Revit Tutorial Topography from Google Earth

all right here's a tutorial video for getting a uh topography set up uh specifically for that fold field far park project and so um to kind of show you first off couple things um this is kind of where i'm currently at so there's two ways you can do this um and i'll show you mainly one of them the other one uh there's already a tutorial video set up for that but i can help you with that one if you're still having some trouble um so one option the fastest option but uh sometimes actually harder to work with is using cad mapper so what cad mapper does is it's a it's actually a web-based program and it takes a um an image from a map and so in this case you know i have zoomed in on ford field you can see it even pulls you know some of the buildings in the area and some of the topography with the roads but the tricky part here is that it doesn't do a perfect job and you can see it is actually gets kind of messy um i did use that though for the site plan so you can get some of the views here of the site but um like i was saying it is a little bit harder to customize based on that and so uh if you want to use this as an initial template to work off from it's not a bad way to go but personally i rather build mine from scratch and so that's probably what i would recommend for you guys i'm going to close out of that cad mapper version uh it does have some perks to it in terms of it being quick and giving you the buildings and stuff but if you build it from scratch uh which is essentially i use a google uh earth image okay so you can see that in the back the one i use actually is from a zoning map and so that's why you have the yellow lines there uh but that's where i kind of use that as an outline and i trace out my forward field park shape you have some of the roads there and then this is a little bit better for customizing um so especially if you plan on making some changes you want to add features to the actual site then this is kind of a good option to do that and so that's what i'm going to walk you guys through coming up next here this is what i at least what i use again it's still not perfect i haven't found naturally a better way to do it though so this is just what i would recommend for this particular part of the project and here's kind of a 3d view and ultimately you can get you know some 3d views set up like this this is just an example like i said not perfect but i think it's a little easier to try to customize and make it your own and so this is what i will show you guys how to do next okay so the first thing i'm going to do is actually go here to google earth so you can just search it on google or if you want to type it right into google.com earth and then uh you launch earth and it pulls this up and then in the search bar all i did was search for ford field park which is 151 griswold street northville michigan and then i got zoomed into this spot okay so just like usual on google earth there's not too much to it you can scroll in and out if you click and drag it pans and then if you click the scroll wheel around if you're in 3d mode so this is also a great way to kind of explore the site a little bit so if you're interested in you can still zoom in if you want to rotate around i hold down the scroll wheel and then move it around so you can kind of take a look at some more specific features if there's something you want to take a closer look at google earth is a great option for that so you can see you know here's the roundabout here's the entrance off from hutton i think it is uh there's the current staircase uh that we'll be re remodeling and hopefully taking something here that we can make it a little bit more inviting coming from this downtown northville area all right so first off to get the screenshot what i would be doing is uh first off under layers okay so under map style sorry i changed this to clean so that takes off all the labels okay secondly i switch this to 2d view and then finally i click on this button to make it face north i think it just makes the most sense in my opinion and then pan this around so that's what you actually want to get there and then i'll grab my snipping tool and then simply cr grab a image here so i'll take everything from around here over and including some of that ford field east into the street okay so once you have this you'll save it somewhere that you could find it again um so i'll save it here and just for the sake of ease i'll put it on my desktop here so this is my ford field park google earth image and then hit save now um don't get rid of your google earth yet we're going to come back to this in a second actually while we're here i'm just going to really quickly do a couple things here i'm going to change my readings right now it's set up to be reading in meters and so if you click on the settings there scroll down and there's one here that says units of measurement and we're going to change that to feet and miles all right i'll hit save and now um the kind of cool thing here is that on google earth well wherever my mouse pans over so you can see right now i'm like over the baseball diamond if i look in this bottom right hand corner okay you see that number keeps changing right now it says 840 feet right if i move it over by the baseball field it says 793 you know as i keep moving it goes up a little bit 794 maybe 795 on certain spots right so it's not perfect but it gives you an idea you know the parking lot here 794 over here by by la fitness you know we're getting over ford field east 793 and then the big one would be the big jump if you go up start going up the stairs you see it jumps really quickly to um you know 802 all the way up to the street street level is 822 feet okay so by by the time you get to the street over here 822 compared to the field is 794 you know we're jumping almost 30 feet and so that's why the staircase uh you want to keep in mind it should be going from about 796 to 823 all right the other thing that we're going to using this for in in a little bit is taking some measurements so if you click on that measure tool right now it's measuring in feet right and we're going to get some measurements that allow us to scale it so for example here if i um measure out this sidewalk right now i can see that that sidewalk edge is a total of um oh sorry i clicked out of that real too quick let's try it one more time click through it through here to here i can see it's about 215 feet okay and we'll use that in a second i'll show you guys that okay so i'm going back to revit now okay similar process to what we've done before but we'll start i'll go ahead and start a brand new file here file click on new and this is going to be an architectural template and hit okay okay so um when we're building the site plan you always want to start building um on the actual site plan portion i'm just going to move some of these around just give me some more space to work with okay so these are just your camera views this is where uh the east view would come from the north view so on so forth oops that's not right i need to zoom in a little bit click and drag all right um anyways let me i just want to give a little bit more space to work with since our site's pretty large okay so um now that i'm here i'm gonna go over again to site plan and i guess i probably should have done that here my fault okay so let's go ahead and just click and drag a couple of these i'm just giving myself a little bit more space to work with when i get to the camera views and then being able to move them again easily a little bit later okay one more view here i'm going to click just scroll back out and stick that over there okay so what i'm going to do now is insert that image that we did the screen capture of so i'm going to go to insert image and i'm going to find where i saved that i believe i did it on the desktop here so let's go to desktop and scroll down find ford field park here's my image hit open okay so when this first loads up the size of it is going to be honestly somewhat random so um kind of just based on the size of your screen i think is what it is and so right now it's coming in at 333 feet and then 214 feet high and so now to scale this out um we have the scaling option right now it's set to 240. okay and now so if i come out of this real quick and i'm going to quick take a quick measurement so there's a measure button and i'm going to measure that exact same spot i did before right so right right now it's set up to 43 looks like it's about 40 closer to 44. okay so 44 feet so let's just assume it's 44 and then i'm going to need to scale this out so since it's 44 feet right there in actuality right when we did it in google earth um when i did that in google earth instead of 44 it was closer to 214 right or 250 that says a214 so 214 compared to 44 i just need to figure out when my scaling factor is all right so then i open up the calculator um calculator here let's open up over here so i'm going to do figure out my conversion factor so it's 214 on this side i'm going to divide it by what it was showing up on revit which was 44. so it looks like i need to make it about 4.86 times larger than um the current size on revit okay so four point oh forgot the number already on top let's see here uh 4.86 so let's go and use that it's not going to be perfect but it'll get us much closer okay so then uh if i click on my image here right now it says 240 is the scale so i need 240 times bring up my calculator again so it's really should be 240 times 4.86 so i need 1166.4 so let's do that i'm going to change this number to 1166.4 i think that was the number yep i believe that was it so 1166.4 and now if i go check out my sidewalks there right so i'll go measure this one more time okay it's not perfect but now i'm at you know 208 almost and so i'm much closer to the correct size and you want to make sure you scale that properly or else uh when you go create your typography it might be all sorts of crazy all right like i said i just like to move those camera views outside of my image there just to make sure i'm not clicking on them and getting things kind of weird okay so now to actually create it i have to create a topo surface so to do that i'm going to come over here to masking site and topo surface right okay so the way topo surface was you're going to place points based on an elevation right so these are based on feet and uh you can do it as an absolute elevation i personally actually like to start things off at zero and uh just because we're not actually going to be comparing it to you know actual sea level um so right now i'm going to kind of look around my site and as i'm painting around the site i see that you know the lowest number is really 790 something right so down here by the parking lot 794 i think the lowest i'm really getting is around 793 kind of in the middle of the field so i'm going to treat that kind of as my zero and the highest i'm going to go is up here is 822. right so it looks like kind of up along the streets 8 22 825 maybe some of these areas up here 8.25 okay so to kind of simplify that i would start things from zero and then the highest points i'm getting is closer to you know 8 26 let's say all right so what i would be doing is as i find my way around i'm going to simplify this a little bit i'm going to assume that most of this area here is kind of flat and so i'm going to kind of assume that my all this around the field is is pretty flat and i'm going to build it up a little to kind of create that hill okay so um let's go and start off at the high points and then work our way back down so at the highest point after 8 25 and it works down 8 23 and then maybe let's see over here i got 8 some 8 eighteens all right so i'm going to do a little bit of quick math so if it's 8 20 get my calculator out one more time okay so the highest points was 826 the lowest points down here was like 790 i think 794 something like that so i'm going to say that at the highest i'm going to go with 32 and then at the lowest will be zero right so then if i come back over here i'm going to just start placing some points and the first thing i'm going to do is change the elevation here let's change these to 32 oops okay 32 hit enter and so now wherever i click it's going to start creating elevation points that are around 8 32. okay and so i'm just going to start clicking a few over here and sometimes it's it's kind of nice you can always change the number later but just to kind of create a box around where you're going to be so i know you know most of my points up this way are going to be around 8 32 or around 32 go and kind of be going back and forth over here on this on this side i'm actually looking kind of looking for some flat areas so 793 so these are more going to be close to zero okay and so then i'll i'll also see over here go back to my revit sorry um change this now to zero so you have to keep changing your elevation values so over here i'm going to say that some of these points are leading more closer to zero and okay as i create this outer shape you can see that it fills in all the topography right now so i have all this this would be assuming that it's all a downhill slope right but as i start adding um and actually i'm going to change my my view here a little bit so if i click on these let's go ahead and do that right now i'm going to change this over here to wireframe okay that way i can actually see what's underneath so now as i go to go back to placing points i know remember all all along my the edge here should actually be really closer to zero right so then as i click around the outside edge of the park and you know just for the example here i already have all that almost zeroed out and that gives me a nice really nice um flat surface to work off from and if i want to make some uh additions along the way then all i do is just add you know make some slight elevation changes so let's say um over here i've got let's say i know it's going to go up a little bit on this side so maybe i'll make these over here closer to four alright so just so i'm starting to see some changes in elevation and that gives me kind of just something to work off from and that's kind of how i'm creating my general topo surface and now if i hit the check mark and let's go look at my 3d view real quick switch over to default 3d view okay and now if i look at it from the side i actually see that i'm getting that nice big slope going up this might you know the park would be down here it's sloping up to the street and then i would just keep adding more points depending on if i want certain areas to be flat here for example for the road then i might add a few more 32s along that edge but that's that's kind of how we create that topo surface and if i go back to the site now and i can even change this back instead of wireframe if i change this more to [Music] shaded for example then i've got my my earthy feel and i can change it to grass so on so forth okay so that's uh the basic rundown how i'm creating the toposurface for for field park using google earth

Channel: Gabriel Pak

Views: 5,855

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Id: D9encqhEoCo

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021