Import a DXF floor plan
Open a CAD drawing saved as DXF and turn it into walls, doors, windows and named rooms you can edit, measure and see in 3D. You say what each layer holds, check the units, and review every item before it goes in; the file is read in your browser and never uploaded.
A-WALLWallsA-DOORDoorsA-GLAZWindowsA-ROOM-NAMERoom namesA-ANNO-DIMSCheck the scaleA-FURNBackground pictureA-WALL-PATTIgnoreS-GRIDIgnore
What FloorGen fills in for these AIA layer names. Change any row; the next file with the same layers starts from your choices.
- Largest DXF it reads
- 25 MB
- Things a layer can become
- 7
- Naming schemes it knows: AIA, English, German, Spanish, French
- 5
- Uploads: read in your browser
- 0
Review every item first
After the layers, check the units and the scale, then go through what it found: each wall, door, window and room name, ticked or not. Only what you keep is added to the plan.
DXF in, DXF out
Once it is a FloorGen plan you can edit it, see it in 3D, check it against the code, and export a DXF again for the drafter: one floor or all of them.
Importing a DXF, in detail
How to import a DXF in FloorGen
- Open Smart import. The button above opens an empty plan with it. In a plan, click More tools › Smart import, or press Ctrl+K (⌘K on a Mac) and choose Import DXF…. Click Choose a file or drop the DXF on the plan.
- Map the layers. Map the drawing's layers lists every layer with what it contains (lines, polylines, arcs, blocks, texts, dimensions). Set what each becomes: Walls, Doors, Windows, Room names, Check the scale, Background picture or Ignore. AIA names such as A-WALL and A-DOOR, and the English, French, Spanish and German words for wall, door, window and room, are filled in for you; the next file with the same layers starts from your last choice.
- Check the units. When the file sets
$INSUNITS, the dialog shows it and whether the drawing's dimensions agree. When it does not, FloorGen guesses from the drawing's size and asks you to pick millimetres, centimetres, metres, inches or feet. - Choose where it lands. This floor if nothing is drawn on it yet, New floor above, or Replace this floor. The preview counts the walls, doors, windows and room names as you change the mapping.
- Review on the plan. Click Review on the plan →. Each item is a dashed ghost: keep or drop it (Enter or X with the list focused), then click Add 10 to the plan (the number is what you kept). One undo takes the whole import back out.
What it reads
| Entity | Read as | Becomes, on a layer mapped to |
|---|---|---|
| LINE, LWPOLYLINE, POLYLINE | Straight segments; bulged segments as arcs | Walls: two faces 5 to 60 cm apart pair into one wall with that thickness. Windows: two parallel lines at the wall faces. |
| ARC, CIRCLE | Arcs and circles | Doors: a swing arc gives the hinge, the width and the swing; two leaves meeting are a double door. |
| INSERT, MINSERT | Blocks placed, scaled, rotated and mirrored, nested up to 8 deep | Doors or windows: a door or window block in a wall. Its visible attributes are read as text. |
| TEXT, MTEXT | Plain text, formatting stripped | Room names: one name inside the walls makes a named room, and the room type is guessed from the name ("KITCHEN" is a kitchen). |
| DIMENSION | The measured value | Check the scale: a test that the units are right. |
Doors drawn as sliding, bifold, pocket or garage symbols are recognised too. Everything on the walls, doors, windows and rooms layers that does not become one of them (furniture, fixtures, notes, hatching outlines), and every layer set to Background picture, is drawn into a picture placed under the plan at the right size and place, so you can trace the rest by hand. Delete it from the image's properties when you are done.
Units and coordinates
$INSUNITSin inches, feet, millimetres, centimetres, metres, yards, decimetres or US survey feet is read as given. A unitless drawing is guessed from its size: the unit that makes its long side 6 to 60 m, checked against its dimensions.- A drawing far from the origin (survey coordinates) is moved next to the plan's origin. Shapes more than 10 km from the rest are left out and counted.
- Paper space, invisible entities, frozen layers and external references are skipped; the reader works in model space.
- Text in UTF-8, UTF-16 or the older code pages (
$DWGCODEPAGE, such as ANSI_1252 or ANSI_1251) is decoded, so room names in other alphabets come through.
DXF out, and back in
With a free account, Export → CAD and 3D → DXF writes the plan as an AutoCAD R12 DXF in centimetres, on eight layers: walls, rooms, doors, windows, furniture, stairs, dimensions and notes, for this floor or all floors side by side. Import that file into FloorGen again and the dialog says Exported from FloorGen and maps the layers for you; an all-floors file can bring in one floor, or one floor each. Floor plan to DXF covers the layers and the scale factor for a feet-and-inches CAD drawing.
Limits
- No DWG and no binary DXF. Save as ASCII DXF from your CAD program first; FloorGen says "DWG files can't be read" otherwise.
- 25 MB and 200,000 entities at most, counted after blocks are expanded. A heavier drawing is "too large or complex": export only the floor plan layers.
- Left out: hatches, splines, ellipses and 3D objects are not read at all. Walls come in straight: an arc on a walls layer goes into the background picture for you to trace.
- A wall drawn as one line, a door with no swing arc, and an opening only a gap in the wall shows come in with lower confidence: check those first.
- Not a CAD editor. FloorGen keeps no CAD layers, blocks or dimension styles after the import; what you get is a FloorGen plan.