Why your .rvt won't open in a browser — and what to send instead

This is the first question we get asked, near enough every time: can I just send you the Revit file?

Short answer: no, and neither can anyone else outside Autodesk. Longer answer is more useful, because which format you export decides what survives the trip.

.rvt — closed, and not slightly

Revit's native format is undocumented and proprietary. There is no published specification, so no independent tool reads it properly. Reading .rvt reliably means Autodesk's own paid cloud service, which is why viewers that claim to "open Revit" are almost always uploading your file to Autodesk and charging you for the round trip.

Exporting IFC is not a workaround for that. It is the actual supported route out of Revit, it takes two clicks (File → Export → IFC), and Archicad and Vectorworks do the same thing.

.dwg and .dwfx — no usable 3D building data

We say this plainly because engineers test it early: neither carries what a 3D viewer needs.

DWG is a drawing format. Even when it contains 3D solids, it carries no building structure — no storeys, no element types, no "this is a wall and it is on level 2". You get shapes with no meaning attached. DWFX is a published-output format, closer to a PDF than a model.

If the only thing you have is a DWG, the honest answer is that the 3D information you want was never in the file.

What to send instead

IFC — architectural and civil. This is the one. It carries the geometry and the data: element type, family, storey, tag. That is what makes it possible to tap a wall on site and be told what it is, rather than just looking at a shape. Exported natively by Revit, Archicad and Vectorworks.

STEP (ISO 10303) — steel and mechanical. The fabricator's format. Precise solid geometry, no building semantics, which is exactly right for a connection detail or a plant item. IGES and BREP land in the same category.

Point clouds — survey. For what is actually there rather than what is drawn.

The useful trick, if you are structural: you can have the architect's IFC and the fabricator's STEP open in the same tool. Those two normally live in different software, and a surprising amount of coordination time goes into the fact that they do.

One thing to check before you send anything

Measure a known dimension in the export before you rely on it. IFC exports get their declared length unit wrong more often than you would expect, and when that happens every measurement afterwards is wrong by the same factor with no visible sign.

We wrote that one up separately: the IFC unit trap.