Convert IFC to DXF

Free, in your browser, with nothing uploaded. Drop your .ifc file in and take the .dxf away.

Drop your IFC file here

.ifc in, .dxf out

Choose files

Nothing is uploaded No account, no email No file size limit

How to convert IFC to DXF

  1. 01

    Add your .ifc file

    Drag your Industry Foundation Classes file onto the drop zone, or click it to browse. Nothing is uploaded: it is read where it already sits.

  2. 02

    Check the preview

    The model is parsed on your machine and drawn in the viewport, so a wrong axis or a missing texture shows up before you commit rather than downstream.

  3. 03

    Save the .dxf file

    Press convert. The AutoCAD Drawing Interchange Format file is written in the tab and lands in your downloads folder. No link, no expiry, no account.

What carries over, and what does not

A format conversion is a translation, and translations lose things. Here is what actually happens when an IFC file becomes a DXF file.

DataIFCDXFSurvives
GeometryYesYesYes
Materials & colourYesYesYes
Texture mapsNoNon/a
Animation & rigsNoNon/a
Scene hierarchyYesYesYes

This is a comparatively lossless pairing: 3 of the five categories above are supported by both formats, so most of what is in your IFC file has somewhere to go in the DXF file.

What our DXF writer puts in the file

Geometry as 3DFACE entities, one layer per mesh, with true colour on each face. 3DFACE is the entity every DXF reader implements, which matters more here than a mesh entity that would be more compact and less widely understood.

About Industry Foundation Classes

IFC is the open standard for Building Information Modelling: how architects, engineers and contractors hand a building between disciplines. It is barely a geometry format: it is a data model of a building, in which a wall knows that it is a wall, what it is made of, which storey it sits on and what it connects to. Converting one extracts the geometry those objects resolve to, which is what you want for visualisation, and drops the semantics, which is what made IFC worth having.

Commonly seen in: Revit, ArchiCAD, Tekla Structures, Navisworks, Solibri, BlenderBIM. More on the IFC format page.

About AutoCAD Drawing Interchange Format

DXF is the format Autodesk publishes so other software can read AutoCAD data, and it has been the neutral CAD exchange format since the 1980s. Most DXF files in the wild are 2D drawings; what converts here is the 3D geometry: 3DFACE and polyface meshes, so extruded or solid-modelled shapes come through while dimensions, hatches and text do not.

Commonly seen in: AutoCAD, LibreCAD, QCAD, Fusion 360, laser cutters, CNC. More on the DXF format page.

How the conversion works

When you drop a file in, the bytes are handed to a parser compiled to run in your browser. The IFC data is decoded into an in-memory scene graph of meshes, materials and transforms, which is what the preview is drawing. Pressing convert walks that scene graph back out through a DXF writer and hands you the resulting bytes as a download.

The whole round trip is local. The page itself is static: it is delivered once and then does its work offline. That is why the privacy claim is checkable rather than a promise.

IFC to DXF: common questions

Is my IFC file uploaded anywhere?

No. The file is read by code running inside this browser tab and never crosses the network. You can prove it by disconnecting from the internet before you convert, the page keeps working, or by watching the Network tab in your browser's developer tools while you drop a file in.

How large an IFC file can I convert?

There is no server-side limit because there is no server. The practical ceiling is your own machine's memory: a browser tab can usually handle models up to a few hundred megabytes. Very dense scans or scenes with millions of triangles will take a few seconds and a lot of RAM.

Why does my converted DXF file look untextured?

DXF stores geometry only; it has no way to record materials or texture maps. If you need the surfacing to survive, convert to GLB or glTF instead.

Does it cost anything?

No. There is no fee, no account, no watermark and no per-file limit. Since the conversion runs on your hardware rather than ours, serving this page costs about as much as serving a blog post.

Does it work on a Mac, on Windows or on a phone?

All of them. There is nothing to install: any browser with WebGL 2 will do, which covers current Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on desktop, and Safari and Chrome on mobile. A phone has less memory than a laptop, so a very heavy scene may be the one thing it cannot finish.

Related conversions

Other things to do with the same file.

From IFC:

Other ways to get to DXF:

Or do something else with it:

Further reading

All posts