Roads in Revit - Roads from floors in Revit (with Environment for Revit)

hey guys balkan architect here and in today's tutorial we're going to be creating a road in revit so i get this question quite often uh how do we create roads in a revit unfortunately there isn't a tool that allows you to place a road on your topography so that's why i decided to create this video where i'm going to be showing you uh in my opinion the the best approach to creating roads in the rivet roads that kind of perfectly follow the topography and there are actually going to be floors that are kind of designed to follow the the topography uh on which they are well hosted i guess you can say so that's going to be the topic of uh today's video uh now before we get into that if you're interested in the site design if you're interested in a landscape architecture through revit i actually have a site design and coordination course for revit it's of course it's over 10 hours long i'm going to link it up in the description just below this video and also in the cards above it's a really good course if you want to master site design and coordination revit i like to encourage you to check it out also as part of that course you will get an extended free trial to the environment plug-in this is a plug-in that's specialized for landscape architecture in revit utilizing building information modeling when it comes to landscape architecture it has a lot of unique tools and we're actually going to be exploring some of those tools a little bit later in this video now if you're interested in the environment plug-in i'm going to also link that up just below this video in the description and up in the cards above and you can also use the discount code balkan architect uh for a generous uh discount or it's not a discount it's an extended uh license so if you get a subscription you get extra 55 days on your subscription completely for free by using the coupon code so i think that's a good deal so anyways now without any further ado let's jump into revit and let's take a look at creating roads so what you can see here is i have some simple topography here and i want to host a road on this topography so for this approach what i like to do is go to the site plan and then the first thing you want to do is you want to sketch out where that road is going to be heading so what i actually want to do is go here to annotate go to detail line and then i can set this to white lines for example and then here i can just go perhaps perhaps like this go all the way up to here go down up to here and then come to here hit the escape key a few times so we have these this is kind of the outline of our road then i'm going to go again to the detail line in this case i'm going to use the pick lines tool and here i'm going to give it a let's go with the six meter offset so just like this like that and like this perfect hit the escape key a few times and then you want to go to the modify tab and you want to use trim and extend to corner to fix these corners up you want to go back to annotate back to detail line and just let's close these up here and here and then also we want to use fillet arc tool with the radius of 6 meters for these inside arcs or actually let's go with i think we can go with 10 meters perhaps let's see can we get away with that no we cannot okay so i think if we try nine i think that will work so let's try that again yeah this will work okay perfect and then on the outside you just add the width of the road so 9 plus 6 is 15 so you just add that and you just do that on the outside just like this so there we go so we have a road that kind of it's a u-shaped road that's going to be going here now obviously we cannot see any of that here uh on the topography so the next step is we actually want to get the elevations alongside the edges of this road so how do you do that well you can use the elevator the spot elevation tool to find those so you can just zoom in here and in this case it's not reporting your uh it's it's not very precise it's rounding everything at at four meters so we can select that spot elevation go here into edit type uh here we can go into units format and let's just add just a couple of decimal places here click ok apply okay i know this is still four but it has that couple of zeros so we have those decimal places so you just want to select this you want to go to copy and basically you want to copy it as many times as you want so basically here we have the this position we can have this position here [Music] here okay so this is all at five and then you can go alongside this uh kind of arc so i like to kind of follow the same number of elevation spots on the inside and on the outside perhaps just following this like that and you're just gonna follow that along now uh more of these that you place more accurate it's going to be in the end and you'll see kind of the the end result and in a few moments and then here we can just place a few like that perhaps here perhaps here a couple of them there we go hit the escape key a few times and there we go so you can place these populations here i think i've placed a bit too many so let's delete a few of these yeah perhaps place it there perhaps we don't even need these and these yeah so you don't want to have too many because it's just going to be a harder job to complete this so there we go i think this might be enough just like that i'm just gonna simplify this surface a little bit and you'll see in a moment what i'm talking about so there we go we have a few of these elevation spots uh or spot elevations okay so now once we have marked our elevations the next step is to go to architecture uh go here to floor and then you just want to create a floor that follows this detail line so let me switch this to 300 millimeters use big lines hover over one of the lines use the tab key just once hit the tab key once and then you get your you get your whole outline and then once you're done with that you go to modify sub elements and then here what you want to do is you want to place points wherever you have placed these spot elevations so you just want to go to add point and then let's add one here here here here i want to add one here yeah i think we can follow yeah now let's add one here as well here here just like that there we go i hit the escape a few times now let's move these kind of a little bit closer and as you've seen where those kind of positions are so i think this one should be closer in here just like that and these should be a little bit closer in here yeah okay there we go okay so now if i just make a cross selection go to filter and then go to check none floors apply okay so now the floor is selected we can go to modify sub elements and now what you can do is okay i haven't added the points here okay here and here there we go so now you just want to go to modify sub elements and you just select the elements and then you assign elevations so for example here i can just select this whole line and say this should be at five meters next uh this one here this point here now if you can't hit it uh you can just use the tab key there we go this should be at five this should be at five so you're basically reading whatever is displaying here on that elevation point and you're just entering that number so this is five this is five and then you just go like that all the way around this is four point 18 [Music] this is something similar like 4.21 and so on so you basically repeat this process for the rest of these points i'm just going to skip that to gonna keep this short okay so i have now completed this and what i can just simply do uh is go here to modify and we're done so now if i go to the 3d view that looks like this so you can see that the road is following the surface but it seems to be like embedded into the surface and you can easily fix this by going to one of the elevations just zoom in and go to the move tool and just move everything up ever so slightly so i would like to go like point one or perhaps 0.15 so that's like 15 centimeters and now as you can see the road is on top of that surface now in some cases it you are going to have issues like this but it's usually an easy fix either by modifying the surface or by uh or something similar i think we have a do we have a point here no so we can just kind of either modify the surface or we can go back to the to the road go to modify sub elements and then we can move these elements up just a little bit so perhaps eight instead of seven here and yeah that should fix that issue and there we go that's kind of an easy way to create roads in revit it definitely does take some time and it's not a perfect solution but it is a solution also if you don't want to see these kind of lines in the middle that's an easy fix as well you just go to visibility graphics overrides scroll down to floors so once you find floors expand that menu and you find these interior edges so if you just uncheck those it's not going to display those lines the in the middle of the floors so there we go uh i i like this solution because it's easy you just used regular revit tools for that but as i've shown you uh it is a little bit uh annoying to have to do you have to do everything manually now if you don't want to do everything manually there is a quicker solution by using the environment uh plugin so the environment uh plug-in as i've mentioned that's part of my course and if you get of course you get extended an extended trial usually the the free trial is two months if you get the course you get five months of free trial so extra three months added on top of that so let me show you how that works so here this is the environment plugin these are all of the tools that you get as part of that actually i'm going to be showing you a couple of approaches one where we use a similar approach to this but instead of doing everything manually it's just a few clicks and another approach is inserting these land xml files which is made for situations where you're working with an engineer a road engineer that's working in civil 3d and then you can just insert that data directly into revit by using this tool but first let me show you how to shape typography so as you've seen here we had to place all of these elevations and so on uh but actually there is a quicker solution with the environment plug-in so let me show you i'm just going to make a broad selection here select all of these annotation elements go to filter uh check none and then let's check out uh check our spot elevations uh and our lines there we go hit apply okay and we can just actually delete that okay let's go back to the 3d view let's select this road and now we have an option to reset shape so what that's going to do is it's just going to well reset it so now it's just completely flat here okay so now let me show you the approach using the environment plugin so you have this shape by typography tool and the shape by typography tool is used in order to basically adapt your floor to the shape of the topography that it's kind of being overlaid with so basically what you do you can select your floor hold the control key select your topography you go to the environment tab you go to shape by typography and here basically what you do is here you have a dialog it's going to report that you have one topo surface selected and one slab selected here you can set up the related elevation so how far up or down is your floor are going to be in relationship to the surface so i want it to be kind of 15 centimeters above uh and then here we can include the the points uh in inside of the contour so not only on the outside of the floor but also on the inside of the floor which is really good also here we can simplify that the edge slope if we want so again for less points i guess for a quicker uh calculation time and once we're done with the settings we just click ok and then it's just going to take a few moments and as you can see now that floor is perfectly adapted to that surface and it looks really really good so as you can see everything is fitting in perfectly and it looks much better than the first approach just because it's going to include many more points along the way whereas previously we were kind of limited with the amount of spot elevations we were placing and obviously there is a lot of time savings with this uh with this approach now let me just show you what to do in a situation where you're inserting a land xml file so how does this basically work so let me just go here to the file menu and start just a new simple project i'm just going to use a simple uh default metric template and then uh what you want to use here or what you want to do here is first i'm just going to insert a cad file just for the coordinates so i'm just going to go here to insert uh import or link cad yeah let's go here i'm just going to select this cad file and open that up so that's going to bring this in and then also let's go here to collab or to manage let's go to acquire coordinates and let's just acquire those coordinates let's see okay uh so uh what i'm going to do next is just go here to or let's go to the 3d view just to see what's oops not that file this file there we go let's go to the 3d view just to see what's going on here so what you do now is you go to the environment tab and here we can insert the file so as i said this is a file from civil 3d so if you have a civil engineer designing that road it's going to save you a lot of headache because roads in real life usually don't look like this usually the topography is a little bit adapted to that road so the road can kind of have that perfect uh perfect slope and so on what's important for road design i guess so what you want to do here is just go here to insert that file you specify the path here i'm just going to specify this example file uh open that up i'm going to be using the shared coordinates click on import and there we go so as you can see it's just going to import that here and this is just going to be kind of simple topography and now uh what's really good is using this insert land xml tool in collaboration with the shape by typography so i can now use this cad file that as you can see these red lines are specifying where that road is and i can just go to architecture i can go to the floor tool i can use the pic lines to pick out the uh that road and here i can just go and close it off see here i see i have a an open line there we go an open loop so anyways once you've done this i hit finish now i have a road let's make it 300 millimeters perfect so once we have this road now i can simply go to the environment tab i can go to select that hold the control key select the this topography above then go to shape by typography i can specify the related elevation offset here uh and okay i'm fine with the settings click ok and now it's just going to adapt that floor to this topography that we have imported and as you can see this is now complete and we have kind of adapted our floor to this to the surface above so let me just show you how that looks in a section because i think that's where this is kind of uh really really impressive so let me just cut a section through this open that up and of course we do have to make some small modifications as i was showing you before for floors just here to turn off that interior edges okay and here we go so this now looks really really impressive so see as you can see this is that kind of a file from a from a road engineer from civil 3d and we have just adapted everything into revit geometry and revit components quite easily with just a few clicks so i think it's a really good solution as i said if you want to check out this plugin i'm going to leave a link to that in the description of this video and if you want to get an extended free trial to it and also get a whole site design and coordination in revit course while that's all on my website balkan arctic.com that's going to be the the first link just below this video in the description 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: 77,028

Keywords: Revit, tutorial, BIM, building information modeling, autodesk, roads, road, roads from floors, hardscape, landscape, site, archintelligence, arch-intelligence, environment for revit, environment

Id: ixgZ30wAPpc

Length: 19min 14sec (1154 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 02 2021