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Home > Supported File Formats > Navisworks to VRML


How to convert Navisworks (NWD,NWC,NWF) to VRML (VRML2, VRML97, X3D)?


PolyTrans|CAD+DCC performs mathematically precise CAD, DCC/Animation, GIS and BIM 3D file conversions into all key downstream 3D packages and file formats. Okino software is used and trusted throughout the world by many tens of thousands of 3D professionals in mission & production critical environments, backed by respectable personal support directly from our core development team.

     

Navisworks

Autodesk Navisworks products deliver project review software for 3D coordination, 4D planning, photorealistic visualization, dynamic simulation, and accurate analysis. Create a whole-project model by integrating design and construction information, including complex building information modeling (BIM), Digital Prototyping (DP), and process plant data. With Autodesk Navisworks project review software, you can collaborate, coordinate, and communicate more effectively to reduce problems during design and construction.

Navisworks is a key and core product from which Okino customers often receive and/or coordinate their data files. At Okino we have spent the good part of 2 decades writing our DWF-3D importer specifically to import super-ultra-massive files from Navisworks datasets, such as oil & gas rigs, oil refineries, 3D plants, marine vessils, etc.

Note: you would ideally pre-center the model at the origin and pre-scale the model to be of a "sane size" within Navisworks before exporting the DWF-3D file for Okino software consumption. This will ensure that the model displays properly in your final destination 3D software.

     

VRML

VRML2 ("Virtual Reality Markup Language") is one of the very best of non-MCAD file formats, little appreciated and lost (mainly) to the annals of time. Many people (wrongly) believe that FBX is the primary "translation file format" but VRML2 pre-dated it by at least 10+ years and has equally good or better functionality (and in an open, non-proprietary specification). It was supplemented or augmented by the X3D (XML-based) file format in the mid 2000s. The Web3D Consortium supports the evolution of VRML2/X3D and of its acceptance as ISO and IEC standards.

Without getting into specifics, VRML2 can be considered a "rich file format" in terms of its functionality and capabilities, yet few software programs fully utilize all of that functionality. It could have, and should have, become the defacto "universal 3D file format" for data translation and long term storage but it did not have the clout nor marketing dollars that other newer formats had such as from Autodesk (FBX, DWF), Sony (COLLADA), Adobe+Intel (U3D), Dassault Systemes (3DXML) and others.

VRML1 and VRML2 are 3D file formats with a long and complex history. They were originally developed in the mid 1990s to define 'interactive 3D worlds' on the then-new World Wide WEB. However, statistically speaking, VRML2 became more well known as a high quality "data translaton and storage" file format, partly due to Okino pushing it as such a standard in the industry. It was implemented by a good number of 3D software packages and hence became a "reliable back door" to convert 3D assets out of those packages before FBX, DWF, COLLADA, U3D and other similar file formats came along in the mid to late 2000s, or glTF in the late 2010's.

It is also known as VRML2, X3D, Classic VRML, VRML97, VRML1 and Inventor2.