Import Google Maps into Revit Tutorial (in 3D!!)

[Music] hey everyone jeff here also known as the revit kid today i'm going to show you something really neat um it has to do with bringing in your 3d google maps into revit as a usable three-dimensional object as well as bring it into other programs this workflow works for a lot of different things so stay tuned you're gonna get some really neat tips go through a couple different software and understand how you can take those 3d 3d images that you spun around in google maps and actually bring them into your software i call it ripping google maps not sure if that's the best term but a pretty cool process hope you enjoy it and i'll see you there a really short backstory um the reason that i decided to sort of figure out how to do this is my usage of drones and creating photogrammetry from drones led me to a project where we could not get a drone out there and i thought what if i used the same process to develop these 3d meshes for twin motion at the time but also for revit but using google earth google maps and so that's what we're doing so the first thing we're going to do is we're actually going to jump into google earth and i'm going to pick a location and i'm going to run you through the process from start to finish taking it step by step of course before we jump in make sure you subscribe to the channel here on youtube hit the like hit the notification and look out for more tutorials videos and live streams in the future so with that let's jump right in so as you can see i've got google maps so just maps.google.com and i'm actually going to choose a location that i know works really well it's a pretty cool building and and i think it'll show the process well so this is what you would normally see in google maps pretty straightforward you would see your map view i'm going to jump over to 3d satellite image and so anyone who has been on google maps recently may notice that it actually changed a little bit it's down in the bottom left-hand corner here i'm going to switch over to satellite i'm going to hide hide the panel there and so if i hold shift and left click you can see i can actually orbit around this building so this is actually the building i'm going to do here it's a really neat really neat brutal building that's actually being renovated to a hotel right now but i like this as a test object for what we're about to do so the first thing you want to do is you actually want to turn off labels so on the bottom left if you hit where it says maps and go to more you can uncheck labels and that'll get rid of all those annoying labels that are telling you what it is so what we're going to do is we're actually going to record ourselves flying around this building almost as if we were flying a drone pretty simple pretty straightforward but we're going to use different programs to to record it so i'm actually using obs to record my screen you can really use any screen recording software it doesn't really matter what it is and you could also just take individual pictures but the the process that i use is actually recording yourself spinning around the building as a video exporting it as images and then uploading it to uh recap photo so let's let's go through the process first so i'm going to hit record over on the other screen and this is basically all i'm going to do i'm just going to record myself slowly flying around the building like this and for for an object and not for a site you can really just do a one spin uh around it a couple times like this and then i would suggest doing uh uh one or two sort of straight down looks you know going like going around the project a little bit if you want to get a little more detailed you get a little more detailed i'm gonna press stopping on the screen the one thing that i will tell you the tip that i will give you is don't pan like this so that you see a horizon line because that kind of stuff like this that just screws with the photogrammetry so the best you can make sure you're looking at a similar angle different heights and record yourself going around the building all right so now let's take a look at what this video looks like after we're done recording it all right so as you can see here's us spinning around it's just exactly what you saw it's my screen recording of me spinning around the screen so imagine we're flying a drone around the site pretty cool right okay so now what we need to do is we need to take this video and turn it into images here's another example of what you can do using different software pretty much any movie or video editing software will get it done i prefer premiere just because i have it i use it for all my video editing so what i'm going to do is i'm going to use premiere for this process but at the end of the day your goal is to take your video and export it as a sequence of jpeg images that you're going to use for creating a photogrammetry mesh so i'm going to jump into premiere i'm going to click new project i'm going to call this ikea building i don't know if you guys saw but it's right next to an ikea it's actually a new haven connecticut for anyone's interested and now i'm going to throw my recording into premiere and so there's my recording in premiere i'm going to drag this into sequence i don't want this to be a how-to in premiere so if you don't know premiere and you really want to learn it feel free to look out i'll show you the exact tools you need to do this process in premiere so all i did was made a new a new project imported the video and then dragged into my sequence you don't necessarily need to do this but i find it to get you get better results i'm going to double click the image i'm going to scale it or the video i should say i'm going to scale it so that my my my toolbars are gone um so you can see i just scaled it so my two bars are gone so if i scroll through this you'll see it's just me spinning around the the building right that's all it is so now i'm just going to show you how you export that as a sequence of images so i'm going to right click my sequence and say export media then for my source settings if i pull this down i actually have options i have jpeg options i have animated gif options i have all these different options if i go to jpeg you can see it says jpeg sequence so what this is going to do is it's going to export my video as a series of images which are jpeg format but the key here is if you did it by default it may actually it'll probably do one frame per second so you know that would be 30 or sorry 30 frames per second so as you can imagine that's actually going to be a ton of images so we don't need that many images that's going to be too many we actually can only max out at 300 images i believe for for the photogrammetry software so down here i'm going to say i'm going to uncheck where it says frame rate and i'm actually gonna pull it down to five depending on how long your images you may need to go down to one but i'm gonna go to five so now this is gonna be five images per second it's just gonna export for me i'm gonna click export and there it goes it's exporting my sequences all right so step one record yourself flying around the building in google maps using some sort of screen recording software ideally make sure that the horizon's not gone or not not showing and then get get a nice spin around the building and then some some plan site plan type of views step two bring it into a video editing software for me i'm using premiere and export it as a series of images jpeg images so now step three let's take a look at these images so there we go so if i click these you see i have 220 images if i open one you can see what they look like they're just a bunch of images going around the building perfect so step three is actually to now load them into a photogrametry software i'm going to be using recap photo as my tool anyone who has i believe it's most of the revit subscription models of autodesk software you get recap and recap photo with it if not you know take a look at your subscription service figure it out you know autodesk has their thing um but there are other tools out there um that pix pix pix4d or something like that there's a bunch out there that do photogrametry so i'm using this as my tool um you guys feel free to use whatever it is there's lots of photogrammetry software out there i just prefer this one and i like the way it works plus i have it with all the subscriptions so i'm going to open up recap now this is recap photo i'm sorry and i'm going to click create 3d and i'm going to click an object and this is interesting because i found you notice this arial and object when it comes to this process i found that the object seems to work better than ariel ariel does a lot of weird stuff when it comes to google map ripping and i've tried a lot of different ways if someone else has other other other thoughts feel free to comment below but i found that object seems to work the best for this particular thing um you can see i have a whole bunch of rips down here that that we've done in the past i'll show some examples probably some b-roll but i'm going to click object so i'm going to create a new 3d object and then the first thing i want you to do is once you pull down the photos so i'm going to go to create oops i'm going to sorry i'm going to click anywhere i'm going to go find my photos and i'm going to load all my photos in here and click open now remember if you're using recap photo you do have a limit even with subscription of 300 maximum photos so if you load them in it says 500 photos on the bottom you have to make sure you delete some it will not let you upload them with with more than 300 photos so just just let you know i have under 300 so i'm just going to leave these as is so now that we have all our photos selected i'm going to click create and this is something a little new for recap photo in the last year or less than a year you do have to create a project and a in a folder or put it in a folder using the autodesk desktop app with the cloud and all this stuff so it does do everything through the cloud and so you need to create a project um as well as a a cloud folder to put it in and you need the autodesk desktop app so for those of you not familiar make sure you're looking into it but you need to install the autodesk desktop app and recap photo to do this process so then i'm just going to click here and i'm going to say ikea 2 and i'm going to click start that's it so i give it a project name it's already in a folder and i'm going to click start and then it's going to upload the photos and then it's going to process i will warn you that um the uploading is actually fairly fast uh the the processing itself um can be a little bit of pain in the butt mainly because it goes up to the cloud and then it sits in the queue forever until autodesk says they want to render it but i've already have one process so we're going to take a look at it now so step one record yourself looping around a building in google maps step two export as images step three load it into recap let it do its thing step four is open the mesh so i have down on the bottom here i have create this is ikea building test and there's an option down here notice how this is local up here it says my computer down here says cloud oh another one of those things that auto just threw in there you have to throw it to the cloud first then pull it down local et cetera whatever so i'm going to click down here where it says open mesh all right so there we have it if i zoom in way over here you'll see i actually have a three-dimensional mesh of that google map which is pretty cool if you don't believe me it's in 3d i can show you some of the faceted edges check that out pretty cool all right so a couple things you need to do before you actually use this in any software um the first thing i i i like doing this in recap photo you can do this in some other programs if you if you're more comfortable in a mesh um a mesh mixing environment of 3d max or blender or whatever you can do it in there but i i personally don't mind it so i know that this building is about 100 feet wide so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to make sure i scale it this is photogrammetry so unless you give it control points it's not going to know the scale location orientation etc so i'm going to go over to my little gear there's a little um ruler on the left hand side for scaling units i'm going to change it to feet because uh you know that's where i am here and i'm going to click value instead of percentage and then there's a couple things you could do you could actually click a scale percentage or it lets you click on screen so again i went to feet i went to value and now if i can click two known points so i'm clicking here and clicking here if i zoom in you could probably see those little pins and then i could type in 100 and click set so as long as you have a known value if you don't know the value you can also just sort of scale it off of google maps itself there's a little scale on the bottom and then go with that so now this is scaled it's oriented pretty well and now you're good to go okay so now if you want to save this you can save this now here's the next part now we have a mesh we have it scaled and now we can do whatever we want with it if we need to cut a middle out we could highlight it we can edit it in here and cut it out etc but i'm going to bring it into revit first okay so i'm going to go under export and then click export model on the left hand side now you can see i actually have so under quick export let me scroll out here quick export you have you know you have a few options one two 3d make you have fbx all these things here i prefer advanced because i think you have more options here and so what we're going to do is we're actually going to bring it as an rcs so right now we're just going to bring it in as a point cloud there's other objects if you want to mess with but point cloud to me is the easiest one to bring into revit and then you can slice it you can model from you can do whatever you want and so i'm going to change this from points per meter square of 100 to points per meter square of 500 you're gonna have to play with how many points you want and sort of weigh the size of the file and the annoyance of using all those points versus not i'm just going to do 500 and see how it looks i'm going to click export so i'm going to save it here and now it's exporting a point cloud all right so before we jump into revit i just wanted to recap one more time through the process first we flew ourselves around in google maps and recorded as if we were a drone then we brought it into premiere or any video editing software exported it as an image sequence then we uploaded it to recap photo for some photogrammetry so any photogrammetry software would work which developed a 3d mesh then from that 3d mesh we export it as a dot rcs file which is a point file for like a laser scan point file all right so now let's jump into revit let's bring in the point cloud so here i am in revit this is just a blank file a blank template i'm in my 3d view i'm going to go to insert point cloud i'm going to select that rcp file and i'm going to click open now you'll notice this is a point cloud if i scroll around you can see it's a scaled point cloud it has all the mesh so one thing that i noticed in a recent update of recap photo is i could not get the points to export with their rgb values from the texture so anyone who's tried this process or maybe familiar with it maybe someone autodesk if um if you know how to change that setting please comment below or shoot me an email or hit me up at twitter and let me know so what i mean by that is as you can see this is useful right i can i can put on a section box right and i can uh let's say maybe i'm using this for existing conditions um or maybe as a background or something like that but right now more for existing conditions um if i go over here you can see there's there's my sort of elevation of it if i if i go like this i'm actually you know cutting into the building maybe i maybe i only cut a section of it and now you can see i actually have the profile of the building so there's still use uses of this but it's a little hard when it's all the same color to sort of get a sense of what it is so what i wanted to do really quickly is just show you an example of what uh what used to happen so let me uh let me get rid of this point cloud so what used to happen is uh when you exported a rcs or a point cloud then when you loaded it in it also had the rgb values so i'm going to quickly load this other example in so if i zoom out you can see this one is a point cloud that actually has the rgb so the color values on it another thing to note too is if you have issues going directly to rcs you can go to a pts file which is a point file and bring it in i tried multiple ways and i could not in the new version of recap photo i could not actually get what you're seeing here which i zoom in you can see their points but if i zoom out you can see you actually have the context of what you're seeing so kind of strange but um maybe there's been an update that i in a different setting that i didn't see but i have not been able to find that setting so feel free to look at it so i was editing this video and i couldn't post this video without trying to figure out why on earth the colored point clouds wasn't working anymore so i dug in a little bit i did some research still don't have the exact answer but for anyone who goes through this tutorial and gets frustrated like me not being able to get a colored point cloud out just wanted to show you that i figured a little bit of a solution out so if we jump into this what i've done is instead of scaling the model in in recap i just brought the model the mesh in you know downloaded it from from the cloud server and here it is here i didn't do any scaling i didn't do any editing any modifying of it and then i just went over and i exported to a rcs file and i didn't touch any settings i left at 100 points per meter square and i was able to export it and what you'll see is if i jump into revit and i import that point cloud it's coming into revit with three dimensions with the points on there so i don't know i don't know if it's a memory limitation if it's a bug of the software if it's something with modifying the actual file and actually for those who would actually want to scale it correctly because remember we didn't scale this if you select the point cloud in revit and you go to edit type you can actually change the scale factor right here so if i click 10 click ok you'll see it scales up and so you can you can scale it on the revit side which is nice the only thing that stinks a little bit is not being able to change the points the points per square meter so um couldn't stop without trying that um i had to fix it so i hope you enjoyed the tutorial and talk to you guys soon so just real quickly to recap no pun intended so we're going to start by spinning around google maps recording ourselves as a video export that video as images upload those images to recap photo or any photogrammetry software export to a point cloud and bring it into into revit or whatever point cloud program you're going to be using it on there are other export options bringing into twin motion or lumion for example as an fbx or or a dae or collada whatever you name it you actually have exports options for the mesh and maybe i'll do another video on that so if you enjoyed this please subscribe to my channel shoot me a comment below ask me if you want to do more like this and i hope you guys have an awesome day i'll talk to you soon

Channel: TheRevitKid

Views: 157,528

Keywords: revit tutorial, revit tip, autodesk revit, bim, CAD, architect, revit tutorials, google maps, building information modeling, revit 2020, revit 2021, revit 2022, Building information modeling revit, import google maps into revit tutorial, import google maps into revit, revit architecture, BIM, autodesk revit tutorials, architecture, architecture tutorials, bimafterdark, bimafterdarklive

Id: fO6MfFHrWg4

Length: 18min 0sec (1080 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 28 2021