Revit Topography Tutorial - 2024 Toposolids Update

this video is sponsored by Autodesk and I'm going to show you how to create a topography inside of Revit 2024. now you may be wondering Kyle you've already covered how to do topography in your intermediate course which is true but since the release of Revit 2024 a few things have changed in fact pretty much topography has completely changed but it's still quite simple so in this video I'm going to show you what some of the differences are between 2024 and some of the previous versions of Revit and also if you haven't used any previous versions of Revit in general how to use the toppo solids massing and sight tools to be able to create a topography so there's a few things that have changed with topography inside of Revit the first thing is that there is no longer toppo surfaces instead these have been replaced with toppo solids additionally the building pad tool has been removed which I always found a little bit clunky anyways so I think this is a really good update basically what it's done is Consolidated both the building pad and the toppo surface tool into one tool which is toppo solids the toppo solids tool works very similarly I hate using that word similarly similarly yeah I can't say it toppo solids tool works much the same as the toppo surface tool if you've never used that tool in previous versions of Revit basically what it allows you to do is create a topographical element defined by a number of specified points or through imported data from a third-party CAD software so essentially the first thing to do to start creating your Topography is to go to generally a site plan because if you use a floor plan sometimes the visibility and graphic settings won't show it so if we go to a site plan I'm going to create a typography for this model now this model is quite well developed if it looks a bit intimidating don't worry about that we're just going to use it as a base now to access the toppo solids tool we're going to go to the massion site tab from here you're going to see that you've got the model site section toppo solids creates a solid topographical element now what it's saying is that you need to define the boundary of the element and specify the elevation points to create Contours of the toppo solid so that's quite self-explanatory but as you can see it's got two options you can either create it from a sketch which we're going to do first or you can create from an import which is what I was saying with a third-party 3D modeling software such as an AutoCAD file you can import it in and use it as your top host solid quite often surveyors will do all of their surveys in CAD which you can easily just import over into Revit and then obviously you don't have to do anything with it first of all let's just create one from a sketch which is going to create a basic Topo solid so you get the idea we're going to create a boundary of the toppo solid or the topography let's just create a rectangle that goes around the site like this now basically what we can do is just check the properties panel you can see that this is placing the toppo solid on finish floor level which is just our zero datum you can offset it from that level or whatever just like creating a floor I'm sure you're well aware of all of these things now what I think is really cool that I don't think toppo's surfaces had in previous Revit versions is that you can actually change the structure of a toppo solid to have multiple layers now I can't actually remember if this was a feature in previous versions because I know that you could assign a material to a topo surface although there was a lot of issues with toppo surfaces not showing surface patterns and stuff like that which we'll get into because that's now fixed but also toppo surfaces were just a single plane you couldn't Define a thickness however using toppo solids it's almost like the building pad and toppo surface tool was combined and now what you can do is assign a thickness to your toppo surfaces or in this case your toppo is solid we'll get into that a bit later as well but for now all that we need to know is that we've got our boundary defined and we can click the green tick cool beans another cool thing is that you can now attach wolves to your toppo solid which you couldn't do with toppo's surfaces there's a lot of cool improvements which we're going to find out along the way of this now I'm not going to attach any of them that's fine here we can see we've got our toppo solid if we go to a 3D view you'll be able to see that basically all it is is just a flat plane at the moment because we haven't to find any points with a height or elevation height so that's going to be the next step what we need to do is modify the sub elements so what we can do is click that modify sub elements button and here you're going to see that it's got four points which can be changed and which specify the Heights and the Contour of this Topo solid so with the modify sub elements button selected we can then click any of these points and change the value of each specific point to have an elevation so if we make this 400 what it's going to do is make that point 400 millimeters above the finished floor level which is that level which this Topo solid is constrained to now as you can see with this point selected there's also a couple of other options at the top here under modify sub elements you can see that's the elevation there so you can also change this here if you wanted to make it say 800 it's going to change it in both those locations that's fine but the elevation base this is basically just saying the project base point is the base of this elevation point so we've got this this one is 800 let's change that to 3 000 and we're going to make this one over here 3000 also now what you can see instantly is that it's created a slope for this Topo solid so what it's saying is that this side here is 3 000 millimeters above that finished floor level which is where these two points are sitting on and it's automatically created a number of contour lines along that path or along this Topo solid now you can control these Contour display options by going to the edit type menu so under type properties you can go to Contour display which is a new Option now in 2024 and you can edit the Contour display and you can choose how often you want these Contours to show up so for example at the moment it's got intervals of a thousand if we made this 500 it would double how many Contours there are so I'm going to click OK and apply that now as you can see that hasn't changed anything because that was only changing the primary Contours but if we were to change the secondary Contours let's make this say 300 and apply that should give us a few more contour lines in between between so that's just how you can change some of those things we're just going to keep it like that for now no worries we've got a couple of extra contour lines now what we could also do is add more points to this Topo solid to give it a bit more detail so if I go to a site plan and you click on ADD Point here what you can do now is say this elevation is 2 000. what you can then do is start adding in your elevation lines and this is going to automatically create some Contours now if we go to a 3D view what you're going to see is that there are all of our points that we just placed and if we get out of that it's then going to update that we've got a bit more detail in this Contour model now if you find that this shape is no longer what you want you have the reset shape button which is going to bring it back to how it was without any of those Point changes I'm going to undo that though so generally if you've got a survey from a surveyor or you've got site information which tells you all of the elevation points of a site all you need to do is specify your boundary of your toppo solid and then start adding your points and you just specify the elevation of each point as it is on your survey drawings and you'll be able to create your toppo solid so with this whole toppo solid upgrade you no longer have the split surface or merge surface tools so sub regions are gone in this version if you never use them don't worry about it basically instead what you've got now is that you can split the Topo solid using the cut geometry in family tool or Additionally you can also use this split element tool to cut it up so if I go to my site plan here's our Topo salad so for example if we wanted to split this Topo salad in half all we'd have to do is use the split element tool which my shortcut for that is SL otherwise you can find it up in the modifier tab I'm just going to select the Topo solid with that split element tool selected what we're going to do is use the split element tool we're going to create a line going halfway through this Topo solid using that we can finish that edit mode and what it's going to do is split that toppo solid in half which was extremely difficult to do before this makes it a lot easier he just wants to be on camera he's such a poser let's just ignore the cute puppy you can also cut anything out of this topper solid using voids the other tool is to cut geometry and family tool which is under model in place if you model in something say like a generic model and you create a void Extrusion let's say we had an extrusion that was coming through yeah make this 3000 tools so we know it cuts through the entire site we click OK what we can do is cut the top I solid on that Extrusion and you're going to see that it's now created a void where that void Extrusion is usually you wouldn't be able to cut a topless surface that easily you would have to use a building pad or the split surface I can't really remember what it was like back in the old versions but it was a big pain to try and cut up the telpo solid so using those two tools makes it super easy just to chop it up now previously it used to be quite difficult to place things on a toppo Surface using toppo solids it's now a lot easier it acts as a host for site components or railings floor-based families so for example if I went to a site component and I wanted to place a tree whatever tree it may be you can now place it anywhere on that toppo solid this is a bit funky doing it in a 3D view but it's going to use that as a host for the tree so there's no having to adjust this elevation and elevation viewer section to try and figure that out it's going to do that for you which is pretty cool another cool thing is that you can apply slab-based families onto a site Topo solid so if you want to create curbing you could easily do that by I'm choosing your Topo solid and then adding a slab Edge to it can I help you foreign a little a little break you can have a break too I know learning about all this can be very difficult and very frustrating take a deep breath give your dog or a cat or whoever may be nearby a cuddle we'll get back to it in a moment you're such a poser why do you always have to be in front of the camera are you gonna let me finish this video ah now another method for creating toppo solids is to create one from an import so if we create a taco salad from import we can create one from a cad file or from a CSV this is generally going to be something that a surveyor will give you they'll give you a cad file with all the survey information on it and you can turn that into a topo solid otherwise you can use one of my previously shared methods of using Google SketchUp and their 3D information to create a rough site toppo solid for your model now I used to use this all the time in architecture school and for work as well for work it was a little bit harder because you usually needed a trusted site to be able to model up your building and have it built in real life but for uni it was great that be able to just grab some rough site information and you can model your building around that because you're not going to go get a site surveyed for a uni project and it's very difficult usually to find that information check out my previous video on that if you're interested in learning about how to quickly create a topless solid in Revit in like under a minute in my intermediate course it also covers how to easily create and import toppo solids from other software such as Rhino that information is all still valid I just really wanted to cover what some of these changes are and help you get on the road to creating your own Topo salad inside of Revit 2024. so I hope you found this video helpful thank you so much to Autodesk for sponsoring it and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Kyle Sinko

Views: 4,615

Keywords: revit, autodesk, autodeskad, toposolids, topography, topographical, site model, contour, contour model, revit contour model, revit site, revit site tutorial, revit tutorial, revit toposolids, revit toposolids tutorial, revit site course, revit topography tutorial, revit topography course, revit topographical model, revit site model tutorial

Id: hTAq6YZ8N_8

Length: 11min 36sec (696 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 11 2023