Point Cloud in Revit Tutorial

in this video we're going to be talking about Point clouds in a rabbit now first I'm going to be showing you how to bring in a point Cloud into Revit then we're going to cover all of the settings and options that we have for Point clouds and finally we're going to be modeling and using that point Cloud as reference for modeling gravity geometry over it now if you don't know Point clouds are essentially as the name would imply clouds of points so what you do is you take either a laser scanner or you use the photogrammetry process where you take lots of images and use them to kind of figure out a position of different points in space now for each of these points we have its position in terms of X Y and Z we also have its color in terms of RGB and finally we might also have a luminance value now when you have a lot of these points in a cloud it forms usually building shape for us Architects so this can be used either to get an existing building or as built model and it's a really quick way of getting all of the measurements and then you can use that as reference to draw over it it's a really exciting technology and I think it's going to be fun exploring it let's go foreign Now quickly before we jump into rabbit I would just like to ask you to check out my website balkanarctic.com I'm going to link it up in the cards above and then also down in the description of this video if you're serious about learning Revit that's definitely the best place to be with over 140 hours of content dedicated to Revit and also there you can find some of my ready to go Revit templates some high quality Revit families and a couple of plugins okay so now without any further Ado let's jump straight into Revit and here we are in Revit and I just have a blank project started and now it's time to bring in our Point Cloud so your point clouds are brought in here on the insert tab on the link panel we have Point Cloud so basically we're always linking up our Point cloud and if I hover over the button you can see that the supporting file extensions for Point clouds are DOT RCP and Dot RCS so you need to find a point clouds with that file extension and then when we click here on point cloud and find that cloud here we have that point Cloud this is an RCP extension now here you can toggle between those two and I found the file so I'm going to load it in for positioning I'm just going to leave this Center to Center and then click ok to open it up and now we have that point Cloud so let's switch to the default 3D view just to see what we have and this is what we have now I keep in mind it might be lagging just a little bit at first and then it's going to be fine so just something that they've noticed with Revit when I open it up for the first time it was a little bit slow kind of laggy and now it's working really smooth just uh just a few seconds that's it that's it so anyways uh now I'm going to position this correctly and then let's go through some of the settings so first when you load in a point Cloud if necessary you might have to set its rotation elevation and so on so let's open up level one here we can see it's rotated almost 45 degrees so let's fix this by selecting it then going to rotate I'm going to place the center of rotation and then also uncheck copy so let's Place Center of rotation now let's go with somewhere over here then I'm just going to extend this like so perhaps like that and then just bring it to 90 degrees just like this there we go then you also want to open up one of the elevations just so you can see where your point cloud is and here be careful you don't want to actually move your levels down in this case you can see the point cloud is way down here and My Level 1 which is at zero is here you actually want to move that point Cloud up because you want your level zero to stay here and you want your point Cloud you can imagine that so I can just go here to move I can find whatever I Define as my level zero so here for example I can say okay it's going to be this and then I can simply move it up to level one and now we have our Point Cloud properly positioned so now it's now it's there so anyways now let's take a look at some of these settings which we have for our Point Cloud so when I select it what you'll notice is that here in the properties panel we don't have that many parameters we have the name and then we also have the phasing parameters so you can adjust phasing for your point clouds but not much more than that in terms of these instance parameters now if I open up edit type here you'll see the scale and it's set to this so for scales Point clouds are basically created at a one-to-one scale Revit is at one to one scale so in 99.9 percent of the cases you will not need to change this number if it's in meters it's going to show you this number if the scale is in in feet then it's going to show one and that's it so usually you don't want to change this number if for whatever reason you need to change the scale be careful about it make sure you have correct calculation for the scale value okay now let's exit out of that so what else do we have for kind of adjusting our Point cloud and how it's represented while in the visibility Graphics overrides here if I click on edit you'll notice we have a point clouds Tab and here we have some adjustments mainly for the color mode so if I open this up we have the RGB color mode which basically means we have kind of realistic colors from the point Cloud now you can actually change that so another option is single color so you want to have a I don't know like a yellow or blue point Cloud you can do that click OK apply okay so now all of the points will be in blue color and then you can kind of differentiate depending on where you have more or less of these points so anyways that's for the first option uh or the second option then we have the option for elevation so what this will do is it will find the point which is at the lowest elevation it will find a point at which is at the highest elevation and it's going to create a gradient from Blue to Red in this case but you can customize the colors so basically a gradient between two colors showing the actual elevation so if I hit apply it's going to look like this so we have some blue points on the bottom and then we have the red points on top now in this particular case doesn't make too much sense however imagine if he had topography then this would be really useful to have elevation represented as color Okay moving forward forward let's go back to point clouds here in the visibility Graphics overrides the next one is intensity so depending on the intensity of the points you're going to get from black to white gradient hit apply okay and then that would look like this so here we have some more intensity in in some areas less intensity and so on so that's useful as well and then finally for our color mode the last option is normals so this is basically referring to the colors relative to the direction of the points basically the vector Dimension or vector value of the points Direction so it would then look like this so that those are your coloring options now I'm just going to go back to visibility Graphics overrides go go to point clouds and just set this back to RGB because that's what they prefer to get the actual in this case facade colors for my presentation okay now moving forward something else that you might want to adjust with Point clouds is going to be how it's represented here in levels so in this case this is really just a facade so we don't really have that much uh however let's say you have a large complete Building inside and out and you want to create a floor plan well you don't want to see too many points you just want to see a point all of the points in one clear section so you can actually do that with the view range settings so here in the properties panel for the view if I go to the view range settings and open that up VR is the shortcut so here we can assign Top Cut plane and bottom and here if I change these numbers so let's say I want the top to be 800 the cut plane to be 750 and the bottom to be 700 so basically this will only show me the points in this very small area these are millimeters by the way so this like 10 centimeters okay apply okay so then we only have points in that particular area and as you can see it's a lot more precise so now when I start placing walls over this uh and other elements it's going to be much easier for me to to be precise because I'm not looking at too many uh overlapped points in this point Cloud it's basically like looking at this 3D View kind of top down and you really have no idea what's going on there so you want to use the view range settings if you want to kind of refine that a little bit now to place actual building elements it's very simple and straightforward I can start a wall tool and then let's set this to finish face exterior and let me start from let's go from actually from here so I can start from this Edge and then finish face exterior flip it to the other side and then I can go up to here okay here we probably have a doors so I'm just going to go past that because door is going to be there anyway go up just like that same thing goes here so you want to connect it like that and so on so you can just simply Place walls go to the 3D view see what's going on there so here we have those walls I can select them I can readjust them so for example here I would adjust the elevation but first before we can adjust the elevation we would have to adjust the actual levels so for that go back to South elevation and then here let's adjust the levels now as soon as you start drawing over your point clouds you're going to get overlap of geometry and point cloud and when you have to kind of take a look at the point Cloud alone I just like to select it and then go here to Temporary height isolate and isolate that element so here we can see the point cloud or let's close that down or just select the walls in this case and then I would just hide those walls if I want to adjust the levels so here I can select this level I can bring it down let's say I want that level to be up to there and then let's see add additional levels so we might want to have one level somewhere around there one level somewhere around here and then our roof level as well here so you basically place your levels and then you zoom in and I I like using the arrow keys just to kind of align it a little bit better so here move this one up uh this one yeah seems all right so there we go and then uh also if you know that all of the levels are the same in a certain area makes sense to just add a dimension line like this oops so just add a dimension line place it there hit EQ and then equalize those distances hit the escape a couple of times now I know I need to reduce this one a little bit so the bottom to a line and now I have a more correct kind of assessment of where level four is going to be located and then we can go back to the 3D view find the walls select them and set this one to level four I think yeah like that let's give it a top offset of 900 millimeters something like that yeah and a bottom offset of minus 1400 to go to the bottom of that building yeah and then you would start layering on and adding more and more elements into this model and then with a little bit more work we get is something that looks like this so if I select the point Cloud here and hide it temporarily see here I have adjusted this all but and now we have a facade basically generated from that point Cloud so those are some of the basic options and settings when it comes to point clouds in Revit and it's a really great way to easily start creating existing geometry inside of Revit if you want to get access to this Revit project file as well as all of my other Revit project files you can find that on my patreon page which I'm going to link up in the cards above and then also down in the description of this video 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 and for more videos and also I've added a video over there that might interest you as well

Channel: Balkan Architect

Views: 34,996

Keywords: Revit, balkan architect, BIM, tutorial, Autodesk, PointCloud, LaserScanner, Photogrammetry, Building Shape, Model, Reference model

Id: OVNRB-Ev7Kc

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 28 2023