Let's Talk Topography: Creating Site Models in Revit Tutorial

[Music] hello hey everyone jeff here um welcome to another episode of bim after dark live um first things first i'm in the process of upgrading some of the audio and visual in here so um hopefully you guys can hear me okay i'm still waiting for some components to come in but um we're gonna work with it they didn't come in in time so as far as i can tell it looks like the levels are okay uh so let me know if you can hear me okay um but yeah welcome to another episode this is believe it or not this is episode 25 of bim after dark live so i'm jeff also known as the revit kid i run a a blog called the revitkid.com and also a community membership learning platform for revit called bim after dark i'm going to talk a little bit about that throughout today's session um but uh welcome if you're a new um viewer thank you for joining um if you don't mind make sure you subscribe to my youtube channel i think and and hit the notifications so you know when i'm going live next also head over to um the therevidkid.com and you can sign up for my mailing list um this show if you're new here this is a weekly live stream that i've been doing for the last 25 weeks in a row and we talk about all things revit bim and and adjacent software related and so if you're interested in seeing the previous 25 episodes head over to live.bimafterdark.com i'll post it right in the chat as well so you guys can check them out um and yeah welcome today is going to be fun today we're going to be talking about topography and it's just one of those things where i was teaching my class at the university of hartford which i teach every semester now and we were going through some topography things and i thought about this being probably a good topic to touch on during this live session so um a quick reminder this is live um so i'm gonna do my best in between to keep an eye on the chat so feel free to ask questions jump in i will do my best to keep up if it's extremely busy sometimes it's hard to you know to to to catch up with your questions so i apologize ahead of time but i want this to be interactive and um and i want you to to feel engaged so thank you for joining if you're a returning visitor or viewer thank you very much or if you're looking at this in the future not live thank you for checking it out so um welcome hello uh jose and and and mona and alden and robert and all you guys peter what's up everyone thanks thanks for joining this is really cool so um today it's it's actually 12 30 in the afternoon here on the east coast i've been trying some different times i believe next week it'll be in the night night time again for east coast just based on the guest schedule so just let me know shoot me an email or something if you guys have a preferred time but so far it seems to help those of you across the pond over in europe when i do at 12 30 but maybe not in australia or something like that so i'm doing my best here for live live sessions either way they're always recorded and they're visible afterwards on live.bimafterdark.com and last little piece that i wanted to mention here is a lot of people ask me after these sessions um where they can get some some of the resources or some of the some of the things that i've mentioned um throughout these these sessions and so one of the one of the best places is um to see my free resources i have a whole bunch of free resources is that free.bimafterdark.com i just posted a link in the in the chat and there you'll find cheat sheets to family making dynamo there's some in some ebooks on on revit for design and there's also a free course on going from revit to twin motion 2020 so definitely check that out again that's free.bimafterdoc.com and i'm i'm linking it in the chat in the description below so without further ado i just hit the mic look at that still getting used to this whole setup here so without further ado we're going to jump into topography today topography is one of those things that i mention it and some revit users will automatically run away screaming and i get it but uh but there's also some as much as a frustration as it is there's also some really really cool things you can do with it so i'm hoping to just show you some of the some of the little tips tricks and techniques that that myself and my my team have have developed over the years of making um way too many site models in revit as far as i'm concerned um before i jump in i wanted to ask one question for everyone to to answer on the chat um just just because i'm curious what is your what is your most frustrating thing about topography and revit just one thing don't go on too many rants because you'll just flood the chat but that's okay if you do what is your most frustrating thing about topography and revit so feel free to hit hit the chat and let us know um what you're frustrated about so without further ado i'm just gonna check the chat by the way i will there's a little bit of a delay so i'm gonna do my best to check the chat and go in between that's just kind of the format that we have set up here um hello hello we got some oh freddy hello freddy how are you awesome awesome kevin from scotland sweet what's up kevin and jose how's it going jose awesome okay so i'm just gonna jump right into it i've got i've got some notes here of of just some of the things that i wanted to touch on today depending on if we go way off course um based on your comments uh we may we may go off course but i'm gonna at least touch on some of these little tips and tricks that i that i have that hopefully will help you guys go and so looks like we've got already people commenting in about some of the most frustrating things so awesome all right let's let's jump in okay topography so i would say my my number one um most important tip when it comes to revit and topography for you is if at all possible don't use it um and i know a lot of people even on twitter when i mentioned the topic there was a few people that were mentioning why would you even use it blah blah blah so if your site is flat or even relatively flat um then use floors or roofs or something like that to model it so for for example here um if i jump over to this view you know this is a this is a more urban site and if you if you look these right here all these things you're seeing here these are all floors okay if i isolate this this is a floor um the site you know obviously in in the real world it's not flat there there's there's you know a couple feet slope between it but generally speaking and depending on what you're doing right if you're a civil engineer or you're doing some extremely detailed drawings and you then you're going to need to model topography right it makes sense but you can get away even with some slope with using floors and modeling that way so my very first tip for sure is to to if you don't have to use revit topography don't use it because it is a pain in the butt but when you get to a site like for example this one here where you have a 900 foot um difference between the top of your topography map and this river here um it's kind of difficult to use floors to show that right it's just it's not feasible depending on what your end goal is it's just not it doesn't make much sense okay so so we're going to talk about situations today where you have to use topography or you need to use topography or you want to use typography so yes i understand and i know a lot of people are going to say just use floors with points and do your thing yeah and that works that works but it's not nearly as valuable or useful when you have a site like we're the one looking at here which is a gigantic site with tons and tons and tons and tons of of points and topography so first thing i want to show you guys is something that has been a tutorial on my blog for many years but every time i mention it it seems to be valuable to people so i'm going to mention it here because it is probably one of the most valuable tips that that i've ever discovered or developed for topography and that is using the auto clicker okay so really quick this site as you can see here this site the other thing i'll mention with this site the site you're looking at here is this is a gigantic site and we did not have a survey drawing so we did not have a cad plan to use and import so these were manually this was a manually drawn site what i mean by that is if i was to click i probably shouldn't even do this live because of so many points if i was to click edit surface um you will see the points this is a big site so probably wasn't a great idea to do the edit points live but uh we're on the fly here and you'll see there's a whole bunch of points in here these are all manually drawn by hand but the thing that i want to show you guys is that if i go to the site plan here okay i am not i am not going into revit i'm not going to massing in sight to topo surface clicking zero and click click click click click click click click click and getting carpal tunnel right that's how you and and probably anyone you ever known um who uses revit has created topography right um so if you only have an image which let's face it a lot of times that's what we have there are some techniques that you can use to actually create topo faster and so one of my absolute favorites is what i call the auto clicker technique i will post a link to the blog post from a few years back so you can get the download link to the actual auto clicker tool but i'm gonna open it here so you guys can see so auto clicker is just a windows tool that somebody created um a while back a long while back and i think it was actually created for runescape the video game but either way what's great about it is it just auto clicks so you set a time so 100 milliseconds 150 milliseconds whatever it is you set the time and then it just clicks every 100 milliseconds okay you don't have to click so that's the key so you'll notice starting and stopping it um you can set these differently but right now it's f6 which is great because in revit f6 doesn't do anything so i'm going to set it to 100 milliseconds i'm going to set it to or i'm going to i'm going to leave this open in the background i'm going to go to place a point you'll notice here's my here's my lines right there's 550 600 blah blah so i'm going to start with 600 right here i'm going to type 600 feet in my options toolbar and then all i have to do is press f6 and it's drawing you might not be able to see there's a little lag let me go into a clean file that doesn't have a thousand things but you can see it's drawing there so let me let me go into a clean file real quick i forgot that given that that thing has um hundreds and hundreds of points um we'll do a clean file so you can see it so if i do 10 feet all i have to do is press f6 on my keyboard i hope sorry if you guys heard those warnings so f6 on my keyboard and i'm actually not clicking right now i'm just moving my mouse as if i'm tracing okay and then i press f6 again and it stops so if i want to go to 15 feet do it again and i'm just tracing i'm not clicking anymore so anyone out there who feels like they um they need to wear a wrist brace because they've built typography in revit for the last two years hopefully this can help you okay and so there you go now i have topography built and all i'm doing is moving my mouse i'm not physically clicking which is super cool so again that's that's auto clicker and the download link is in the blog post that i just posted on there super simple it's a exe that you just keep on your machine you launch it you don't need to install it but massive massive value so for for anyone who brings in images and i know plenty of you do in order to build topography the first thing you've got to do is start start using autoclicker i'm going to quickly check the chat before i move on to anything else a couple people um a lot of people have the same frustrations um with with with sight um lots of um uh roads and retaining walls and and floors and stuff oh yeah yeah understood understood things following it right awesome cool looks like a lot of people didn't know about auto clicker which is even better so definitely check it out it's it's it's gonna be a game changer for you if you've if you've ever sat there and manually clicked to click create sites that's so cool um okay so hopefully that also showed you quickly how how how a topography is made in revit which is which is pretty neat um okay so sorry i was trying to get back to the camera there so there you go so first first tip first tip of the day is use the auto clicker keep it on your machine launch it and don't forget about it because i promise you it's going to save not only you a bunch of time but it's going to save you a whole heck of a lot of wrist pain somebody asked if it's free yes auto clickers free download like i said i posted in the chat the link and also posted in the description below um to it um where i show you how to use it but i also show you where to download it from the one thing i will mention is it's free and open source and so right now it's still accessible but um i it hopefully the link doesn't disappear and if it does i guess i'll i'll keep the exe somewhere and i'll maybe host it on my own on my own drive or something but i believe it's just a creative commons somebody developed it so so definitely check it out all right glad that was helpful so now before we move into actual site modeling stuff there's something that i needed to bring up because this is such a common question and such a common thing that i see um with students especially but i see it across across the board too and so um it has to do with with the site um this the topography fill in like a building section or elevation um and also not being able to see some of your topo surface um lines so your your primary contours or your secondary contours so let's jump over to screen and camera all right um actually before i move on real quick um paul asked how do you handle steep slopes and drop-offs well that's a perfect example where where um where something like the [Music] auto clicker can help a lot because really i mean unless you're doing retaining walls which we'll talk about in a second or something like that but really the the the best way to do steep slopes is to have extremely tight points right because the problem with steep slopes is if this is at 15 feet and then i do one at 20 feet right what's going to happen is depending on where these are and then you have maybe that's probably not that steep of a slope and then maybe you have ones at five feet in here um so what happens is you're going to get points that connect in between you know like stuff like this and it starts getting getting kind of kind of kind of crummy right and so what you need is you need extremely tight points when you're doing steep slopes so you need your points to be you know as absolutely tight as humanly possible so that they don't go through it so that's a perfect example of where something like the auto clicker comes into play because um when when you have the auto clicker running oops i apologize i just opened outlook instead of auto clicker when you have the auto clicker running everything's opening on the other monitor go figure what you can do is you can move slower so if i press f6 you'll see you almost can't even see the points that's how many points it's placing and then i can stop f6 and then i can do you know a 20-foot shear wall here i can zoom in even tighter if i press f6 remember it's clicking every it's clicking every i'm sorry about that i need to close out look it's clicking every um 100 milliseconds so as you can see i've got points that are extremely extremely tight together so that allows me to create this wall here which as you can see is almost vertical at this point so that's the wall that was just created okay so that's anything that's that's tight tight like that or anything that's extremely steep like that that's what you want to do you wanna sorry i just need to close outlook so you guys don't hear that all day long again um so because you you just want the points to be extremely extremely tight when it comes to steep slopes okay awesome all right let's do this oh somebody said ah my cpu yes i mean in general with revit if you're using extremely large sites and you start you start building tons and tons of points it is going to slow some things down as you saw before when i was trying to edit that of the total it would work but i just doing this live i don't i don't have the time to wait for rabbit's freaking loading bar to go okay so what i what i want to talk about now i want to talk about the um visibility of sight and an issue that i see all the time so i'm looking at this floor plan here and this is the same topography um but why is the one on the right hand side why does that have secondary contours but the left hand side only has primary contours okay the reason being is the one on the left hand side is actually starting if i do a quick spot elevation you can see this one goes from zero feet to negative 24 feet this one goes from 25 feet to zero feet okay so what does that mean that means if i look at these sections here's my slope of the first one and here's my slope of the second one okay when it comes to topography and visibility if you're running into these issues i see it all the time i see this especially where you have the disappearing um disappearing filled region so like you're building if you had a building here and and your and your foundation went below 10 feet or whatever this is below topography i mean i'll even show it here let's just draw it real quick so if i drew a wall in here and the bottom of that wall was negative 20 feet for whatever reason and i click it in here right if this is our building look my building is going beyond my topography kind of strange right i see this all the time okay and the other aspect of it is if you go under site i also see this where it's like why am i not getting secondary contours why am i not getting secondary contours so i'm going to show you a really really secret dialog box that not many people know about under masking and site where it says model site and your topography or topo surface and site components are there's a little teeny down arrow on the bottom right of that dialogue so that's under mass massing in sight tab and the bottom right there's a little teeny arrow if you click that there's all these special settings yes settings that not many people even know existed it took me a long time to even realize these existed i honestly don't remember when i discovered it but what you'll notice is that your contour lines there's settings for these you can actually you can actually have third and fourth and fifth contour lines so you can manage these all all differently you can see your increments are one feet but what you'll notice is that the start and stop your start of your contours is actually at zero feet your stop is at one thousand feet it's like well and i'm not saying that and i'm not i'm not even um promoting the idea of of of you know starting your buildings at zero and going down from there but let's be honest we do that a lot right we started buildings at zero which means our basement floor might be negative nine which means our footings might be negative 12 or maybe we have two levels underground three levels right it happens it's just depending on how the project's set up so we're not going to get into that argument today but what i want to say is that your contour lines actually start at zero so if you have any site that's below zero you're not going to see your contour lines so if you change this to negative 1000 for example for your start of your contours and your stop at a thousand if you click apply you'll notice now this this topography on the left-hand side which is negative 25 i can see my secondary contours which is awesome so now let's talk about that that earth hatch all right remember that earth has just disappears at some point um here i'll go back to it so you can see so if i go into here my earth hatch just sort of disappears even though my topo goes down there right well if i go back into the settings look at this there's a global override for your cut material of topography and so that's the material it's called earth but notice this the elevation of the poche base so for whatever reason the poche of your site stops at negative 10 feet so whether you're doing solid white solid black or earth hatch it's always gonna stop at ten feet below zero so if i change this to negative one thousand as well look at that now my site goes on forever but if i'm making a visual i can crop this up and it at least looks correct i don't deal with that disappearing hatch anymore okay same thing over here so the tip number two for today is to explore this modeling and site settings area if you haven't check it out if you have good for you but i can tell you right now the amount of projects that i've seen whether it's students or even professionals where either either they override their topography that's a key one right how many projects have you seen where people are putting detail or um filled regions as topography because they can't figure out how to get that stuff to go down or above or etc um well that's that's one way hey marcelo's here what's up marcelo check out uh if you guys want to see uh a couple episodes with marcelo check out live.bimafterdark.com marcelo did a really cool uh uh q a with myself and paul aubin way back in the beginning of this series and then he came on and did it did a really neat episode uh talking about um rhino inside revit so definitely check that out you can see all the previous episodes again at live.bim after dark um before i jump on so that was the site settings dialog so let me um i'm gonna read a couple comments make sure that we we don't move on without any any questions um so that was the site settings so don't forget the site settings under massing in site and then there's that little teeny arrow thing down there one question i just saw was can is there any way we can get these sample files so all of the sample files to all of my tutorials literally every tutorial and if there's one you can't find you ask me are available to members of the bim after dark community so um this sample file the ones that you're going to see in a little bit which is it has all these really cool railing types and and site families are going to be available immediately after this tutorial for members and so if you're interested in becoming a member and access to all of my sample files literally all of them for any tutorial you've ever seen on the blog including all the courses and stuff like that just head over to community.bimafterdark.com i just posted a link down there so if you're interested in any of that at all check that out i do have some sample files for free on the site but for the most part i like to to put them to members mainly for a couple different reasons but uh mainly so that there's a place i can host and access them all right matthew just asked can't you create 2d contours and then assign elevations to them sure but drawing 2d to contour so i think what you're saying is whether it's in revit or in cad sitting there and drawing a spline that follows your contour line and then setting the elevation and then importing them and creating a mass if you think that's any more efficient than just using the point tool and auto clicker and tracing it then fine but honestly it's the same thing to me right i mean you're still tracing the contours with 2d lines clicking them setting the elevation and then doing it a thousand times um sure but yes you can you can you can use cad or another program to create polylines um that are our actual elevation and then you can import them and create a topo surface from import i will warn you that when you do that your best the most efficient way to manage that is actually keeping that contour file as a link and being able to modify the contour file which can be a pain in the butt so um so yes you can personally i don't see much more of a benefit to it in this situation the best bet would be you have a civil engineer or a surveyor on the job who created a three-dimensional cad plan and then you can import them and start from there but i'm trying to give you some ideas for when you don't because let's be honest that doesn't happen in every single job okay um i just want to check some of the chat you guys before i move on here a couple questions about curves and stuff i'm going to talk about that kind of that in a second here all right okay sweet so site designers uh sorry the site setting dialogues is what i want to show you so now this is this is sort of one of the things this has been a game changer for us so one of the things that you'll notice if i share screen and overlay is and as i mentioned in in my in my email to you guys to sort of set it up in the description to this video we i build a lot of sites um you know on the architecture side of things they're built usually for visuals but a lot of times even on the contractor side of things so the work i do with turner construction we are building a ton of site because the part of what we do is is visualize the construction um and obviously cite in context when it comes to logistics of site planning and methods and means and and moving through a job have a lot to do with the site so we do find ourselves building sites a lot and so you know some of the things that we're doing a lot are things like construction fencing which you're seeing here um utilities um whether it's for visuals or actual coordination or just general phasing and so i mean here's an example here where um you basically wouldn't be able to use floors for this site right i mean look at this thing it just it it's not i wouldn't i wouldn't go there and then you know as i showed you before in that [Music] more urban site you know this one here which what you'll see is that there's also um you know the existing site but then there's a site with excavation and so here's an example where where floors can come into play so this is me using floors and we're just using edit points um so modifying the sub elements so for those of you who don't know that i wasn't actually going to talk about this but i know people mentioned it so i might as well for those of you that don't know what modifying the sub elements of a floor are you'll notice this floor is actually sloping if i zoom in a little it's sloping into the site so that's kind of our ramp to get into our site so i'll go over the clean file and just show you just real quickly because i know some people may not be familiar with this process so if i had if i had a floor so i'll just model a floor here it's a generic 12 inch floor we'll just say that this is our site okay so i'm going to go in 3d so everyone can see it okay so there's our topo there this is our site so what people are talking about when they say using floors is if you when you're in a floor if you click modify sub elements you can actually modify and tweak parts and pieces and layers of the floor but not only that you can actually add points so if i was to take this point here though and say go up 10 feet press enter you'll notice that it's actually warping and moving the floor to get up to that 10 feet area right for some reason the edge isn't showing which is kind of weird but i can also add points so i can add a point somewhere along this line and now you can see oops edit modify sub elements now i can take this point and i can actually move this up and actually i can start flexing this floor okay so that's what people are talking about when they say using floors um personally like i said i try to avoid that as much as possible unless need be but it is it is a router it is a way into it so like for example on the on that on that sample that i was showing you here with the site um i have so many tabs open now with the site here um this is a good example because we're considering the entire site being flat but then we need to show our excavation we need to show a a ramp going into it so what a perfect example of just modifying the floor and moving those those sub elements so that it shows a ramp going in okay but really the biggest the absolute biggest thing um game changing um device for us as far as modeling site was back in 2018-17 i remember what year it was but when when revit and the folks at autodesk decided to let us host railings to floors okay so what you'll notice as i move around this particular site we've got this this post and rail um wall or fence we've got a retaining wall here we've got a retaining wall here and a retailing wall here we've got site fences and notice they all follow topography so what does that tell you that tells you that we are using fences for everything or railings for everything okay railings being hosted to topography when you start to think outside the box of what railings can and can't do is a game changer right railings are what they're a sweep along a path um where you can have a repetitive element in them and then they can also follow a surface i mean that's everything you dreamed of when it comes to topography so here right here this is actually our our construction fence and railing file that we use at turner and i use for most of my most of my site modeling stuff this is just a glimpse into some of the families that we've created to do what we need with topography again community members do get this uh and i'll post it immediately following this stream so check check out community.bimafterdark.com if you're interested but look at this we've got a guard rail we've got striping look at what this striping is following and the sketch for this all right if i go into it it's just a line it's one single line all right look at this here retaining walls why not right we could use retaining walls guess what else earth retention okay why is this cool because of course this i did it on flat area but let's just say we're you're digging into a site with a slope so let us um let me let me dig into this site let me go into massing in site building pad i'm gonna i'm gonna say i'm digging into the site right here okay of course i did not dig into anywhere where it was sloped let me try that again that is slope now so now we finally got a little bit of slope here if i take this pad and i say i don't know this is a this is an eight-foot hole okay and then ba-boom if i model this guy i'm just doing create similar to finish and then if i pick new host and i select it check this out oops let me offset it offset six inches don't copy it click finish there we go i just took it out of the host so let me try that again try that again okay so i got to flip it but you see the retaining wall check that out or the the earth retention is actually following it and again these are all just railing families so when it comes to striping when it comes to um dash line look at this is this is dash striping so imagine how fast if you instead of drawing sub regions for everything not to mention by the way anyone who's actually used sub-regions to the extent of trying to stripe a parking lot for example you will know that revit does some really weird things when you have too many sub-regions and sketches in topography like to the point where sometimes you're missing topography and you don't understand why so how do i create striping in a parking lot easy you can just take i mean for this i can actually just copy and paste this guy so if i copy and paste this down here you'll notice it's actually now hosted down here which is perfect right and these these are railings so these are just single sketches or multiple sketches depending on how you want to look at them right but then i can also if i want to do street striping i can pull this around here click finish now i have striping or if i want it to be dashed i have a dashed as well there's your dash striping okay sorry i'm just checking the chat as we go along here so pretty cool right so what i'm going to do is i want to show show you how some of these railings are built um just so you get a sense of it but the reality is when you start thinking about that think about all the things that you can do with this right the one thing i will mention when you're using railings is that um as you can see i have this arc here for some reason when you're using arcs and curves and you're hosted with the railing to typography it can run into some issues depending on how this how the railing is built and so um a lot of times what we end up doing is actually segmenting our arcs just for the sake of revit being able to file the topo this one actually is doing a pretty good job but you will run into issues um so most of the time we're segmenting arcs just for the sake of that otherwise for the most part it works pretty good so let me just let me just read some chat before i move on to those it looks like people are using roofs all the time which is pretty pretty awesome um yes railing is parking striping yes any of these things right any of these things can be i mean a wall is a perfect example right if i go back to that example here notice i have a couple versions of it if you these are just fieldstone walls that are out in the middle of nowhere right but you need them to file the topo and so that's what this is this is just a wall and i can make it more clean but for the sake of what we're doing and it's actually following the topography and all it is is a single line it's just me drawing one single line as opposed to doing all the crazy hacks that you guys may have seen in the past marcelo's on here so i i i'll never forget the hack that you had with exporting uh the dwg corner of like a of a pad and then importing it back in so you can pick the lines right no longer have to do that not not even not even an issue paul says sub regions only end in tears yes they do so picking apart how i built that other site before i jump into the railings then you'll notice um there are sub regions in here and this one i didn't end up stripe in the parking lot just for the sake of timing but uh there are sub bridges in here but if i was to do some some parking striping and stuff i would use railings i would not use i would not use subregions whereas i think this one here this guy are these railings these might be railings too yeah so these are all railings here these are not sub-regions so you'll notice the street is sub-regions but all of the all of the the paint is actually railings because again you just have more freedom trying to do this in sub-regions as everyone out there clearly uh can attest to because i just from reading the comments i could tell um that that's that's not a fun way to do things okay so let's see but walls are profiles not walls per per se right correct jose so i'm gonna ju i'm gonna show you sort of how these things are built um in a second uh but let me just make sure um ali um one question before i move on ally just asked um i know you i know you you must get asked this a lot but how how come or how do you make revit look that cool i'm assuming you're talking about the visual style of it um so for that i have an entire course on making revit look sexier um that's within that community as well so again that's community community.bimafterdark.com but also if you just dig through the blog and you search for um sexy revit or revit presentation i do have some of my settings somewhere out there um as posts and i'll post them in the descriptions here but most of it is just graphic settings man there's just specific graphics settings okay so uh back to um what jose was saying about um the wall so let me just show you a couple of you guys how how these are built so this this is a perfect example and obviously it's not going to be perfect because you are these are sweeps and everyone who's used railings knows that railings are not perfect um but for the sake of most of what you'd be doing it's beyond close enough um so if i go into the stone wall i go into rail structure you'll see these are just simply profiles man stone wall path parking stripe right they're just rectangular profiles so if i open one of those profiles rectangular hand rail i'm just using the default rectangular handrail there's a stonewall path right here two foot six by two foot if i wanted to change the height of it so that it digs into the dirt the earth more i can say four feet you can see now it's digging into the earth more right for some reason there's a there's a post in this one i don't know what happened there let me go to baluster you should have baluster set to none i'm not really sure why that's not set to none so if you say baluster is all set to none and you have a path just like that a two foot six then all you're doing is creating a sweep that's hosted to a surface that's it guess what the striping is the same thing if i isolate the striping it's just a sweep that's hosted to the surface the one thing you will have to mess with is where the offset is and how much you want this to be sticking above your above your um your site but otherwise that's it it's just a sweep that's hosted to a surface um and you get rid of you get rid of your um your balusters um you know same thing you know these are actual railings basically so if you know how to make a railing you know these are these are all just railing types and then striping and striping is a unique one so in order to get striping guess what we don't have any profiles right because we need it to be dashed but think about it we have the ability to place an element in a pattern along a path using a railing right so if we use balusters we have a baluster family called striping dashed one inch all right so if i open that baluster family my uh microphone's in the way here hold on a second if i go into railings balusters and i probably just i probably even make a new one actually let's see baluster square nope here striping dashed so here's my baluster family if i go under edit this is what it looks like it's pretty simple it's just a long okay i didn't even didn't even put parameters on it for that must have been going quick so it's just a a long rectangle right but then i'm telling it okay revit every every so uh every x number of feet i don't even know what projects i have open anymore guys i'm sorry i'm flipping through projects like this but tis the nature of tabs and revit without knowing what the heck project they belong to and i know uh john john and parallax you guys sent me this stuff i just never installed it sorry let me close all these where on earth did my railing family go there it is how many of you guys have ever done that just click through all your damn tabs until you get to the project you want okay so then this is just a baluster that if i go under edit baluster you know you can see it's you know top top offset is one inch and then it's it's um every however many feet i have it set to um from the host and then it's good to go that's it um so surash suresh mentioned so railing is cool but when you export to fbx the file size becomes heavy um that's true of anything in revit when you're exporting fbx you have to export and pay attention to what you're looking at and i'll tell you from experience all those files i just showed you are all fbx files that were done in twin motion and they're all manageable so one thing i will mention is if you're using the default revit fbx exporter it's not the best at optimizing if you're using the twin motion exporter which even if you're not a twin motion user you can use just install it the export for revit optimized they have a mesh setting for optimize and i think i mentioned this in one of the last sessions where i talked about twin motion it's really really good okay so so it's extremely good at compressing files um not necessarily ruining the graphics it might but um curves are the worst um obviously and then um steel beams for example that have curves and chamfers you just set it to medium so yes i understand what you're saying you're going to add a little bit a little bit of of of heaviness to the model but totally worth it josh just mentioned site designer tools don't even bother wasting your time learning those all right um let me show you how many questions here do you use phasing and graded regions paul great questions actually um i i would say so depending on what you're doing for your site and topography um let me uh depending on what you're doing for your site and topography you you may have to right and so i do have a tutorial which i'll pull up um in the description after after we go live for how to use graded regions and calculate fills and cuts and stuff like that and so if you need to and you need to manage that within your file and use that information then by all means use phasing phasing and site just especially if you start using pads and hosting it it can be an absolute pain in the butt um so for the most part with with what we're doing um with phased logistics like i was just showing you we're actually just using design options for most of those so the sites may exist in the same phase but they're existing in their own design options and that's mainly because when you think about a construction sequence it's it would be more like a million phases between existing and new construction so then the design options kind of fill it in um making a site demo making phasing and demo and then also bringing in an architecture model and masking mapping phases like that is just a pain in the butt so for the most part we're actually using um design options so um hopefully that's helpful what time is 115. oh just hit subscribe there we go so one last thing i wanted to show you guys with this whole railing thing because again as you can tell i'm super hyped about how how dramatically railings can help you um build site models um i'm gonna go back to this model here and just show you because it's a cool example of combining everything um so this this model has a little bit everything has a topo surface it has um sub regions it has just little masses in here that represent the buildings eventually they became more detailed more subregions it has railings here and railings here for the for the site fence construction fans all this good stuff right so if i go into this view and i think i post this question in the email um utilities so underground utilities are something that um we have to model a lot for very they're very different reasons okay um when it comes to just visually looking at them or visually having them there and not specific um specific utilities um a really really quick way and i laid these utilities out in probably under an hour probably less than an hour probably like 30 minutes i don't even know and what's really cool about these utilities is they were great for the the visual but what you'll notice is if i click them guess what they are they're railings that's right so let me let me hide the topography and show you exactly what's happening here so while we were putting together this proposal you know they wanted to show they wanted to show all these utilities across this entire you know massive acre site and i'm sitting there like do i really want to sit there and do pipes and ductwork and duck banks and inverts and do all this just to make this thing follow topography for the sake of proposal and showing that we're going to you know we're going to actually know where all this crap is right so then i was like well what follows topography and does it easily and and we can also add elements to well railings right so these railings are super simple if i go into it there is a circular hand wheel profile i made it's 10 inches and then i have a material called storm water right then if i go into the baluster guess what i made a baluster called manhole and instead of having it in between i just had it at any any um um start post corner post and post because guess what that's probably gonna have a manhole anyways so look what these look like if i just sit there and i draw from here to here to here to here to here to here to here and i click finish check that out it makes utility super super fast right but even better if i turn on topography i can take this and i can say i want to host a topography and there it is there right so now this thing is following the topography see how it's doing all this cool stuff here and then i can just offset it so let's just say you know this is down base offset um negative two feet three feet i remember how big this thing was but i can say negative so now you have something that's three feet below the surface following the exact profile of topography so yeah this isn't great for um if you're if you're actually modeling you know civil utilities for the sake of coordination for example but um let's say you're modeling a an electrical not a duck bank but something that that you know something that just requires a cover for example so maybe you have an electrical wire or duct that that that or conduit that the only rule is it needs to be 36 inches below the surface guess what you can use a railing draw the path and then just move it down 36 inches and you've got it so you can actually use this for legit civil drawings obviously here i wouldn't necessarily say that these are perfect because you know there's no inverts there's crazy things in between but but again just a different way to think outside the box and make revit site work for you okay so pretty cool right railings go figure all right i think i saw a couple a couple of questions so let me go check this out um um uh alden was asking about geo reference and some of those so so today i didn't want to jump into to um coordinates and systems and geo-referencing and all that other stuff okay you know this is where this is just all about how you're going to physically model and mask the sites okay when it comes to that kind of stuff definitely check out the previous episode where i had uh nikon from revit pure and we talked about coordinate and shared coordinate systems um ideally you're working with your civil engineer or your surveyor to figure out how their files coming in but if you're bringing in an image and that's your file i mean geo-referencing and figuring that out good luck right i mean i guess you could but so i'm not even you know i'm not even going to touch on that really um just want to check to make sure all right any other questions guys this is this is awesome you guys are some really cool questions here um have you considered so matt was just asking about a compute a little off topic but he's asking about a computer um computer setup so i'm actually what you're seeing here is um he asked about a 16-inch versus 17-inch laptop and larger screen area so actually the screen that you guys are seeing is not my 16 inch laptop screen the screen you're seeing is a vue sonic 27 inch 2k monitor um and so the reason i want 2k is first of all that's an amazing resolution way better than 4k 4k just gets too small um so you do get you get you definitely get more more screen area 4k obviously i would get even more screen area but um you guys would never even be able to see it streaming so that's why you may see that texas being a little bit smaller so alfredo sorry i'm uh i'm late it's okay alfredo you can check the replay afterwards jose said i should make a a railings t-shirt not a bad idea railings and curtain walls are just those two tools that are like man the amount of things that you can do thinking outside the box with those tools is absolutely incredible and by the way i mentioned somebody had a chat um a question in the chat about but it's a railing still it's not a wall well if you check out my last session um from two weeks ago with aaron mahler um which had to do with um filters and and even his previous one where we talked about templates again you can see all previous episodes going to live.bimafterdark.com but he mentioned um you know using generic models as a starting point and also stuff and the reality is he's using parameters to to to drive categories essentially so because revit basically puts you in these boxes of categories um you feel like you have to use them you have to use a roof for a roof you have to use a wall for a wall but the reality is you don't all it is is one major category that's that's looping these things into it all you have to do is put a piece of data i can go in here let's say i'm doing a takeoff right maybe i'm doing a take off of the site based on this i can just go in here and i can even go in comments and say walls or wall right now whether i'm making a schedule whether i'm using a symbol whether i'm using costex doesn't matter what i'm doing i can just filter by comments equals wall and now i know that i've got all my walls in here i've got my site walls in there so there's there's you know you don't have to be stricken or restricted by revit's almighty category set up right so so take yourself out of the box and don't don't be afraid all right before before i wrap up i'm just checking um some of these chats here um somebody asked about building pads i'm not really sure what the question is about building pads but yes i use building pads that's that's what i'm using here to cut holes in the ground um you know they're useful for certain different things um you know the only thing with building pads is i believe the only thing you can do is slope them so you can put slope error you can't actually modify the sub elements so if you need to do something funky within a building pad you can't um and then allah asked about sub hardscape pavings subregions yes so for the most part yes subregions are the way to go in theory though in theory um if you guys really wanted to try i don't see why you can't create curbs and sidewalks and even street profiles using railings and it'd probably work better than the site designer tool so i haven't done that yet but the reality is when you think about it if you were to create a profile that was a long skinny profile or maybe even had a crown in it and you and you had to follow you can probably utilize it you might get some weird joints but um it's not a bad idea not a bad idea actually um and then alfredo asked the alfredo check out the beginning um i did cover some of the concrete the walls and stuff like that that you saw there um steven asked interior designer with linked models using railings for wall mouldings there you go see look at that it's kind of a cool idea um the other thing i will mention too is um you cannot host um i know i just talked without showing you the screen sorry about that um you can't you can't host multiple railings at a time so if you have um let's see here if you have a whole bunch of of these railings here so let's say let's say this striping and these three pieces were all drawn come on so let's say you had all these drawn and they weren't hosted so if i say pick new host oh they're not going to unhost are they i'll just draw a new sketch so if i draw a new sketch of this guy here which is this fence and let's say let's just say i i mean i'm running through and i'm making a bunch of them or i'm copying and pasting like parking striping one downfall is you can't you can't select all three of these and click pick new host you have to select them one at a time but of course you can use dynamo and so um i do have a dynamo script and again i'll post this as a sample file to community members after this although i didn't open it beforehand so uh we'll see how this goes while it's opening i'm just gonna read real quick and each any chat on there i probably uh wasn't planning on showing this but i thought about it so let's just see opening a dynamo script you haven't used in like four months during a live session is probably not the greatest idea but let's see uh and then doing it from your vpn is probably not a good idea so let's do railing the striping has a horizontal baluster the striping has no balusters um so let me just check that out let me just i'm just trying to find the script for you guys um change railing host here it is it'd be a miracle if i didn't need to update or something like that oh that's it all right so uh so really simple you just select the railings so if i go under here i'm going to pull this off screen just you guys can see so i just select select my railing families here i select my topography here and then unfortunately i couldn't find any any anything other than a a quick python script which is super simple but um found it online and you just click run and ta-da all three of these are now hosted okay super simple super cool okay the one last thing that um i'll answer before we wrap up is um the railing so the striping uh the horizontal striping does not have any balusters so if you go in here you'll notice balusters is no no no no none all it is is a rail profile okay there's no reason to have a baluster all right hopefully that's helpful cool oh man i wasn't sure if i was going to get it all in so so that's pretty sweet we got it all in an hour um kind of let me let me know guys let me know what you guys think of this time um i think next week it's going to be at night just because i have a guest on um it's kind of unique doing it at this time in between lunch hour and i guess the biggest difference is i just have water instead of a cocktail so i don't know i don't know what's better or worse i know some of you guys over over in europe maybe have cocktails but all right so uh thanks again i'm jeff uh thank you for joining me i hope you guys enjoyed this topography uh discussion i really enjoyed the chat and the feedback um make sure you check out free dot bim after dark for all my free resources check out live dot after dark for all the previous episodes and then check out community.bim after dark to get the sample files for this and become a member of a sweet community we have over 100 members there's four full full length courses there's a whole bunch of office hours and private office hours um that we have together and a discussion board and sample files so definitely check it out um you guys are awesome thank you so much for joining me i'll see you next week have a great weekend and with that i want to bid you all to do so cheers and uh see you later you

Channel: TheRevitKid

Views: 81,280

Keywords: revit, revit design, architecture, architecture design, autodesk revit, revit tutorial, lumion, lumion 3D, lumion architecture, revit tip, revit tutorials, revit architecture, BIM, building information modeling, autodesk revit tutorials, architecture tutorials, revit 2022, revit 2021, revit 2020, revit site modeling, Let's Talk Topography: Creating Site Models in Revit Tutorial, creating site models in revit tutorial, site models in revit, site models in revit tutorial

Id: Kw3MBFRInAQ

Length: 58min 36sec (3516 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020