How to use the BIM viewer

The BIM viewer on this site runs entirely in your browser. No account, no install and — the part that matters — no upload: when you open an IFC file, a WebAssembly parser reads it on your own machine and hands the geometry straight to your graphics card. Close the tab and the only copy of the model that exists is the one on your disk.

That architecture is not a privacy slogan; it is what makes the viewer usable on real work. Coordination exports, tender models, anything under an NDA — files nobody could justify pushing to a third-party cloud just to look at — stay local from first byte to last. If IT asks where the model goes, the answer is: nowhere.

This tutorial runs the whole loop once: get a file, open it, orient yourself, inspect an element, cut a section, federate a second discipline, and leave with a snapshot for the coordination report. Each step links to a deeper guide where one exists.

Step 1 — get an IFC file (or use a sample)

The viewer reads IFC, the open exchange format of BIM, in the three schema generations you will actually meet — IFC2x3, IFC4 and IFC4x3 — plus zipped .ifczip archives. It does not open RVT, DWG or SKP; those are proprietary authoring formats, and the route is to export them to IFC in their native tool first (for the Revit case there is a dedicated export guide).

No file at hand? Visit the viewer and pause for a moment — it loads a sample by itself. Three ship with it: the Duplex house (IFC2X3, 2.3 MB), the Institute building (IFC4, 10.4 MB) and the FZK Haus (IFC4, 2.5 MB). Every step in this guide can be practiced on them before a real delivery lands in your inbox.

Step 2 — open the model

Three doors, one room: drag & drop the file from your file manager onto any part of the viewer; click Open IFC file — the first toolbar button — and pick it in the dialog; or follow a /viewer#open link, which skips the auto-sample and goes straight to your own file. Opening a file this way replaces the current scene; stacking models on top of each other is step 7's job.

One note on size: the practical ceiling is around 300 MB, and it is set by your device's RAM, not by us. From 150 MB (80 MB of combined models on mobile) the viewer shows a friendly heads-up before parsing. If a delivery sits over the line, run it through the IFC Compressor first — exports are routinely fatter than they need to be.

Step 3 — read the status bar

Before touching the camera, spend twenty seconds on the strip at the bottom: file name, a schema badge (IFC4, say), the item count, the file size and the load time. That strip is a free sanity check on the delivery itself. An item count near zero means the export filtered almost everything out; a schema badge that contradicts the project's exchange agreement means someone's export template has drifted. Catching either now is cheaper than catching it mid-review.

And when a file refuses to load at all — parse error, blank scene — don't start guessing: the troubleshooting guide works through the causes in order of likelihood, from truncated downloads to schema quirks.

Step 4 — move around

The camera takes three gestures with a mouse: left-drag orbits around the model, right-drag pans across it, the scroll wheel zooms. On touch: one finger orbits, two fingers pan, pinch zooms. Lose the building — it happens — and Fit view on the toolbar reframes everything loaded.

That's enough for this tutorial, but camera fluency is what separates a painful review from a quick one — in a coordination session you navigate far more than you do anything else. The navigation guide goes deep on every move, including navigating by subtraction with the isolate and hide tools.

Step 5 — find an element and read its data

Click Model tree to open the side panel (on phones it slides up as a bottom sheet). The tree mirrors the spatial hierarchy — site, building, storey, then the elements on each storey — and loads names lazily as you expand branches, so heavy models stay responsive. Click a row and that element is selected in the 3D scene; the eye icons hide or reveal whole branches, and Show all undoes any hiding in one click.

The Properties tab is the panel's other half — clicking any element directly in the 3D scene opens it too. It lists the selected element's attributes, its property sets (Psets) and its quantities: the fire rating on a door, the net volume of a slab. This is the data the "I" in BIM stands for, and checking it beats trusting it. To query that data across hundreds of elements at once, the properties explorer searches a whole model without loading any 3D.

Step 6 — cut a section, take a measurement

Section planes let you look inside. Activate the mode, then — as the hint says — click the model to add a plane and drag its arrow to move it; walls peel away and the interior becomes reviewable. Measure distance works the same way: click to place points, click again to finish a run, Esc cancels the one in progress. In either mode a red trash button wipes every plane or measurement at once, and Esc leaves the mode when you're done.

Sections are the single most useful tool in a clash discussion — enough that they have their own guide, including how to pair cuts with measurements to document a clearance.

Step 7 — add a second discipline

Here is the feature this viewer is built around. Add model to the scene opens another IFC without closing the first — architecture, then structure over it, then MEP over both. Each file stays an independent model with its own branch in the tree, so you can hide one discipline, isolate another, and ask the questions no single-discipline model can answer: do the ducts clear the beams, does the riser land in the shaft. Fit view reframes the whole federation.

This on-screen federation is deliberately throwaway — it exists for the review, not as a deliverable. When a milestone requires one combined IFC file to hand over, IFC Merge writes it with every discipline's hierarchy preserved.

Step 8 — snapshot what you found

A finding that isn't recorded didn't happen. Save PNG snapshot exports exactly what's on screen — the section cut, the highlighted clash, the measurement — as an image ready for the coordination report or the issue thread. A Share button for live links sits on the toolbar too; it's coming soon, with a waitlist behind it.

On a phone or tablet

Everything above works on mobile: the side panel becomes a bottom sheet you pull up over the scene, the camera answers to the touch gestures from step 4, and toolbar targets are sized for fingers. The one honest difference is memory — mobile browsers get less of it, which is why the size warning arrives earlier there. For a site walk with the coordination model, that budget is usually plenty.

Run the loop once on a sample — open the Duplex, walk its tree, cut a section, drop the Institute on top — and the next real delivery will cost you minutes, not a software install. Open your own file whenever you're ready.