Revit Toposolid - Complete Revit 2024 Tutorial

in this video I'm going to be showing you everything you need to know about Topo solids in rabbit so if you don't know Topo solids are a new approach to topography in Revit it starts from Revit 2024 and in this video I'm going to be covering everything so we're going to be exploring how to convert old topography into new rabbit Topo solids we're going to be talking about how to create a new topu solid from scratch how to create a topo solid from an import so either a cad file or an Excel spreadsheet how to set everything up most importantly the contour lines how to create subdivisions and alternatives to subdivisions like splitting Topo solids how to create voids how to cut topography with walls and Foundations which elements can be hosted on top of solids and finally we're going to be talking about graded regions or bringing phasing to topography let's go foreign just like to mention today's video sponsor and that is the environment plugin this is the ultimate tool set for Landscape Architects it offers more than 50 tools dedicated to site design so if you're working on a large landscape project there really is no alternative it has features for editing walls managing geolocation or planting and collaboration but they also have amazing features dedicated to typography which is much more in line with today's video topic they have topography tools panel which allows you to create typography either starting from existing edges and surfaces or you can create your typography from scratch and what I find most exciting is the modified typography panel which allows you to essentially shape your typography like clay it has tools like inflate typography shape by point or mesh control and you can easily get the topography that you want by using these tools now it will of course work with Revit 2024 and Topo solids and I'm going to be creating a whole new kind of dedicated tutorial to environment really soon now if you want to check it out and if you want to get a free trial you can just follow the links up in the cards above or down in the description of this video now you can also get an extended trial if you get my site design and coordination course also there on my website you can find all of my other Revit courses where I take the extra time to go slowly step by step and explain all of rabbit's interesting topics now you can find a link to my website up in the cards above and then also in the description of this video now without any further Ado let's jump straight into a rabbit first let's explore opening an older file so Revit 2023 or older where we already have a topo surface so our old version of topography and let's see how can we convert that into a elbow solid so here I have this project that was made in Revit 2020 and here this is a topo surface now you can see it's completely flat and when I select it in Revit 2024 it's going to say topography now as soon as I select it on the modified topography tab we're going to get a generate double solid button and when you click on that it's going to bring up here a warning so here it's a problem with the work plane so I'm just going to exit out of that and then move to the site plan and then here in the site plan if you select that topography and let me just move this away a little bit generate Topo solid it's now going to give you this menu where you need to select the base level as well as the family type so the base level is basically the base level of typography I'm just going to set it to ground level and then we have the family type because this is an older file we don't really have any tofu so solid types because well there wasn't dopo solids in Revit 2020 so I'm just going to select this topu solid one which is kind of the default one that appears when you open up a file in Revit 2024 and click ok so now when I go to the 3D view you're going to get this kind of a little error message and you can see we have some overlap going on over here so if I zoom in you can see that now we still have that topography selected however below that we have a topo solid so you can just come in here select that topography on top hit delete and it's gone and now you have a double solid now something that you'll notice here as I said that because we didn't have any Topo solid types this one is just kind of a basic type when we go into edit type it has this default thickness and it basically has only one layer so now it's up to you just to build out the rest of the layers and turn this into a great Topo solid let's now create a topos solid out of an imported file so if I go here to masking inside and to double solid we have an option to create from import and when I select that we have a couple of options one is create from Cad and the second one is great from CSV file so this is an Excel spreadsheet file let's start with the cad first here you can see I've linked up this CAD file and what I'm going to do first before I create this Topo solid from import I'm going to select that CAD file go to query and then I just want to find my contour lines click on them and just see what's their layer name here you can see it's they're called contour lines now I can just okay out of that hit the Escape key a couple of times and then go back to Topo solid create from import create from Cad and then you just select that get file and here you're going to get all of the layer names that you have have in that file I'm just going to go to check none then I'm going to find my contour lines layer and then I'm just going to click OK and that's going to generate a double solid so now I can select that CAD file I can either remove it or I can just hide that element and then perhaps let's view this in realistic now you can see I have an extremely accurate dopu solid and something that they really like compared to the old Topo surfaces we have those concave edges so it's following the edge of that topography perfectly previously it would connect this point with this point and then this point with this point and it wouldn't look right right now we have the topography that looks exactly like our CAD import okay so now let's move to our create from CSV file so I'm just going to click on this and then I have this file on my desktop this points file so this is basically a spreadsheet where it has basically numerical values of measured points for topography so essentially somebody who went around measured each point and then it has uh the coordinates for three axis and that's in form of this Excel file so now I'm just going to hit open uh so for the units this is going to be in meters click OK and then we have our topography however it is really high so something that I'm going to do is go to zoom all and you can see it kind of went all the way up here and then I can just go to the height offset set that to zero and hit apply okay and that's going to drop that Topo surface down I can move it off to the side here so we can view it a bit better and now you can see I have this whole extremely precise dopo surface generated from that points file or dopu solid generated from that that points file so this is how you can create Topo solids from Imports now let's explore creating a topo solid from sketch so I'm just going to go here to masking inside Topo solid and then we have to create the boundary line I'm just going to create a simple rectangle just like so then I'm going to hit the Escape key once and finish now you're going to see we have a completely flat double solid I'm going to switch this to realistic so it looks a bit nicer and then let's make some changes so to edit the sketch we can go back here and then you can make some modifications if you want to that sketch so if we want to add an arc here I can simply do that now if you want to change the actual shape and shape our Topo solid we can go here to modify sub elements and then we can start moving them so you can change the boundary first if you want so for example I can select this whole boundary line I can move it by using this grip so arrows it doesn't matter if you select the bottom or top you can move it up and down irrelevant to that and then here you can add a numerical value so if I want this to be at four thousand millimeters I can just type that in in addition to that you can select individual points at the address and then you can move those and you can also add a numerical value then we have the option to add points now to understand Point placement a little bit better I have created this section here so you can observe the changes in section according to the existing levels so first here we have two of these options where we can place a long surface or absolute so placing a long surface means that once you place a point it's going to add this value to the existing position on the surface so let me demonstrate if this is set to zero and we set this to a long surface now when once I place a point here you can see the point is placed but there isn't really much change to this topography because even though this point has been set to 0 0 it's 0 0 from this position here that's why it didn't move much it is going to change the topography just a little bit but not really make any significant changes however when I set this to Absolute and then place a point over here you're going to see it's going to drop this down to level 1 which is set at zero so it's going to drop everything down down to zero because the elevation has been set to zero so that's basically how these two different options affect our topography so depending on what you're trying to do if I set this to 1000 or let's go with three thousand millimeters and now I place a point over here it's going to set that exactly at the 3000 millimeter level however if I change this back to our along the surface option and set this again to 3000 millimeters and place a point here you're going to notice that that point is going to go from here all the way up by the value of 3000 millimeters so that's basically how these options work and then here we have the option to set elevation base so basically from where is it calculating the value so is it the current level the project base Point survey point or internal origin usually you're going to keep this at project base point and now if you want to reset the shape you can always go back here and just reset that back to a flat shape if that's something that you want to do and then you can go back to modify sub elements and continue making changes now I have modified this topography a little bit and now let's mix changes to the points one thing to note here when you select your topography you're not going to see any of those points this is really good because sometimes you have many points and it would just be overwhelming however if you do want to see those points you can just select your Topo solid go to shape editing expand this menu and then you have preview points and now once you select your typography it's going to preview those points and you can actually use the Tab Key to select them and you can now change the their values here I'm just going to drop this back down to 3000. now when it comes to these points when I select my topography and go to modify sub elements just by clicking on the modify sub elements it's kind of like a select tool where you can select individual points if you select them you can use the arrows to move them kind of organically up and down you can input a value here numerically or what you can do is you can come in and hover over the center of the point and then you can just drag it over now this can sometimes give you issues from my experience where it tends to move that point not only in the X and Y Direction but all also in the easy Direction so it tends to move it up and down which I don't like so I'm just going to drop this back down to 3500 and now if you actually want to move it kind of in a plane you can simply go to the move tool and now you can move that point unfortunately we cannot copy points something else that you'll notice here is when you select one of these lines inside you can actually move that whole align up and down organically or numerically here finally we have the convert lines so convert lines basically turns this into a split line I don't really know why would you do this split lines for me personally don't work very well here with Topo solid but if you want to do that you can convert it like this in into a split line so now when you go to modify it's going to just appear over here if you don't want to see it anymore you can just select it go back to modify sub elements and you cannot really convert it back however you can just hit delete the line will stay there but it will not be a split line so you do have that option when it comes to your split lines let's now take a look at the contour lines so previously with Revit 2023 an earlier contour lines used to be adjusted on the masking inside the tab here in the model site drop menu we used to have a dialog here which we could open and adjust those now with the Topo solids which act as system families for themselves the contour lines are adjusted in the type properties so you can have multiple different Topo solid types and each one can have different contour lines so if I go here to the Contour display you're you're going to see that it looks like this so in this case we have two different types of contour lines we have the primary ones which go at every 1000 millimeters or one meter and then we have these secondary contour lines which go from 500 uh every 500 millimeters or every half a meter and then here we have the range type so is it single values or multiple values single values basically means you have only one at one spot and multiple values means well there's a lot of them obviously like we have here and then you can even check them on and off which I like and here you can insert new ones so for example I can insert a new one which is going to start at let's say 2 000 millimeters it's going to stop at whatever we're going to just place it as a single value and then it can be uh I don't know a primary control line and then if I uncheck both of these apply okay apply we're only going to have that one single value at 2 meters so you can see it here anyways let's go back here check on these two and I'm just going to uncheck this one hit apply okay apply and there we go now you have noticed here that we have this primary and secondary Contours but we don't really have the option to adjust the line type while that can be adjusted in a view by view basis or it can be adjusted on a project-wide basis so on a kind of single view basis you can go just to the view properties go to visibility Graphics overrides as a find topography and then in topography here we have the primary and secondary contour lines if you want to set it up for an entire project so in all views to have different display for these two types of lines what you can do is you can just go to the manage tab find the object Styles and there again under typography you're going to notice that we have our primary Contours and secondary Contours and you can adjust those you can see the primary ones are have the Align weight of six and the secondary ones have line weight of one that's why we have some thicker lines and some tender lines and I'm now just going to cancel out of this menu now let's talk about subdivisions and the truth is I don't really like them so anyways here when you select a topo solid we're going to get a topless solid shaping panel and there we have the subdivide tool when you select it you have basically the option to sketch out a subdivision so if I go here to the site plan I can create a rectangle like so and then this is going to be a subdivision when I go back to the 3D view this is what that's going to look like so essentially you get another additional layer on top of on top of the existing Topo solid and then here you can set up the height of this now the downside when it comes to setting up the height is you can't really go negative so you can't really create a reveal it can only be kind of added on so if you want to make it smaller like 100 you can do that but you can't really go below one it has to be a positive value which I find a little bit annoying so anyways uh if you want to adjust the material here you can just go to material and for example if we want to turn this into a road I can assign this pavement material and it's going to look like that now we do have the option to inherent uh Contours so we have this option so right now you can see we have Contours even on this subdivision however if we select the subdivision and uncheck that you're going to notice now it's going to be flat so I think this can be interesting if you're creating roads or parking or something like that and you don't really want to show Contours let's say you only want to show Contours on actual grass Earth and so on so you do have that ability now my main issue with these subdivisions is the fact that when you cut a section through this it looks absolutely awful so let me cut a quick section here open that up you can see this is what that looks like so this is basically the subdivision it isn't even the same line weight here we have this thick line that kind of eats up half of the subdivision it just doesn't look right if we go to find level of detail again it's just not better if I go to join geometry uh it's not going to let me yeah so we're going to get an error message we can try to resolve it but yeah it doesn't work really so I find it annoying just because it's kind of slapped on however the benefit the main benefit is the fact that now if you take this topography underlining topography and if you go and move one of the points your subdivision will adapt to that change so you do have that ability however if you want to create a road usually you would want to have it going inside typography not on top of it so for something like that you really can't use this effect patiently it's just not going to look right so another option that you can do is do cut to Geometry so you can cut your double solid just by going here on the modify Tab and going to the split element tool and now the split element tool can actually cut a dopo surface and I can go here and I can actually carve out a road for example so if I want to carve out a section like this hit finish okay the late instances we have some issues but there we go basically this is what we get so this is now separate uh geometry so now we can take this and we can make modifications we can create a new type we can turn it to something else so we can even give it an offset so something like that so now as you can see now we have that kind of indentation and this is going to look much better we can even apply different Contours and we can remove Contours so on and so forth so I think this is the better option in terms of how it performs especially when you run a section through this it's going to look much better oops not that but and you're also going to have the ability to adjust layers independently from here and here and you can even use joint geometry to join this so in section views in presentations it's going to look much better however the downside of this approach where you're splitting geometry is the fact that now when I select this and when I go to modify sub elements I'm going to be modifying this basically separately from the rest of the topography or the rest of the Topo solid so now if I want to make some adjustments I would essentially have to adjust both sides so if you're using this approach or if you're creating roads at this point some my my way of thinking is we would probably start off with this subdivision and then when you have everything kind of finalized you can replace a subdivision with a split Topo solid because it's going to give you better presentation options now let's talk about building bands well we don't have them now we use voids so the first option for voids is to use a component family here I have created this floor based void and floor-based families are going to be hosted on Topo solids so I can just cut avoid like that the second option is to go to component model in place I'm just going to use Topo solid for my category click OK and then you can simply use a void sketch out a rectangle hit finish extend it and then just use cut geometry to cut that void out of our Topo solid and finally third option is to go and use a mass so turn on masking inside go to in place mass and then you simply sketch something out like this you go to modify you select that you turn that into a void form so something like this okay let's adjust it a little bit let's select the top okay like that and then you would go to cut geometry again and just subtract subtract that void from our topography and then you can hit finish and at any point you can adjust any of these this one you can only adjust the position but that's that's it so that's basically three different ways to cut uh openings inside of our Topo solids uh this is pretty great because now we can make actual underground structures where topography goes over the building or parts of the building which I find uh really exciting speaking of cutting a topo surface if you have Foundation or a wall or something like that now you can actually cut that out of your Topo solid so if I come in here and go to the modify tab I can use the cut geometry to basically cut this with a wall and with the foundation so now when I select that now basically this is going to be cut so if I select these two items and hide them temporarily now you can see we actually have that opening in the Topo solid which I think it's really great it's actually going to calculate the material that's being dug out and all that good stuff so we now have options to actually cut the topography with building elements when it comes to hosting elements on topography we can actually host multiple different categories so if I go to masking inside obviously we can host site components and then we have the option to host parking if we want we can host floor based elements so for example this floor-based void that they have created I can host that as well then we can host railing so if you want to host trailing I for example in this case for this row they have created a curve as a as railing so I can simply go to my site plan and then I can and go to railing it's this railing one and then I can simply create railing just like that pick new host pick this hit finish go to the 3D View and this is what we get so now we get that curb modeled as railing which I really like now also we can use the floor slab Edge now you might think well this is great this is even better than railing and we can use it for Curves while we cannot these lab edges can only be placed on horizontal elements and even there it's not perfect but if I try to place it on a slab Edge if I try to place it here on a curve it's not going to work it's only going to allow me to do it here and at the bottom where we have a horizontal line so that doesn't work finally let's talk about graded regions or introduction of phasing into typography you want to demonstrate that the typography or the site was one way when you got there the existing site and then you made some changes and how much Earth was removed from the site or has to be added to the site so with topography we do this with the graded region tool so basically you click on the graded region tool you have a couple of options to create new typography exactly like the existing one or to create a new one based on the perimeter points only so the the second option will only keep kind of the outside points and the inner ones will be deleted and this one will keep everything so basically it will keep double your topography as the old existing phase and then it will bring in a new phase so I'm just going to click on this option and select the topography there we go and now we can start making some changes so for example in this site let's say we want to select this point and just move everything a little bit towards the inside just like that so we're we're making some change here and you can see that now we're starting to have kind of two different types of topography okay this is annoying for it going up so let's see can I move it like that horizontally okay so essentially I'm making some changes here let's say I'm happy with the set of changes I've made I can go here to modify and now it's going to appear like this it looks a little bit weird because here we have the new uh topography so here if I go to phasing it's going to say new construction if I select the gray one it's going to say phase created new construction phase demolished new construction so this is demolished now I actually don't like the fact that it's created in new construction so I'm just going to set this to existing and then hit apply and then also for the view I'm going to go to the face filter and just go to show complete when I hit apply in The View when it's set to phase new construction it's only going to show the modified typography if we go back to existing it's going to show us the old topography or how the site existed originally so that's basically how the graded region Works something that they like and I've noticed that here I don't think this was available previously it's the fact that it gives you the net cut fill so basically here you can see we have actually removed 731 cubic meters of Earth and then this is the fill this is the cut so basically it's going to give you all of this information so uh you have it on hand so I actually like the fact that it's here and then later on it can be even scheduled so that's basically how graded region works with the new Topo solid okay that's going to conclude today's tutorial if you have some perhaps specialized site video ideas or something like that please let me know in the comment section below if you want to get access to all of my Revit project files like some of the files I have shown you here but of course all of the rest all of my rabbit project files are available on my patreon page which I'm going to link up just below this video in the description and then also up in the cards above 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 and for more videos and also I've added a video over there that might interest you as well

Channel: Balkan Architect

Views: 78,850

Keywords: Revit, balkan architect, BIM, tutorial, Autodesk, toposolid, Revit toposolid, revit 2024, toposolid void, toposolids, landscape, topography

Id: gXffLa2vLF4

Length: 30min 7sec (1807 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 10 2023