Prepare Arkio exports for other 3D programs

Arkio supports exporting to OBJ, Revit, Rhino, Sketchup, and BIM 360. Sometimes other export formats are needed depending on your use-case and 3D programs.

Your geometry can be exported as a mesh or solid CAD data. This can be achieved using other tools as an in-between step when exporting. Here are some simple steps to prepare your geometry for other tools.

Mesh

Meshes are mostly used in real-time applications for gaming and game development. They can be created from Arkio as an OBJ a universal mesh format that is accepted by most 3D applications. It is pretty straightforward to convert OBJ files to other mesh formats like FBX and glTF using Mesh editing applications like Blender (free) and Autodesk 3dsMax or Maya.

You can just Import the OBJ files that got exported from Arkio.

Then clean up the geometry you don't want to export by e.g. hiding an object, editing or splitting the meshes and changing the mesh materials.

After your mesh is looking good you can export the geometry to your required format. Depending on what Mesh editing tool you use you have different export formats available.

For 3dsMax some of these formats are:

• Autodesk (.FBX)
• 3D Studio Mesh (.3DS, .PRJ)
• Autodesk Collada (.DAE)
• AutoCAD (.DWG)
• AutoCAD (.DXF)
• gw: OBJ-Exporter (.OBJ)
• ACIS SAT (.SAT)
• StereoLitho (.STL)

If you have trouble exporting complex scene and large imported models it helps to use tools like Rhinoceros and Revit with our Arkio plugin first as we can bring in geometry cleaner using our own plugin and both tools natively export FBX and other mesh and CAD formats

(OBJ importers on old software like 3dsMax can sometimes break when importing complex models)

Solid CAD

The best way to get Arkio models to solid universal 3D CAD formats is using our close integration with Autodesk Revit to bring the models to Revit first using our plugin.

After you loaded your Arkio model to Revit (or BIM 360 and download the Revit file) you can clean up the geometry you don't need or want to change first.

Then hit Export>Cad Formats>DWG and select exporting as AECS solids in options.

This should give you a 3D DWG file from your scene that can be imported into almost all BIM and CAD applications as solid geometry with materials.