, and Archify deletes its own upload copy when the conversion ends. A DWG can be up to 25 MB, and each account gets 4 DWG conversions a day. Saving the drawing as DXF from your CAD app skips the conversion: a DXF up to 60 MB is read in your browser, never uploaded, with no daily limit. The test drawings quoted below are DXF files; a DWG is read the same way once it has been converted.

Project files such as .rvt, .skp, .3dm can't be read directly: export OBJ/GLB/DXF from your 3D app — a floor-plan view as DXF if you want an editable house. Drop one of those files on Import & Switch anyway and it shows the export steps for that format instead of an error.

2. What gets read

Only what is drawn in model space is read. Blocks are expanded where they are placed — moved, rotated, scaled and mirrored as inserted, up to 6 levels deep — and a block that is defined but never placed adds nothing: on a test room with a 2-line block definition that is never inserted, the importer read back 4 walls and 1 room. A curved wall comes in as straight pieces that stay within 25 mm of its curve.

Units come from the file's header — and, when the header is wrong, from the drawing's own measurements. One of our test drawings is a house drawn in inches inside a file whose header says metric: the importer read it in inches, and the review says the file's header disagreed. You can still pick the units yourself in the review before anything is created.

3. Every layer gets a role

Each layer becomes walls, doors, windows, openings, room names, or nothing — decided from its name and what is drawn on it, and shown in a "Layers → what they become" table you can change before importing. Furniture, planting, title blocks and hatches are counted and left out, so they don't turn into walls.

Our office-style test house is a 40 × 30 ft residence with trimmed wall poché, door blocks rotated and mirrored, window blocks and room-name text. Drawn the ways offices draw, it read back the same each time:

• The same residence with Spanish layer names and no English wall layer, plus dimensions, a title block and notes. Read back: 16 walls · 5 rooms, all named · 6 doors · 7 windows · 1,078 sq ft.
• The same residence with 200 chair blocks written into the file before the first wall line. Read back: 16 walls · 5 rooms, all named · 6 doors · 7 windows · 1,078 sq ft.
• The same residence with its exterior walls drawn as 4 lines (veneer, air gap, stud and lining). Read back: 16 walls · 5 rooms, all named · 6 doors · 7 windows · 1,078 sq ft — each exterior wall's lines read as one wall.

4. The cleanup, and the list of fixes

Imported drawings are healed automatically — gaps closed, overshoots trimmed, walls straightened — and you get the list of fixes. Before anything becomes a wall, one heal pass runs over the linework. Everything it does is counted, and the import review lists each fix in plain English before you press Import. Here is what each line of that report means, at the default tolerances:

• Read double-line walls — two parallel lines 75–400 mm apart become one centerline wall with that thickness. That is how a wall is drawn, not a defect, so it is listed but not counted as a fix.
• Welded — a corner left open by up to 75 mm is closed where the two walls meet.
• Extended — a wall end that stops up to 150 mm short of another wall is extended to meet it.
• Trimmed — a line that runs past a corner is trimmed back to the wall it crosses.
• Straightened — a line drawn within 1° of square is made exactly square.
• Merged — duplicate, overlapping and broken lines become one.
• Dropped — stray slivers under 300 mm are removed.

A 600–2,400 mm break in a double-line wall becomes an opening — a door when a swing arc or a door block is there, a window when window lines are. On our dirty-geometry test drawings, each defect drawn into the file was fixed and counted:

• A 20 × 15 ft room drawn with single lines, one corner left 1 in open. Read back: 4 walls · 1 room. The review listed "Welded 1 corner gap under 75 mm".
• The same room with every line running 3 in past its corner. Read back: 4 walls · 1 room. The review listed "Trimmed 8 overshoots back to the wall they cross".
• The same room with one wall drawn 0.5° off square. Read back: 4 walls · 1 room. The review listed "Welded 2 corner gaps under 75 mm"; "Straightened 1 wall drawn within 1° of square".

Walls drawn as two lines come back as one wall with the drawn thickness: on the test room whose walls are two lines 6 in apart, the importer read back 4 walls · 1 room · 266 sq ft, every wall 6 in thick — and on the office-style test house above, multi-line exterior walls read as one wall each, the same way.

5. Doors, windows and named rooms

Room names come from the text inside each room, formatted multiline text included. Put it all together — the same residence, now with 2 corners left open and 2 lines running past their corners — and the importer read back 16 walls · 5 rooms, all named · 6 doors · 7 windows · 1,078 sq ft, with every room named as drawn and every door hinged and swinging as drawn, and the review said "Healed 4 issues": "Read 16 double-line walls as centerline walls with their drawn thickness"; "Welded 2 corner gaps under 75 mm"; "Trimmed 2 overshoots back to the wall they cross".

A second test drawing is a house plan in inches: 3 wall thicknesses as double lines, door and window blocks (one mirrored), room names in formatted multiline text, dimensions, a title block, wall hatch and furniture blocks. Read back: 17 walls · 5 rooms, all named · 6 doors · 10 windows · 1,323 sq ft, walls 4.5, 6 and 8 in thick. And at scale: a 22 × 22 grid of 12 ft rooms with double-line walls, a door into every room, a window on each column's south wall and a name in every room came back as 484 rooms, all 484 named, with 483 doors and 22 windows.

6. Nothing is created until you say so

The import review shows "Healed N issues" with the list of fixes, the wall, door, window and room counts, the units it read, a plan preview and the layer table. Change a layer's role or the units and the import re-runs on the spot. Import creates the house, and in the Design Studio the whole import is one Undo. Importing never spends credits.

What it leaves out

Furniture, dimensions, hatches and title blocks are not imported. Curved walls come in as straight pieces within 25 mm of the curve, and the 1,500 longest walls are kept. A real drawing can need more fixes than our test drawings did; whatever the cleanup can't settle is yours to fix with Trim, Extend and Fillet in the Studio. A PDF page or a photo of a plan is traced rather than read: rectangular rooms become walls, a placeholder front door is added, and no other openings are detected.

After the import: units and precision

A Design Studio drawing is precise to 1/16 inch or metric: feet-and-inches rounded to 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 or 1/16 inch, or m / mm rounded to 1, 5 or 10 mm, set in the Drawing panel — and dimensions, schedules, sheets and DXF follow the units, with metric sheets printing at metric scales and areas in m². The model itself is stored in millimetres, so switching units never moves a wall; it only changes what the labels say.

Versions, and two tabs on one design

The Design Studio keeps named versions, and two tabs can never silently overwrite each other. Save version… names one, an autosave becomes a version at most every 10 minutes, and up to 30 are kept (the oldest autosaves go first, named saves last). Restore saves what you have first as "Before restore", so a restore can itself be undone from the same list.

Open the same design in two tabs — or on two devices — and edit both: the save from the tab that is out of date is refused instead of being written over the other. The editor asks which copy wins. Keep mine saves the other tab's work as a "Conflict copy" version first, then saves yours; Reload server copy keeps your edits as a "Before reload" version, then loads the other. Until you choose, nothing autosaves. AI CAD plans and 3D Workshop scenes have the same guard and keep the other copy as its own saved file.

Getting it back out: DXF and IFC

The DXF carries every level in one file — on L1-, L2-… layers when there is more than one — or one file per level in a .zip, with walls, opening marks, door leaves with their swing arcs, furniture outlines, stairs, room names with their areas, dimensions, redlines and tables, each on its own layer, in the design's units. It reads back through the same importer: Archify's own DXF re-imports as 12 walls, 13 openings and 5 rooms, at the same 1,427.5 sq ft as the model it was exported from.

The IFC is IFC4, a coordination model: storeys, walls with real openings for their doors and windows, floor slabs, the roof, stairs, and rooms as spaces with their net floor area. Walls, doors, windows, storeys and stairs take their GlobalId from the model's own ids, so an element keeps its id when you edit and re-export; rooms key on their name tag or their walls, and roof planes are re-solved if the roof type changes. IFC is export-only — Archify does not read IFC back in — and there is no DWG export: DXF is the exchange format.

Every export is on the Design Studio's Export menu, included with every account, and never spends credits. Without a plan, and on Starter and Student, the sheets, DXF and GLB carry the Archify mark; Pro and up export them clean from the plan's first payment.