Part 1: Importing topographic GIS data into Revit using QGIS

all right I'm going to show an example of how to export data into QGIS or geospatial data for elevations topography contours and also property lines and the idea is to take that data from qjq GIS and build a package that you can import into Revit so we're gonna look at this property here as an example it's it's got this property line like this as a stream in the back and a in a road actually there's a US dia usgs actually has a link to get elevation data and if you click on this national map download client it'll take you to a page where you can enter in your address and get get various kinds of data for it so we'll take a look at this address here so on the left here is elevation products you would click and then you go back over here and click on find products and you'll see there's this elevation data and this is what it looks like it's just a grayscale image with each one of these pixels to noting this is a thumbnail it's not the actual full image it's much larger than that you can see it's been three and fifty seven megabytes for the entire package I've already downloaded it so we'll go into QGIS and see how that how that looks so [Music] I'll go ahead and add Open Street Map just as a reference so we can see so we can see the overall a so I've already downloaded it so you'll go to a layer add layer and raster layer and it's a fairly large image file after you extract everything and so here it is let me zoom into the area so you can see their first up I'll actually crop it because we're going to generate contours and then from those contours elevation points so I'm going to zoom in a little bit here just not get everything so I'll go there's two ways you can do this you can either go through raster extraction clip rest or by extent or mask layer but here I'll just it's easy enough to just right click export save as raw data file elevation stopped if there's a bunch of different formats you can save it as but TIFF is fine I'm gonna do map canvas extent and the rest of the options look good I could actually change the CRS of this but I don't think I need to right now so here's an example so now I've got got that overlaid so the next step I can do raster to get the contour lines extraction contour and interval this is a meter so let's do it point about point three meters is a foot elevations this is all fine so we can take a look here I think this is one of the reasons why it's probably better to do it the other way you see here there's there's some artifacting from that that save as so I'm gonna I want to redo that actually and exploit it a different way let me turn this back on get an area that I want to crop out let's do raster extraction let's try this way clip raster by extent use canvas extent let's see if this one works okay so this is better I don't see that same sort of art affecting that was happening before well if I am it's not as pronounced okay same deal raster contour okay 308 clipped let's do that this all looks fun although I feel like there's still some artifacting going on another way I could have done this was by using a using a clip mask and we'll do that later on so in order to get the actual X Y you see elevations out of this because that's what Revit expects in order to generate a topographic surface from it I'll need to go through one more step which is vector a now since we have a contours vector layer will do a extract vertices run that and so now we have a bunch of points and so next up actually from vertices we could we could do an export save feature as let's just take a look at how this looks and instead of that I want to save this as an XY a CSV file and I want to turn off all the options here the reason is is rather it's expecting a CSV file with XYZ as the headers and all of this other information will kind of screw that up and I'll rename this to elevation points that's CSV and we can take a look at that in a second okay everything else I think what's fine and we'll run it actually geometry this is important also the format that it's going to output is as XY the third parameter the Z part is this elevation and we'll take a look at the file all right let's take a look real quick so you see here XY is the elevation this is actually gonna be a problem for Revit the units that this is in or the the projection so let's actually update that real quick and all we need to do in order I want you to do for that is to just save it in a different saving it in a different projection and I think the one that I've been using is let's try this one actually and we'll see the difference immediately once we export this excellency I'll just try that okay so this is kind of what I was getting at is that the that all of this is in meters and in the decimal degrees lat/long format but a kind of broken record on the on the import and this is actually too much data I think for Revit we don't need all of it but we'll just see how it looks as an example ok so let me close this project real quick we'll do a new architectural template and I'll go right into massing insight toposurface we're getting a warning that topographic elements are not visible this is this is actually because I need to I think in the site change the is its site or level view range make this top unlimited let's try that one more time okay there we go all right so we're gonna create from import and then I'm going to specify points file elevation points and the units are in meters let's see how this looks and give it a second and this is usually why I turn it down a little bit more because it it's a lot of points especially at 1 foot contour is contour lines and probably only need you know just just a smaller area that's that's around it to get a good look of of everything well it looks like rabbits not responding well no let's say it came back large distance I think this is this is a warning certainly that it has to do with the projection so these are all the points that we have certainly way too much oh did I accidentally undo that I did let's try that one more time before I do that let me let me trim that down a little bit because I think I think it was way too much I'm gonna actually turn on a imagery viewer so that I can better a better pickup boundary let me move something that like this looks about looks a little better okay so let's try that so if I turn on vertices let me move this above there so we can see it okay so let's try let's remove this one because it's old I'll do a vertices export save feature as this actually extent I'm going to change to extent map canvas extent the geometry needed to be XY the projection needed to be I think that was what we picked last time double check I think that's everything let's try that let's just inspect the file real quick okay yeah that looks I think the projection is different these numbers or maybe it's just because we clipped it a little bit differently that if those numbers are drastically different right let's go back into let's go back into Revit I'll try this one more time create from import specified points file elevation points they are in meters this should go faster because there's less data that I'm importing there we go it still says that I'm way outside of the boundary where the points are really far from each other all right so I will from here go edit I can just say okay everything looks fine to me and if we go into 3d so you have this looks I'll actually turn on let's turn on some realistic colors change the daytime Sun settings this is fun actually I think with for the Sun settings to work we we need to actually change the location let's try that No so here we go and one other thing actually I can change this to change this material let's actually create some grass in all use earth I'm gonna duplicate this one duplicate let's call it grass and then add glass let's just say some bluegrass okay hit apply okay well it doesn't look like it changed it let's try this one more time yeah it's me let's try this one more time maybe because it needs to be a 3d object what is it right now material all right let's try let's try a different let me delete that grass actually and all you say I think one of the it has to be a 3d model let's just try a luminol or analytical floor surface let's just duplicate this one duplicate yes let's load up grass here and I think that worked no still nothing well anyway I actually did this for a another project and it worked out pretty well I must be missing something small here I see that the locations of the floors are way off but that's how you pretty much do that it's just a simple quick and easy technique to get elevation data into Revit it doesn't get rid of the necessity to get a surveyor but at least you have a an okay idea for a starting point so anyway that's it thanks a lot

Channel: Andrew Fernandes

Views: 10,875

Rating: 4.9379845 out of 5

Keywords: qgis, revit, usgs

Id: ETngbGFwup8

Length: 19min 0sec (1140 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 17 2019