A hundred-and-forty-unit residential tower lands from the architect's team as a single Revit file, and before anyone opens a camera or touches a light, somebody has to decide how that geometry crosses over into 3ds Max. FBX, DWG, or a native RVT link — most studios inherited their default years ago from whichever senior artist set it up, nobody's revisited it since, and that one unexamined choice quietly decides how many of the next few days disappear into cleanup work.
There isn't a single correct answer. Each format makes specific trade-offs around geometry quality, material round-trip, file size, and whether updates from Revit propagate. This article walks through each one honestly, including where it falls down, so you can pick based on what actually matters for the project.
The three real options
| Format | What you get | Where it hurts |
|---|---|---|
| FBX | Geometry + materials + lighting + linked Revit files | Tessellates curves badly. Layers collapse. Polycount bloats. |
| DWG | Clean curves. Lower polycount. Instances preserved. | No materials. No textures. No linked files. |
| Native RVT link | Live link to source file. Updates propagate. | Same tessellation issues as FBX. Heavy in viewport. |
Picking between them is mostly about answering one question: do you need updates from Revit during the project, or is this a one-shot handover?
If updates matter — design is still changing, the architect will send revisions — you want a linked workflow. If it's a handover — design is final, you're moving the data once and never going back — you want an import workflow.
Within those two buckets, the format choice mostly comes down to geometry quality versus material round-trip. You can't get both. Pick the one whose pain you're prepared to deal with.
FBX — the path of least resistance
FBX is what most studios default to, and Autodesk recommends it in their own docs. It exports geometry, materials, lighting, cameras, and crucially picks up linked Revit files automatically. If the architect's model references other Revit files (which it almost certainly does), FBX brings the whole hierarchy across in one operation.
The problem is what it does to curved geometry, and the reason is fundamental rather than a bug Autodesk could just fix. Revit models a curve mathematically — a railing sweep or a column taper is a true curve, exact by definition. 3ds Max, like the FBX format itself, only understands polygons: flat triangular facets. Exporting a curve means tessellating it, approximating that exact surface with enough facets to read as smooth. Revit ties the resolution of that approximation to the active view's Detail Level rather than exposing a dedicated quality control, so you get whatever facet density the view happened to be set to, not the one the geometry actually needs. A curved staircase railing that's lightweight in Revit can land in 3ds Max as tens of thousands of triangles; a curved wall that should be a handful of polygons becomes a wall of micro-faces. Switch to wireframe on any column with a base or a taper and the facet edges are visible on surfaces that should be smooth — reflective materials show it worst, at grazing angles.
The other FBX limitation is layer handling. Revit's categories, families, types, instances, and levels collapse into a flat hierarchy on export. You can ask the exporter to preserve category groupings, but levels disappear and type information becomes a string in the object name — the scene structure you'd actually want in 3ds Max needs rebuilding by hand.
When FBX still makes sense: the model is mostly straight geometry (commercial interiors, office buildings, anything modernist), the architect's materials are usable as a starting point, and you don't need updates after the handover. For a finished design that doesn't have a lot of curved detail, FBX is the lowest-friction option.
DWG — the geometry quality answer
On pure geometry, DWG wins outright. It's carrying Revit's native solid data across rather than an exported mesh, so a curve stays a curve instead of becoming a tessellated approximation. Polycount stays low. Multiple instances of the same family come through as actual 3ds Max instances — fifty identical chairs from a Revit family share one mesh instead of arriving as fifty independent copies, because native Revit files carry instancing information that FBX largely throws away. On a recent residential project I ran the same model through both pipelines as a test — 460MB via FBX, 78MB via DWG, same visible geometry.
If DWG is the better geometry every time, why does anyone still choose FBX? Because DWG's export is geometry only — no materials, no textures, no lights, no cameras, no metadata about which object is which, every wall just "wall," every column just "column." FBX exists in the pipeline specifically to carry the production data DWG drops: material names, light data, the linked-file hierarchy. Picking DWG means you've decided the studio's own material library is worth more to you than whatever comes across for free, and that you're prepared to rebuild lighting from scratch.
DWG also breaks down when the Revit model has linked files — a structural model, an MEP model, separate sub-buildings referenced into the main project. DWG export only handles the active file; the linked content is excluded. FBX is the only format here that brings linked content through automatically.
When DWG makes sense: the model has significant curved geometry, you have your own studio material library that you'd rather use than the architect's, and the model doesn't depend on external Revit links. For projects that lean heavily on curved architectural detail — anything by Zaha Hadid Architects, BIG, MVRDV — DWG is almost always the better choice despite the material rebuild.
Native RVT link — for live updates
Since 3ds Max 2015, you can link a Revit file directly. The scene maintains a reference to the .rvt file on disk, and you can refresh that reference when the architect sends updates. Changes in Revit propagate to 3ds Max without re-importing.
This is the right workflow for projects where the design is still changing. Maintaining a manual sync between Revit revisions and 3ds Max scenes is one of the most time-consuming parts of a long ArchViz project. Native linking removes the manual step entirely — when the architect updates the model, you refresh the link and your scene updates.
The catch is the same tessellation problem as FBX, because the native link uses the same export path under the hood. Curves come in heavy. Polycount bloats. The same workarounds you'd use for FBX (manually rebuilding railings, replacing curved columns) apply, except now you have to redo them every time the link refreshes — which defeats some of the point of linking in the first place.
The bigger problem is stability. Linked Revit files are interpreted live every time the scene loads, and on heavy buildings — anything mid-rise commercial and up — that interpretation either takes minutes to complete or fails outright. The most common failure mode is 3ds Max crashing on scene load, sometimes silently, sometimes after a long unresponsive pause. The same scene that opens fine when the geometry is imported as static objects becomes unworkable when the same geometry is sitting behind a live link.
Even when the scene loads, viewport performance suffers. 3ds Max can't cache linked geometry the way it caches imported geometry, so navigation drops to a crawl on big buildings. A model that's perfectly comfortable to work with as a one-time import becomes unusable as a live link.
When native RVT link makes sense: small to mid-size projects (residential, small commercial, single-family interiors) where the architect is still iterating and the geometry is light enough that the live interpretation doesn't break. For anything bigger, the crash risk and viewport drag outweigh the convenience of automatic updates. Studios that started a project with a live link often end up converting to a static import partway through, once the model gets heavy enough that 3ds Max starts crashing.
Side-by-side viewport comparison: FBX import on the left (heavy tessellation), DWG import on the right (clean curves)
What you do once it's imported
Whatever format you pick, the imported scene needs cleanup. Revit's model structure doesn't map cleanly to how 3ds Max wants to organise things, and the import inevitably brings in a lot of artefacts that aren't worth shipping to the renderer.
The standard cleanup pass:
- Remove empty objects. Revit uses group helpers and dummy nodes liberally for block structure. Most of them are dead weight in 3ds Max.
- Fix normals. Curved geometry from FBX or RVT often has inverted faces or undefined normals. Reflective and refractive materials reveal this immediately.
- Consolidate duplicate meshes. Even when the source format supports instancing, the round-trip often produces independent copies of objects that should be sharing geometry. Dining chairs, lamp posts, balustrades — anything repeated across the design.
- Repath materials and textures. If you imported via FBX with material round-trip, the texture paths point to wherever the architect had them, which is almost never where you have them.
- Clean up layers. Revit's category-based organisation produces many layers in 3ds Max. Most of them want consolidating into a smaller set that matches your studio's standard.
This is where most of the cleanup time actually goes, and it's the same operation regardless of which import format you chose. You can do all of it by hand with 3ds Max's own tools and a few scripts; it is slow mainly because it is repetitive. SAM's Scene Clean-up in the 3ds Max menu scans the open scene for junk objects, pivot and scale problems, generic names and bad texture paths, then lets you preview the fixes and apply them in one batch, as a single undo step.
How long a cleanup takes depends heavily on the building and on how the architect exported it, so I won't put a number on it here. What I can say is that doing the same fixes in the same order every time is the part worth automating.
The decision, simplified
If you can only remember one heuristic: DWG when curves matter, FBX when materials matter, and Native Link only on small models where iteration matters.
Most studios end up running multiple workflows depending on the project. The mistake is having no opinion about which to use — defaulting to FBX for every project and then complaining about the tessellation. Picking deliberately, based on what the project actually needs, is most of what separates studios that turn around Revit projects quickly from studios that don't.
The other piece, the cleanup after import, is the slow part regardless of format. Whichever route you pick, build a repeatable cleanup order and stick to it.
Further reading — How to relink 3ds Max files without opening them · SAM vs Connecter: which asset manager fits a 3ds Max artist?
Sources — Autodesk: Exporting a Revit model to 3ds Max · Tiltpixel: Revit to 3dsmax workflow · AEC Magazine: The Revit and 3ds Max link · BIM Associates: Exporting Revit to 3ds Max
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