Revit Plug-in for Generating ANY Site on Earth - Revit Plug-in Tutorial

what's going on guys balkan architect here and in today's video we're going to be talking about how to create these surroundings for your revit models i know this is something that's a popular topic i get asked a lot about this how how do you generate the surroundings for your rabbit do you use massing do you use a different approach what's the easiest and the fastest way to create uh the surroundings or the the the context for your revit model uh and that kind of fits in perfectly to what we're going to be talking about today and that is well actually generating that surroundings in revit so we're not going to be modeling that we're not going to be creating it ourselves we're just going to be generating that by using a plugin so we're going to be using the placemaker plugin for revit it's a plugin that's used or that works both for revit and also there's a version for sketchup and what it does it allows you to connect data from different sources and bring it into revit and then apply it to actual or turn it into actual revit geometry so what the this placemaker plugin does it allows you to find first of all it allows you to load in some really high quality aerials from different sources so one of the sources is near map and that actually goes up to seven centimeters so you can get the idea of just how how high quality the image is and how clear it is also there is map box and hexagon they have pretty much global coverage uh almost any place in the world you can get data from but it doesn't stop there it doesn't stop with the aerials also you can load in terrain from cesium and they load in this uh or it is the plugin allows you to load in the terrain data and it turns that into actual revit topography so you can find the location you turn that into rabbit topography you can apply a high quality aerial image over that and then you can take it even further so you can actually scatter the buildings so it can actually find data for the for the buildings for actual 3d geometry buildings roads paths railways uh even vegetation like trees in some areas and it can adapt that to your topography so it can adapt to the houses on the different elevations of topography it can place the uh it can place the the roads there the pads and pretty much anything so it's a really powerful tool it connects all of these different sources and then it gives you a completed terrain you can and also you have even a water that you can load in which is also really useful and i'm going to be explaining that a bit later on so anyways that's what this does and uh full disclosure uh this video is sponsored by placemaker so that's something that i would like to note and yeah i think it's really powerful here i'm just going to open up here you can see the website uh so this is the placemaker for revit add-in and you can try it out here uh there are a couple of options you can go for you can get this absolutely free and then you use credits which you can purchase on the website and then you spend those credits to get data now some data is cheaper some data is more expensive for example the terrain the buildings the roads that's cheap and and then the the kind of the more expensive stuff is the high quality images that you can get and it obviously depends on the the quality you want to get lower the quality it's cheaper and then higher the quality it's more expensive now here as i said there are a couple of options so if i go here to shop now place maker for revit you're going to see that we have a couple of options we have pays you go which as i said with credits and then also you have a subscription bundle with which already gives you credits but then on top of that you can get kind of cheaper credits later on or cheaper uh cheaper data later on so when you're paying for some let's say high quality aerial images uh you get that cheaper if you have a subscription then if you have the page you go plan so it's really dependent on what you need it for so if you just need a few sites during the year like three sites well then maybe it makes sense with pay as you go but if you have maybe more than that you have a lot of sites that you want to generate your kind of surroundings for then perhaps the subscription bundle is the better option now let's jump into rabbit and let's actually go over how this works inside of rabbit now if you want to check out the actual website i'm just going to leave a link down in the description of this video and then also up in the cards above so check it out if you're interested but anyways when you go there when you download and install the add-in it's going to appear over here on your uh on your ribbon it's just a new tab and then it looks like this now you can log in as you can see here i'm logged in balkan architect and these are the credits that they currently currently have so let's now use this and generate some generate a site for our project so what you want to do first is you want to go here to select place so that's where you can specify which place you want to get data for so i'm just going to go here to select place it just open this up on my second screen so let me bring it in and resize it a little bit so basically it looks like this and here you can type in an address or just a location what where is your kind of project location or what site you need so i'm just going to say i don't know let's go with seattle and let's see so it's just going to give us a little drop down here you can select different uh results i'm just going to go like this and then you can actually kind of navigate around and find a site that you're happy with so let's say i want to have something here so it has a little bit of terrain has a has some houses and so on and then to select the kind of actual area you go here to select area and brings up this window and you can actually resize the actual kind of window that's going to be used to grab the site so you can zoom in here perhaps something a bit larger let's say something like that you can obviously move around and then you just select the the area that you that you need or the area that you want perhaps like i don't know let's go here there we go and then you just click on import area so what this is going to do it's going to generate a new 3d view so as you can see here 3d view one and it's yeah it's just 3d view and then if i select this you're going to notice that this is just typography now don't worry these aren't the high quality aerials that they've been talking about we're going to get to that but this is just kind of due to specify the site that you're kind of getting data for okay so once we have this in place the next step is to import the terrain so the topography the the what is the shape of the terrain so for that you go here to feature imports you go to import terrain and it's just going to open up this window here you can specify the ccm cesium is where you is the kind of the the supplier of the terrain data and here you can specify the grid spacing now currently this is at 10 000 millimeters which is like 10 meters and this is perfectly fine for this particular project and it's really going to depend on the the project location if you're in perhaps a kind of a more urban area you might get even up to one meter kind of grid for your terrain and then in some cases it might be larger in this case i'm just going to go with 10 meters i think it's more than enough so i'm just going to go here to save and import you just click on that you select that terrain and then if we just wait for a few moments it's going to bring up this window here and this is where those uh credits uh are kind of this is this is where we use them so as you can see it's it's going to specify the provider cesium ion product data here you can see six styles for the terrain that's kind of the general size of the terrain and the required credits is here you can see six so i can just confirm that order and you can notice that here the number of credits is just going to drop by six when they load in this terrain data and if i wait for a few moments yeah this is what we get so here's the terrain and actually as you can see it's actually high quality terrain if i zoom in uh there we go so let me just select this perhaps to see this better let's go to the site plan there we go and this is the terrain see all of the little contour lines it's really high quality if i go into edit surface you can see that it divided this whole thing into points and then if you zoom in and if you measure between the points it's 10 000 millimeters or 10 meters so that's that number that we have specified earlier so there we go now we have our terrain looks really good now let's do something about the image so as i said this is not the actual high quality aerial for the aerial uh what we want to do here is go to import imagery it's going to open up the the window here so as you can see this is the image import settings and now here you can specify the source you can go with the map box near map or hexagon depending on the on the source here you can zoom so here the zoom is basically defining the quality of the image you can go with max high medium low let's go with high for this one uh use most recent data of course we want that and then we can just save and import so you click there you click on the terrain and then you wait for a few moments you're going to get another kind of prompt here so here again this is going to tell us uh how many credits this is going to cost so as you can see the provider it's near map the image rates 3d tiles so that's because we have kind of a more high quality image and then the credits required is 150 and also here you can see i have a subscription so i've actually saved 60 credits because i'm subscribed if i if i didn't have the subscription this would be well 60 credits extra on top of this and as you've mentioned before you you will notice that the images cost the most that's just because that data basically caused the most from all of the data that we're using here but then the rest of it it's it's quite inexpensive so if i just go here to confirm order wait for a few moments it's going to download those images and it's not only going to download the image it's going to apply it on our topography so uh obviously it's going to take a bit more because we've chosen the high quality images but the end result is of course going to be of higher quality you can notice now the images are now being generated and if we wait for a few more more uh moments to load in all of the or to generate all of the images now you can see those images have been applied as tiles and we can zoom in and as you can see this is really really high quality and this wasn't even the maximum quality but as you can see this is this is really really good so you can obviously use these images here for your site you can see even the sea looks really good from these images so anyways once you have loaded in the high quality images the next step is going to be to load in some buildings so if i create click here on import buildings it's going to bring up this menu for uh buildings import settings and here you have a couple of sources i'm just going to go with osm uh 3d buildings obviously we want that you can specify the building height the building level randomized heights and the important thing to check here is the merge with surface what this is going to do when you check this on when you generate the buildings the uh the buildings are and are going to be kind of adapted to the surface they're not going to be flat they're going to be adapted to this 3d topography so now you just click on one of these tiles and it's going to give you a little warning saying do you just want to generate buildings on this particular tile or on all tiles now obviously we want it on the the whole topo surface so we're just going to click yes so it's going to take into consideration the whole topo surface and as you can see it's got buildings which is now generating and it's obviously generating these buildings a lot faster than you would if you had to do this manually this would be a nightmare i mean 300 buildings yeah i wouldn't want to do that that do that see and as you can see all of the buildings are now generated and they are at kind of proper elevations set here on that topography this looks really good okay so once we have the buildings in place the next step is to import roads so you click on import roads and then again it's the same source of information again merge with surface this is important check that on so the the roads will follow the actual topography click save and import and then you again you just select one of the tiles you tell it that no not just that tile the entire topo surface you click yes and now it's just going to generate those roads see as you can see we have the 34 roads that are now being created and they're going to be kind of adapted over our topography so let's wait for a few moments there for it to generate and there we go now we have the roads and i think if you can see them there we go so as you can see this is just a a generic model so everything is going to be kind of adapted to revit model elements so if you select the buildings they are generic models if you select the roads they are generic models and if you select these tiles they are typography i think they are just kind of sub-regions of our whole topography these kind of image tiles obviously we can take this forward you can go with import paths so if i just bring that menu up here so here you can actually specify the width of the path it's the same thing with roads you can specify the width and then you save an import so if it finds any paths here on this area it's just going to generate those so as you can see we have nine paths so it's just adding those to the model and now if i can see them yeah i'm guessing okay here we have some baths there yeah this is pretty much kind of an urban area so we have more roads than actual paths but there we go we have some bats here going on here and here yeah so we do have some pads also you can import rails uh in this case i don't think that makes too much sense just because it's uh that type of a site i don't think it has any rails here also we can import trees so this is really going to depend from our project location to project location not all of them are going to have trees but let's yeah let's try it for this one so again merge with surface that's important here you can specify the spacing the heights and then let's save and import specify this there we go and let's see is it going to find some trees for this particular location it's kind of searching there we go we have okay let's say 45 trees let's see now it's adding those objects so we wait for a few moments there we go it degenerated some trees again as i said it's not going to be perfect the the tree data but i'm going to take what i can get because yeah placing these and modeling these there that would take a lot of time so just it's definitely useful uh now moving forward you also have water now it might not make sense why would you want to generate water but why i think it's useful is because if you want to then create some sort of a visualization inside of some sort of either third-party rendering engine or something like that you want to have like uh like a like an actual model surface that you can use for generating that water so it's really useful that it kind of brings that in for you so again it's the same source make sure to check merge with surface save and import again it's the same kind of set of steps and now it's just going to kind of find that water line and it's going to load in that water generic element so let's let's let's just wait for a few moments there we go so we have some water here as well so there you go that's how you kind of generate this uh that's how we've generated this whole site as you can see i really like the images i really like all the 3d buildings that's that's what that that that's really really important uh here we have the water seems to be a bit higher so we can obviously go and just change the elevation or something and now it moved it a bit higher so if i just move it down that would be much better there we go so there you go now you have the water you have everything uh and you have the the terrain the buildings the imagery and so on so i think it's a really powerful tool for generating uh your site in revit it's really quick saves well quite a bit of time if this is something that you do on a regular basis i think it's a must have but there you go so i i hope you have enjoyed this video i hope you enjoy this tool as i said it's going to be linked below the video and up in the cards and also please tell me in the comment section below what do you think about this is this something that you might find useful do you want to use this in your kind of your current workflow so uh please tell me that in the comment section okay so thank you for watching the video and i'll obviously be back with another regular balkan arctic tutorial in a couple of days have a nice day thank you for watching guys make sure to check out my website balkanarctic.com for more uh revit courses there i have over 120 hours of content and i'm adding more each week make sure to subscribe for more videos and also i've added a video over there that might interest you as well

Channel: Balkan Architect

Views: 103,387

Keywords: Revit, tutorial, BIM, building information modeling, autodesk, site, topography, topo, context, surroundings

Id: bZWGABISYII

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 08 2021