Complex Site Modeling in Revit Tutorial (with Environment for Revit)

what's going on guys balkan architect here and in today's video we're going to be talking about complex site design inside of revit so a couple of months ago i have released a course called site design and coordination inside of revit and kind of for promotional purposes i have created this kind of cool site design i'm just going to use it as a thumbnail as an image and i guess it has attracted a lot of attention and a lot of you guys have asked me well how do you model something like that and i decided well why not create a tutorial just on that particular site how do we model something like that inside of revit and that's what we're doing today obviously if you want to learn more about site design you can check out the entire course now that's only going to be kind of the first half of this tutorial as part of the second half of the tutorial i'm going to be talking about the environment plug-in so you're probably already familiar with the environment plug-in it has all of these extra tools for site design in revit tools that revit unfortunately doesn't offer but luckily we have a plug-in for that and you probably know about it but you probably don't know that it has been updated recently and we have some cool new tools exactly for designing the site so i'm just going to be kind of overviewing all of those tools for uh for site design all of the new features that are available with the latest update as part of that course you will get extra uh three months extended trial for free and also as part of the course you will learn about all of the features of the environment plugin now also if you want to purchase the plugin afterwards you can use this coupon code and you will get extra 55 days on your subscription which i think it's a really cool deal okay so now without any further ado let's jump into revit and let us now talk first about complex site design so here you can see i have that building and i have the road that we have here and when it comes to site design you're usually going to have one of two kind of approaches the first approach is going to be when you get a site from a surveyor and then you can generate that inside of revit i talk about this in depth inside of the course i'm not going to be talking about that now here but the second kind of approach is when you have the building but you want to model the site kind of as context this is especially important if you're an architecture student you usually want to have that site as part of the context but it can be really difficult inside of revit because revit can be so kind of complicated when it comes to using all of the site tools so i'm going to be using showing you in that second approach when you already have the building but you want to add that site as part of the contact context the surroundings of your building so let's let's take a look at how that is done so what you want to do first is move to the site plan here there we go so once we're at the site plan usually i just like to create the site plan or generate a surface which isn't going to be fitting in perfectly but we have a starting point so you're just going to throw it out there and then you start adapting it so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to go here to topo surface go to place point and usually what i like to do is just place one point first so just one point like that hit the escape give you times then i'm going to select that go to copy check multiple and then i'm just going to copy it multiple times perhaps once every 12 meters like that let's do it a few more times there we go i think we have now enough okay so once we have all of these let's set their elevation and actually i want these to be at minus six meters just like that then i can select them i can copy them and i'm just going to copy them a little bit like this hit the escape key only once so they're still selected only the copied ones are selected so now you can just change the elevation here let's go to -5 and then let's select them again go to copy move again hit the escape key again just once and then we can move these to minus four so i'm just going to continue like that so the next step let's go here all the way to the road like so escape minus three and then you just wanna go again copy and you just wanna kind of continue that so these let's go here this can be minus two copy this can perhaps be or no let's move it up a little bit so you can always go to the move tool yeah here and this can be minus one copy zero and then you can go kind of positive so let's go here to one and go to two three and finally let's go for kind of a little bit further away and there we go we have our surface okay so now once we have the surface what you want to do next is just go to the 3d view just to see what we have and obviously this doesn't doesn't look too good and that's okay that's a kind of a good starting point and then it's time to adapt all of this to our building and all of the kind of building elements that we have on screen so what i like to do is i like to go back to the site plan here make sure that the site plan is always in the wireframe view mode because if it was in hidden line you wouldn't really see anything so i like to keep it at wireframe because it's so much easier to see what's going on so now let's first adapt our topography to the road that we have here and this bearing wall that we want to have so or not bearing retaining wall sorry okay so let's go to the site plan and now i'm just going to select this road which is just a simple floor and you can see that this is at minus three meters so we want the side to be at kind of a little bit below that so minus 3.1 would probably be the the perfect elevation so you just select that typography you go into edit surface and then what you can do here is simply for example select these points here these five points i'm going to move them a little bit so just move them all the way to the road and then i can say okay this should be minus 3.1 go back here hit finish and now if i go to the 3d view you can see that we have kind of uncovered that one part of the road okay so we now want to move forward so let's select the topo surface again at the surface so i'm actually just going to select all of these points like that perhaps we don't need this one so just these go to copy and then you copy it up to here you go back here and now we have cleared the road we still have the sidewalk but at least the road is cleared okay so now we can go back to the site plan hit the escape key a few times hit finish now the sidewalk you can see that the sidewalk is at minus 2.8 so we want the topo surface to be kind of on this side of the sidewalk at minus 2.9 so i'm just adding 10 centimeters so i'm just going to select this again go into edit surface so what they can do here is simply select all of these go to copy move them here there we go hit the escape key only once and then this as we said this should be minus 2.9 there we go finish and now go to the 3d view just to check and as you can see this looks much better now so it's starting to kind of fit in slowly also here we have an issue with the road so perhaps we can go here and copy this one here and then here as well and hopefully yeah that will kind of clear our road now here what you'll see is that here we have this kind of small uh retaining wall and let's say that we want we don't want to have this kind of hole here of the topography so what we can do is we can go back to the side plan and then if i hit the escape key a few times this was at minus 310 so i can create a point here at minus 2.7 perhaps and then place just a few points here or i think two would be enough let's see and then go to the 3d view so as you can see it's already higher here so i can select both of them by holding the ctrl key and then perhaps instead of 2.7 you can go to 2.5 okay this seems a little bit better now it did mess things up here in the middle but that's okay we can fix that so uh that's because of the uh the side kind of this see this connected with this point and then it brought everything up so if i select this point and copy it move it here it should fix that there we go so as you can see it kind of fixed that issue again we have an issue here so we can select this point copy place it here and that kind of solves that issue we can select it again copy it here you can move it with the arrow keys and this yeah so it kind of clears that area so as you can see it's just a lot of this kind of back and forth to adapt everything again here with this retaining wall what i would also do is just place a few more points so here for example these are at minus 2.9 so i would take this point or let's see where is that yeah this one is a bit too low perhaps so i can select this one move it down all the way to the other side of the wall and then instead of minus two we can go minus one let's see what that looks like okay might be a bit too high so let's try minus 1.5 okay that looks a lot better again here we seem to have a little bit of a spillage so let's go back here and then we can select this point this is at minus 2 so we can let's copy that one perhaps somewhere or what you can do instead of copying points you can go to place point but instead of absolute elevation go to relative to surface so what this does is when you place a point it's just going to add an additional point at that elevation i know it did the mess things up here but don't worry we can fix that but it's important to have the ability to select this point and then go to down to minus 2.4 2.3 or no 5. yeah okay this will work i'm just trying to kind of make sure that this connection here works and it seems to work right now and then because it's messing things up here we can just select these two points go to copy and place them right in front of that point and that should fix things and it did so as you can see it's just uh adding additional points uh along the way and we can do the same thing with the house so i can go here to the house i can select we need to hit finish first select that floor we can see the floor is at level zero so the points obviously should be as he said 10 centimeters below so minus 0.1 so what we can do is again select the site plan go into edit surface place point or we can select this point this one is at -1 that definitely doesn't work so we can just delete that one place point at minus 0.1 and then we can just go all the way around like so placing additional points just making sure that this is kind of at the correct elevation okay we'll fix that issue there but there we go this is basically what we want to see uh so this one i wanted to be in a corner okay now we have these points inside this one is at zero this one is at zero we can just delete those we don't want those and now when i go to the 3d view it's starting to look like this now i have noticed that i have made an issue or made a mistake so remember here when i change this to relative to surface i should have changed that back to absolute elevation and it didn't so it did this which is terrible so what you can do is just not save the changes with okay yes and let's oops yeah okay so we haven't seen the changes perfect so let's now go back to the site plan place point instead of relative to surface absolute elevation and now minus 0.1 so you'll you'll make mistakes as i make mistakes so that's that's okay but it's just important to go back when you do that okay so now we have all of these points in correct place and now you'll see how the surface is going to start looking much better there we go and then we can delete the ones in the middle like so you know when i go to the 3d view as you can see it's starting to look a lot better also something that you can do and what i like to do is when i'm working with typography because most things you're going to have to kind of place in the site plan but then you want to see that in the 3d view so you can just undock the 3d view here and then perhaps dock it off to the side so you can have that 3d view there above and you can have the side blend here so you can kind of work at both so i can actually make this a bit smaller i don't need the 3d to be that big and then i can select this and then i can kind of continue uh working uh another additional thing uh that you should be able to do let's see so here if i place a spot elevation i can get like elevation at these points here unfortunately it doesn't get report decimal places so i can go to the units format and add a couple of decimal places okay and now as you can see here i can see that oh it must be on topography so that's why it's changing so much yeah so unfortunately this isn't going to help that much i think the topography is kind of giving us an issue here so that's a little bit annoying but that's okay so anyways now we can continue and you you can continue playing with those points i think you you get the you get the idea so here we have another issue with that so we can go into edit surface so here we need to add some additional points so you can select this point go to copy and as you can see it's fixing that but then i wanna add these points as well on the bottom so it can balance these things out and now we no longer have that issue here that we had and then you can just play around so for example here let's say i want to bring this up i don't want it to be kind of like this going straight down i want to have kind of a little curvature there uh what i can do is i can just come and place a point and again use relative to surface set it to something like 5.5 so that's kind of half a meter and now i can just place a few of those points there and as you can see it's just going to kind of bring things a little bit up here into 3d view see how it can bring things up perhaps it was a bit too much so i can lower that a little bit oops no nine i think so you do have to do a little bit of math here when you're adjusting these but i think you get the point so this should be 1.1 i think so i'm just putting them a bit lower [Music] there we go and as you can see it's starting to have that kind of pronounced part and then of course here we have the gap so we can fix that gap by perhaps deleting this point there we go that fixes it so there we go so it's a lot of back and forth but try to work in both your site plan and 3d view and then you can kind of adapt things a lot easier and this is already starting to look good here in front of the in front of the house obviously we have an issue with the stair so with the stair unfortunately you don't have much a choice so what you have to do is just select that surface and this is kind of the last thing that i'm going to be showing you for now for for this because i don't want it to take too long so again i'm going to go relative to surface and then set this to zero and then here we can just place a bunch of points kind of on the edges of this stair and then once you have those points you can actually edit them i prefer editing them in the 3d view okay so here i don't want this point anymore okay so you can just select them and then you can move them down for example so 2.5 let's see okay that works here 2.902 there we go this one so you're just kind of playing around with them this one works this one should be lower so it's not really that difficult okay these kind of work this one perhaps should be a bit lower there we go and then this one definitely should be at least two there we go so as you can see it's not that difficult uh okay here we have an issue point down there if we delete it it's going to fix it so as you can see you can still clean this stair up and it looks fairly natural perhaps if we bring this one up just a little bit oops that was down 65. there we go and then to clean it up on the other side you just go back to the site plan here so remember as i said kind of toggling in between these that works really good here and then you just basically copy this to the other side and now if we take a look here as you can see it cleans that stair up from that topography so you would basically continue that for for the rest of this i don't want this to take way too long so i'm just going to stop here and now it's time to talk about the new features on the environment tab and now let's start exploring the environment tools or the new tools with the latest update so you can find the tools here where kind of the typography tools were before now here we have the new kind of typography tools this is the beta testing version you can see and this is if you want to build a new topo surface now in this case i don't want to build a new one i want to add it this one so i'll just go here to the site plan and then i'm going to select this topo surface and just go into uh typography tools so it's going to be available there and here we have this panel i actually really like the fact that it's a floating panel so we can kind of move it around if we want and here we have uh all of the all of the tools so first i want to start off with the selection tools that we have here so here we have multiple selection tools and now in terms of selecting you can just come in here and select individual points you can hold the control key to add to selection hold the shift key to remove from selection so it works basically like just like in rabbit you know regular revit tools you can also make cross selections just keep in mind that if you do it too quickly it might start kind of a little bit below so just make sure to do it a little bit slower and then it's not going to give you those issues okay so that's kind of basic selection now let's talk about the advanced selections that we get here with the new topography tools or edit typography tools so the first one is points on boundary so i really like this because it allows you to click here you select one point then you can just drag this out and you can see you get this line that's basically connecting points so you can select multiple points on one boundary uh really easily so it's just going to select points on one boundary and then you can edit them if you want obviously they're not at the same elevation and they're just connected by a boundary so you can use that tool for that okay moving forward you have the draw selection region now i really love this tool i think this is a game changer and i don't know where revit doesn't have this but it doesn't and the environment plug-in does so that's good so you basically click here on draw selection region and then if you want to select certain points in a certain region where you can't really kind of drag and select because you would select multiple points that you don't need with this you can just kind of draw out a selection region and you can just do it like that see how cool it is and then you can just select the points that you want to select you go to apply selection region and now those points will be selected and then you can manipulate those points so that's also something really really good uh moving forward uh let's take a look at get connected points so what this does is this basically allows you to select one point and then when you click get connected points it's going to select all of the points that are on the same elevation uh now it's not going to select all points if you have let's say a complex topography where you have kind of multiple uh multiple hills i guess you can say if you have two enclosed circles in terms of contour lines it's only going to select one circle of contour lines so this is basically if you want to select one contour line it's going to connect all points inside of that one contour line so that's basically how this works again really really useful now when you select these points here it's going to display the elevation of those points and then here you also have elevation change elevation so i really like this uh you might remember kind of in the beginning of this tutorial when we were setting this up and all of these points when you want to kind of manipulate one particular point here for example i had to select one point and then i would kind of change the elevation a little bit now that's really annoying because you have to do the math and here you can just go minus 0.1 click change elevation it's just going to change that point by minus 0.1 meter and click change elevation there we go so it's going to do that now we're changing it multiple times probably so there we go so i think that's really useful to have that ability to change uh to change elevation of that one point uh also we have the vertical line uh now this would be useful and let me just here can i go to the 3d view yeah so here on the 3d view let's say you want to align something vertically this is going to allow you to do that so if you want to align any points you can do that so you can select so once you select a point you can go here to vertical align and then if i select the top of this surface it's oops they select the point there i did okay so now it's just going to move that point to top of that surface so that's the vertical line i think that is a really useful feature also we have the move feature which allows you to move the element we have copy which obviously copies the element and then we have delete if you want to delete so those are kind of very similar to regular revit tools so i'm just going to move this a little bit back there we go now let's explore the rest of these so we have place point which kind of basic just works just like revit place point but then also we have this add line option now this is really powerful so what this allows you to do and let me escape out of this uh you can actually create model lines and then use those model lines in order to shape geometry now i have talked about this in one of the previous videos where i talked about the environment plugin and how you can generate topography from contour lines i'm going to link that up in the cards above so you can check that out if you want so here i'm just going to add a simple kind of chain of lines just like that hit the escape key a few times so now if i select the topography and go to the new topography tools if i go here to add line here i can select these line segments i can use the ctrl key to add additional line segments or use the shift key to remove line segments or i can just highlight one of them and then hit the tab key and select the entire chain of lines now once we do this here we can set this up so do we want to use smart point so you can see that here it has kind of some strange order of these points so it's uh has different distances and basically it's using the triangulation of the topography in order to determine where do you need points so it kind of flows naturally with the existing topography which is really smart that's why it's called smartpoint but anyways you can go to custom settings and then you have a couple of options you have a distance between points so points at each three three meters or you can divine line divide the lines into segments and then each line is divided in this case in into five points uh also here you'll notice that we have an option to use uh lines from links so this would uh basically allow you to it would allow you to use kind of links or lines that are part of links in order to generate these points okay let's move forward then we have the from edge option so what this allows you to do is it allows you to select a certain edge and then it's going to basically allow you to place points on that edge so here as you can see it just placed a bunch of points here on this edge now you can do the whole edge or you can do one point and then you can kind of just place individual points you can also give it a height offset so if i want to give it like a minus 0.1 height offset and then insert those points as you can see we have a bunch of these points at minus 0.1 meters so that kind of gives us that solution in terms of the height offset and that i i really like okay let's insert those points and then we have the pick face and now this one is really powerful as well uh so for example i was showing you how you can kind of adapt the topography to the to the stairs that we have here and i have shown you how we can kind of manually adjust that now imagine if we did that for this spiral ramp here i think that would be a nightmare so you do have the pick faces option and here you can set up the accuracy this means the amount of points so i'm just going to set that to the lowest amount and you can specify the whole face or a specified mesh i'm just going to go with the whole face and then i can just select the bottom face of this and it's going to include as many points as it needs to generate the surface and as i said here by accuracy you can insert more or less points so this is more points i usually like to keep it simple not too complicated and also you can give it a height offset so if you want these to go above a little bit so i can add like a plus 0.1 offset insert points so now those points have been inserted there in the uh so for that yeah so they have been inserted there and the topography now follows this curvature a lot better still we have this point here which if i delete now as you can see it looks perfect so if i hit finish yeah this now looks a lot better so remember here where we had a straight line how much time it took to to fix this and this was just kind of a couple of clicks and and you're done so i think this was this is a really powerful tool where you just pick a surface and it generates points along that surface now finally i just want to show you one more tool so if i select the topography here and go to topography tools here we have this slope path tool and this allows you to create while a sloped path so you can just select one of these existing points here and kind of extend a line from that and what you'll see is here it's going to configure out the elevation of that line and it's going to create first a straight line so both the start and the end are at minus three meters but you can customize this so you can set it to zero so now it kind of slopes up or you can set it to minus i don't know minus five and then it slopes down so kind of that's that that that's the whole idea uh also here you can switch this from elevation to slope so instead of entering the elevation here you can specify the slope so if you know that you want this to be it i know something like minus three i can just type in a minus three percent uh or sorry three degrees and it's going to generate a line that's at a minus uh three degrees slope uh and also here you can arc that both the left and to the right by using the slider which is really useful and then once you're happy with the changes you can just go here to finish and yes we want to insert these points and there we go so there you go those are kind of some of the new updated tools with the latest version of the environment plugin i hope you have enjoyed this video if you want to get this project file you can find that on my patreon page which i'm going to include in the description of this video and also up in the cards above thank you for watching guys make sure to check out my website balkanarctic.com for more revit courses there i have over 120 hours of content and i'm adding more each week make sure to subscribe for more videos and also i've added a video over there that might interest you as well

Channel: Balkan Architect

Views: 35,616

Keywords: Revit, tutorial, BIM, building information modeling, autodesk, site, siteplan, topography, landscape

Id: 2Qp7iqvlVx0

Length: 33min 9sec (1989 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 11 2022