PROJECT BASE POINT and SURVEY POINT: The good, bad and ugly

all right my friends so here we are together yet again and today we are going to talk about survey points and project base points in your project now before we go very far i just want to talk to you guys all right it's frustrating isn't it you know when you're working with survey points and project base points they are frustrating because they're supposed to be the way you coordinate between your consultants or associated architecture firms is supposed to be a great thing that helps coordinate you but the people at autodesk are morons no i'm not kidding they're complete morons because everybody in the world you and me included we know where we are on the planet earth by our latitude and longitude okay there are apps out there that you can download in fact google earth google maps every program out there that helps you locate yourself knows where you are lat and long okay and with that that means that these these programs and a gps handheld unit people that go hiking way out in the himalayas or or wherever you go to the mount everest you know where you are based on how far you are north or south from the equator and how far east and west you might be from the prime meridian which goes through greenwich england okay you guys are with me i hope but the morons at autodesk didn't use that coordinate system at all when they set up revit okay they came up with feet or meters or centimeters or how far you are in feet from the equator or how far you are in feet or meters let's talk metric if you'd like from the prime meridian so my location where i live okay i i do a lot of you are all over the place in the world and it's awesome i wish i could meet you all but i live in the united states and i am i i checked it i did my calculations you can go online and you can find out take your latin long and convert it to feet and i am um almost 16 million feet from the equator oh that's helpful and i am about 42 and a half million feet west of england from the prime meridian no that's helpful so let me just open up revit and show you what i'm talking about okay i'm serious here we go let me share my screen with you guys so that we can see this together okay here we are in revit and i'm sure hey there i am i shared my screen with you and now you're seeing what i see okay let's go to the plan okay here is our little architecture building okay now when i started talking to you about this what we've got are two things i'm going to back out a little bit and show them to you there they are these two items right here one this triangle is the survey point and this circle with an x in it you know the triangle has a little plus in it the circle with an x in it is the project base point okay if these are not on on your screen you can hit vg on the keyboard just type vg on the keyboard okay and when it comes up it's underneath your face and you have to pull it out to the side okay you can scroll down in your model categories until you get to a group or a category called site and expand it and in there you'll find the project base point and check that box and the survey point and check that box revit also has an internal origin that can never be moved it is locked in place you can't reference it you can't you can see it but you can't nothing in revit looks at it but it you know nothing uses it it's just there it's an internal origin okay so we're going to leave it off and we're just going to use project basepoint and surveypoint today okay so turn those on and you will see them you might have to say zoom extents and then you can drag them around wherever you want but let me let me just let's just talk about these things now the survey point is it says north south and it gives you a distance next to it okay and it says east west and it gives you a distance and it would be super cool if this was latin long but it's not whoever put this into revit decided that the projects in revit are not going to be coordinated based on real world coordinates they're just going to be based on feet from something and i'm going to do another video on how to actually go locate your project somewhere on the planet which is pretty cool and it puts latin long inside the pro your file and locates it except that then your survey point and your project base point are going to be reporting the millions of feet away from an arbitrary place and i'm not kidding it's an arbitrary place i geo-located my own little office here okay this little architect's office and it did it brought in the latin long and i could put the latin long into my project but when i clicked on my project base point it had thousands of feet for north and thousands of feet west i was like what is that it located the zero point thousands of feet south of me and thousands of feet to the west out in the middle of nevada okay a desert arbitrary like whatever so let's just get this let me let me just dispel all rumors the numbers on these things are so arbitrary and so silly you need to set them yourself just work with me here you're going to set the project base point and right now more importantly the survey point you're going to set 0 somewhere relevant somewhere near your building just set zero so that it's not millions of miles off if you geo locate your project which is okay i'm not telling you not to geo-locating your project is great and all but then you've got to deal with millions of feet in this in this setting okay and if you don't mind working with millions of feet or thousands hundreds of thousands of meters away in the settings here didn't go for it but for some reason revit decided not to use the latin long the real true latin longs on these two objects so let's just let's get real okay when you are working on a project the civil engineer is working on building a site plan for you and locating your project on a site somewhere and you're busy working on the doors and the windows and the bathroom the stairs and blah blah blah okay so we need to bring these together and so it's there comes a time in your project when you want to link in your site and start getting things coordinated a little bit between your consultants and yourself and the site okay so let's bring in the site plan i'm going to link in cad and i'm going to link in the site plan that i got from my civil engineer which was actually me i just made a site plan but that's irrelevant i'm going to hit i'm going to look at this if i preserve the colors of my cad drawing dwg that's coming in because that's what i got from my civil engineer and i'm going to bring it in carrying it by its manually by its center so it's going to be on my cursor so if i say open it pops in on my cursor i'm like oh cool look i've got a site plan hey so i can put it wherever i want i'm just going to set it off to the side here click now autocad has lots of colors and reddit does not revit deals with black and white but autocad has lots of colors and and it assigns different layers different colors and so it might be kind of hard to see some of this stuff because it's a lighter green and darker greens and pinks and stuff so what i'm going to do is highlight that and hit delete no big deal i'm going to bring it back in but watch this if you hit link cad there's a setting right here at the top instead of preserving the colors you can switch them to black and white which is very very helpful and i'm also going to bring it in manually at its center so now when it comes in okay and hit open now when it comes in oh now when it comes in there we go you actually have to pick the file i'm carrying it and i'm going to place it on the site and it's black and white it really it helps a little bit so things the line weights are all fairly blase you'll notice but you have a little bit of control a little bit i'm not going to go into it deeply but i'm going to show you if you picked your site plan i know this is getting a little bit away from the um survey point and project base point but i may as well know this kind of stuff if you highlight your cad file what's going to come up across the top is a query button it's the furthest to the right when you um click on it so if you hit query what that gives you the ability to do is pick on something it'll tell you what later it is on in the cad file so let's just pick the um the property boundary around here is kind of wimpy i'm going to pick it and the query comes up with the layer name as c prop line okay well if i hit delete it deletes that and i don't want to do that if i hit hide and view it'll turn that layer off but i can just note that mentally c prop line i'm going to say okay thank you thank you very much now if i hit vg on my keyboard and click on imported categories i'll see my site plan here and if i expand it i see all of the layers that are in it and i can go to see prop line and right here this button is override button i can change it and if i want the line weight to be something like 10 give me a 10 okay i can change the color of it too i'm going to change it to a 10 and it beefs it up tremendously do you see that it really so it pops out secondly i'm just going to do one other thing like all of my trees here are the same line weight as everything else and i kind of want them to go away so i'm going to do a query i'm going to pick it i'm going to query it i'm going to pick any line that is on my vegetation click something and it says it's on the layer l plant so i'm going to say okay thank you thank you very much so if i hit v g on my keyboard back to imported categories and expand that i just come down here to l plant i'm going to click on that and this time i'm going to change the color to a really light gray and say okay so now it goes those a little bit so see you've got some control over the layers that are in your autocad file i'm just saying if things are on a separate layer if every if everything was on like the zero layer or on one layer you wouldn't have much control but if things are on different layers you can control them just saying okay back to the reason we're here once you get your site plan in your project you can rotate it if it needs rotating look rotate i guess you can rotate it to any angle you want to you can get it in here where it needs to go so i am going to rotate it back back to where it was what i need to do is get it so that my proposed building on here and i had given my civil engineer the outline of my building and kind of where i wanted it on the site and he placed it for me that was really nice so here we go i need to align this i'm i'm going to get this i'm going to rotate it wacky so that you can see what i'm talking about better all right there see that proposed building sitting there i'm gonna click on it i'm gonna move i'm gonna i'm picking the cat plan i'm gonna hit mv move on the keyboard i'm gonna pick the corner of my building pink corner of the building and of the site plan i'm going to move it to the same location on my building that corner right there okay so i'm getting fairly close but i need to rotate the site plan into place and so i'm going to rotate and it shows the center of rotation way out here in the middle of nowhere well you can hit this little button or drag that blue dot to where you want if i hit the place button i can place the center rotation on that corner of my building okay and now i'm going to say along this line i want this along this line to be rotated i clicked and now i'm lifting it up horizontally and click so now it has rotated my site plan i've moved it to the right location and i've rotated into place and now would be a probably a good time to highlight and pin your site plan so when you get your cad plan in from your engineer get it underneath the building and put it in place now comes what's more important now the pro let's let's talk about the project base point and the survey point and how they work together they are either carrying an important point to you or they're looking at an important point and what we're going gonna talk about right now is zero okay instead of referencing something that is thousands and hundreds of thousands of feet away we're going to bring we're going to bring reality to our site i'm telling you this is what this is the easiest way to get to coordinate with your consultants because nobody cares about millions hundreds of thousands of feet away and since it's irrelevant what the number is anyway we bring relevance back to the site by looking at it and deciding what point on our site is important to us okay maybe this bottom right corner of our property line is important maybe the that right where the road meets the driveway is important maybe you know you can pick any point on your site to be your relevant most important part of the site okay and i'm going to say it's right here in the bottom left corner of my site here's why that point is important on this particular site because i have setbacks that i cannot build in around my property i have a 25-foot setback on the back of the property i have 15 foot setbacks on the sides and i have a 20 foot setback on the front so that's an area i cannot build in so that's noted on my project and so from this corner i cannot build a from this front uh property line i can't build 20 feet and my building is set 20 feet and 8 inches back okay good and from the side setback it's 15 foot to the setback and then it's four foot six further to my building so my building knows where it's located based on my property line and so that's important to me the property line is important and this corner is just as good as any of the other corners on my property line okay i'm just saying so when you go to work on projects in architecture if you have a property line boundary that's important that's actually more important than how far you are from greenwich england that's more important than how far you are from the equator it brings relevance to your project and so what we're going to do is we're going to tell a place which i'm going to pick that bottom left corner i'm going to tell that to be zero in this project because that is more important than something a long ways away okay you with me so here's what i'm going to do this right here is my this triangle remember it's the survey point and the survey point is what you put you put it somewhere relevant on your site because it's a survey point and it belongs somewhere on your site relevant okay so i'm going to drag it over now first let's note something before it's reporting numbers of where it is wherever i put it it's reporting the location of that the reason it's reporting location it's reporting how far it is from zero when this little clip you see the little clip thing has a slash through it that means it's not clipped to the earth it's not clipped down to the planet the the globe that we live on it's not clipped to it and because it's not clipped wherever i move it it's telling me how far it is from something that's zero somewhere that's zero okay so what i'm going to do on this site plan incidentally let me just tell you something the project base points doing the same thing it's reporting always there's not a clip for it okay the project base point i'm in i'm in revit 2022 okay revit version 2022 but you can't clip the project base point it will always report how far it is from zero okay zero north and zero east wherever zero zero is in your project the project base point will always report information of how far it is from zero zero but the survey point will report zero how far it is from zero zero when it's unpinned okay if it's pinned and you move it it's moving it moves zero wherever zero is it's moving zero so you gotta be careful with this little guy okay leave it unpinned for right now this point right here has become important to us the bottom left corner of our property and what i'm going to do is go to manage button and i'm going to click on position no no yes no i'm going to click on coordinates that's what i'm going to do click on coordinates and look at this there's a button called specify the coordinates at a point okay and i'm going to pick that tippy-tippy corner of my site okay and the coordinates come up here north south east and west and because of the morons at autodesk you could only put feet here or metric system you know it's either imperial or metric how far you are from something you can't put in your coordinates your true geographical lat and long which is what it should be but since you can't we're just going to set zero here and we're gonna set zero here okay we're gonna set that tippy corner of my site as zero zero zero pam when i say okay that becomes the important thing in my entire project and now my project base point is reporting how far it is north and west from that corner right there and since my my survey point is unclipped it's doing the same thing so let me just bring it over here so it's just about exactly over to the left of it and look i can actually say i want you to be exactly straight over not um north of it and i want you to be look i'm going to say i want you to be 20 feet to the left of it see i can control that survey point to where it is i can tell it to be 30 feet for to the right of it see you can tell it or 40 feet i typed in 40. minus 20 uh not 20 back up minus 40 feet so i can jerk that survey point around and make it go where i want okay but i am going to leave it unpinned and i'm going to tell it to go to 0 0 0 okay and then i'm going to pin it so it doesn't move anywhere now let me just show you something if i drag it now that it's pinned i i clipped it now i clipped it to the earth and this corner is 0 0 0. if i drag this away i just moved where zero was it's it actually pulls zero around the survey point can drag zero okay i'm pulling it way over here away from my project and if you look it at it's still saying zero zero so it's moving zero so i'm going to drag it back to that corner okay get in here tight so i can see what i'm doing i'm gonna drag it right there now i'm going to leave it there i have established 0 0 0 0 on my site at that location i could go in and tell it an elevation also if i want to that's how high my sight is off at that corner how high it is off the sea level but i'm not going to do that right now what i want to do is to mostly talk about north south east west okay now my project base point needs to be placed somewhere if i want to okay it's going to always report where it is in relation to zero you're with me so look at this if i put it on that corner what do you think it's going to say do you think it's going to say that it is north 20 foot and 8 inches and maybe do you think it's going to say east 15 no 19 do the math fif 19 foot six to the east well let's check it out let's drag it over there and see okay i'm going to drag it onto that corner and then we're gonna check it and we're going to zoom in and we're going to find that that i rotated my site plan i didn't get my site planning there perfectly all right this is very funny 19 foot eight no oh wait wait wait wait work with me here okay all right i when i rotated it did i get that exactly in the right spot let me just move it you move to that snap to the end point okay you can snap to the end point and now this guy is and i'm going to move it down here wait for it hey let my people go stop it okay now you move from the center snap to the end point of that building right there all right it looks like i am fractions fractions hundreds off hundredths off and that's my fault for not drawing it perfectly accurate but let me just show you look what it's doing it is 19 6 and it's 19 six and 67 256 my bad i'm sorry and it is 20 foot eight to the north and it is like it's 20 foot seven and 97 once it's it's way close and i have i have to talk to my um surveyor and let me just i'm going to do something i'm going to take my site plan i'm going to take my site plan and i am going to unpin it i'm going to i rotated it wrong i believe i need to align it i'm just going to align my site plan with the building you know what i mean instead i'm just going to move it over here close work with me people align go to the face of this you bam go to the face of this you bam okay now that is i aligned it to my building and so now if i move this 0 0 i want to move 0 0 to the end of that line okay move move to the end of that line bam okay i'm just doing this because hey this is live people and now oh my goodness would you look at that my um site plan was it was a little cattywampus and it was not in the right place and so take a look 20 foot eight 19 foot six i i like things working properly just like anybody else so if i move this project base point to the corner of my building it is going to report exactly its relationship to the survey point and so now i can coordinate if i want to see i'm sorry about that little snafu but you have to see things as they are friends you got to see this thing live to make it real okay now i have placed my survey point in a place that is relevant on my site and i can move my project base point anywhere relevant on my building and it could be inside at column line a1 which makes sense to if you've got a column line or if you don't have any column lines you put it on the corner of a building put it somewhere where your consultants can find it and see it so if you've got let's just say you're working with a structural engineer and he says okay i've linked your project in now how do i align it with mine and you just say oh well i've got my project base point at the intersection of column line a1 and he's like thank you that was really smart and he can move it into alignment with his project or you know that's just an example so you can work with your consultants to get everybody to put their um project base point in their survey point in the same locations as you so that everybody stays coordinated okay this is not about sharing coordinate systems you know share coordinate systems with the other files which is a good idea after you get things lined up exactly where they belong with respect to the um survey point the project base point if everything is locked in you've placed the survey point at something on something relevant on your site and you've placed the project base points some on something relevant on your building then your court your consultants will be able to stay exactly aligned and that at that point they could most likely share coordinate systems with each other you know you can i'm not going to do it because that's a different video but you can come up to the coordinate button and look at this acquire they can acquire coordinates from your file and that way from then on it stays rock solid locked in and can't move all right so anyway i just wanted to show you guys how this whole thing works with project base points and survey points and you need to make them relevant to your own project because otherwise they're not relevant the numbers are arbitrary so i hope that helps i really hope that helps it is a tough thing dealing with these project points and survey points do you need to use them no you could just turn them off and try to align the exterior of the building with the extra building that kind that works also if you want to try that but it's a good it's good practice to have an object something in there that can help coordinate two revit files that are linking together so everybody stays coordinated all right that's about enough i hope you guys i hope this is beneficial to you guys and i hope you guys have a fantastic day working in revit happy reviting and have yourself a great day all right bye-bye

Channel: Mike Taylor

Views: 13,762

Keywords: Revit, Tip, Project Base Point, Survey Point

Id: TjP40wpFF34

Length: 33min 24sec (2004 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021