Site Modeling in Revit from a Landscape Architect's Point of View

[Music] hello hello hello welcome everybody welcome to another episode of bim after dark live my name is jeff also known as the revit kid thank you for joining me today i have an awesome guest and we're going to be talking about awesome stuff site modeling and landscape modeling for architecture from the eyes of someone experienced in landscape architecture which i think is pretty neat um and probably something that i know a lot of you may not be experienced in so always great to hear from people using uh revit differently than i'm used to hearing it so i'm super excited stick around um she's also going to be showing a tool that has been developed for this by her and her team and you don't want to miss that especially if you've ever tried using the the uh the site tool that uh the site add-in that came with with revit and autodesk then you're gonna you're gonna to see this because i could tell you it's a little bit better um so thank you guys for joining me again this is this is live um it's a new time today um um so i have a bottle of water instead of a glass of wine but that's okay because it's the middle of the day and we might have some some different guests uh or some different uh viewers which is pretty awesome um before i introduce our guest i did want to um remind you guys that we are live and feel free to chat i'll be checking it out the whole time through and i also want to um uh introduce you guys to um the new uh sponsor title sponsor of this show so uh as you know in the past i i had a couple different title sponsors i'm really excited about this one because it's a company and a product that i think many of you may not have heard of but will also find a ton of value in so let me roll the reel and then we'll talk a little bit about [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all right so you guys hopefully saw that reel but the new title sponsor of this show is polycam anyone doesn't know what polycam is it is actually an app for iphones and ipads um the way i got sort of introduced to it um is i bought this iphone a couple years ago and it was the first one i ever had that had lidar uh you guys are probably familiar with what lidar is and so um i needed an application to try out my lidar i was you know pretty pretty excited to have lidar and try it out and so the first one that came up when i searched was actually polycam and fast forward two years down the road um i've tested it out i've done all kinds of cool stuff and i reached out the company and they're awesome and they've also been asking for feedback on how to get these scans into revit and so what you'll see is it is a application where you can do lidar scanning as well as well as photogrammetry directly from your ipad or your phone and it exports into lots of different formats what type of formats well point clouds with rgbs you saw the video there meshes like obj stl and you name it fbx and it goes through it so as you guys know the the newer version of revit allows you to bring in obj with textures however previous versions let you bring in point clouds with with uh with rgb and so um i will tell you it's a phenomenal application super easy to use um you can use it for free sign up and and roll through it there's a link i mentioned before polycam.bimafterdark.com there was also a qr code if you missed it go back and scan it from your device but polycam thank you for supporting us and i'm super excited to let you guys know in the audience more about it in the future and some of the cool things you can do with it okay so now let's bring in our guest lauren i'm so sorry that you had to wait so long and stare at just me doing all that you didn't get to see the hype video and the music and everything i had playing there because it was pretty cool so you have to check it out afterwards i want to welcome to the show lauren schmidt how are you doing lauren hey you're doing good all right thank you for joining me today i'm super excited about this um i i've as we talked about before earlier and i think you've probably seen a couple of my previous episodes i do do end up doing a lot of site modeling and topography modeling and stuff like that revit but usually it's for the sake of visualizations and not necessarily with an end game in mind of being useful and so i'm always excited when when folks are trying to do the opposite which is not only just model but also make models that are useful for for their their their profession and so um before we jump into all of that i think uh this is the first time on the show so i think you should probably introduce yourself to the bim after dark audience um so lauren who are you what what what do you do sure yeah i'm lauren schmidt i am a landscape architect um so been in practice for going on almost 10 years now so i i do work at i think you mentioned on twitter if i work with aaron miller at parallax team so we're we're uh yeah and you know when we set this up when we set this up i was looking back and i didn't realize that i did back-to-back parallax i usually like to put someone in between parallax but that's okay that and i should have just brought john and melissa and everyone in on the next week and just had a whole month of parallax but that's awesome so yes you do work with parallax team if you guys missed the episode last week check it out aaron came on for the like fourth or fifth time and we talked about groups versus links and it was super super fun so so awesome so so um i guess uh before before we jump into the the the actual landscape and all that good stuff um i'm curious uh um what what drove you uh before joining parallax um to to thinking revit was a useful tool for landscape architecture because usually people just wipe it away and don't even bother so what was the driving force for you um wait yeah so i guess right out of school i ended up at an architecture firm architecture engineering firm in indianapolis where they had been their architecture side had been using revit for like five or six years and this was almost 10 years ago now so they've been using it for a while um and they had like a small site landscape group which i was a part of and they were they kind of had everyone else in revit already so they had interiors in revit they had mvp and revit um they worked closely with like a structural it was almost like it was in-house but it wasn't and they were all in revit too and so it was basically just like landscaping civil was not in revit and so they were interested and and kind of getting that started and i was able i was interested also kind of i don't know certain people i think are more i find revit a little bit easier maybe to learn than others i'm not definitely like my personality type is is one that yeah i took pretty quickly to it and i was able to kind of lean on the architecture team and their knowledge to kind of learn from them but a lot of it was self kind of self-taught and so that's when i started my blog land dark bim because there wasn't really any resources out there for landscape architects wanting to learn how to use revit um i knew there was other people out there doing it but there's just like there was no resources um so yeah that's kind of how i got my start awesome yeah i should have mentioned that as well so lauren runs a blog called land arcbim and i'll put the links to that in the description as well as on the blog post tomorrow but um uh yeah so so as far as so i guess you didn't have to convince necessarily the the firm you worked for at the time but um i have to imagine that there's a lot of frustration in trying to get what you needed done out of revit so but clearly you had the personality where you wanted to try and figure it out right but i have to imagine that that was challenging was was that challenging yeah it was i think it's one of those things where when you first start down something like that like you don't know what you don't know and so like that was probably a little bit to my advantage that like yeah and like i was also in the midwest working on relatively simple sites and so that probably also helped a little bit relatively flat yeah relatively like indiana is pretty flat yeah yeah um so like but yeah so i each i started probably like with baby steps but i've gotten and worked on yeah a lot much more complex sites um yeah a couple of likes so after we actually moved abroad for a couple years and so i got really into dynamo um and so you'll see that on my blog during that time period yeah i i got so dynamo was kind of like my first taste of like the revit api and like understanding what revit can actually do on the back end which it can do quite a bit right overcoming those limitations you're feeling on the front end right and so yeah dynamo was kind of my a big step towards like getting landscape a little bit more figured out but still very very limited awesome so so today i think the goal here was to sort of run through some some out-of-the-box uh tips and tricks that you've sort of developed over time for for anyone whether you're an architect or a landsat architect or or or anyone who has to sort of deal with the site tools in revit uh so or i mean i would say the site tools and adjacent tools in revit and then as well as talk about um foreground which is the application that you guys developed to overcome some of these limitations so i'm excited for that uh everyone uh stick around for a minute what we are going to do is we actually are going to take a quick break and we are going to do the tip of the week um for those of you who have been following on with the show um you're probably familiar with this segment but uh basically we're gonna take a quick break from the topic and we are going to go to the big bad bin tip of the week which is sponsored i'm sure a lot of you guys know following along with this show here but real-time um program and add-in to revit that is phenomenal super easy to use if you watch three or four episodes ago i'll put a link in there um we ran through some of the new versions so head on over to enscape.bimafterdark.com sign up for a free trial or i believe you can get 10 off discounts so the tip of the week uh this week is actually um from uh tim as the user and i believe i believe um the tip came from dan stein because i think i remember seeing him post about it but it's a super easy super quick um tip that i think a lot of people i actually showed someone else this week and um and i thought it was so useful that i shared here so what i have here is a mep model this is a plumbing model and i'm going to bring in a link so i'm going to just load in a ductwork link i hope that nothing blows up i probably should use the smaller model so i'm going to bring in the the ductwork link and what this tip is is how you can copy and paste elements from a link to your current model okay so here's my ductwork link if i zoom into the corner here and i tab and i'm just gonna select so all these duct work this is in my link so i'm just gonna quickly tab tab tab tab and select all this work and if i go up to the top notice i can actually use copy i can use ctrl copy if i click ctrl copy and i go down to paste i can paste a line to same place and guess what happens it's actually pasting those elements it's going to give me some some warnings based on or not some warning some of them are updates or or what they're going to take take properties from the current file i'm going to click ok and then i'm going to turn off our link and then you'll see that our elements have been copied and pasted from the link into the current file super useful tool that um hopefully you don't have to use too often but uh but i think it's a tip that that some of you guys can probably probably gain some some value out of so let me just turn off the link so you can see what happened there so there we go there now these duct these ducts or fabrication ducts in this case these are actually in my local file so tim thank you so much for the tip i appreciate it um let me jump back to my face here so everyone can see me instead of the duct and lauren as well all right so thank you for the tip if you guys have a tip um feel free to email me if i choose it i will be sending you a free t-shirt so that was our little tip of the week break thanks for sending it in tip and i hope that guys i hope that uh that added some value to your lives i know i showed someone this week and they were like face palm pretty cool okay so lauren now you're back i know you didn't get to see any of that but hopefully you you heard it and we're like this is what jeff's doing pretty pretty cool tip i don't know if you knew that but i remember when i learned it uh a year or two ago i thought it was pretty wild and i thought it was like can i always do this and so i happened to be in a 2018 file last week and i tried it out and it does work which is pretty cool so apparently we could always do that which is pretty neat alrighty so lauren let's do this so ran through a little bit of of your history how you got to where you are so i think it's just time to jump into some demo and let's talk about some cool stuff i'm sure we're gonna have some questions remember guys you are in chat so i'm sure we're gonna have some questions so feel free i'm sure you've got some stuff teed up and and hopefully they take us in all sort of directions but um what's the first thing you want to show us today lauren um sure so i guess is my screen being shared then jeff okay yeah so i was just going to talk through yeah some of the kind of common landscape workflows and then we can kind of touch on foreground a little bit and then but yeah essentially and this is always kind of a question that we kind of bring up and discuss is like is kind of talking through like yeah what do you build a site out of like you get people talking about typography like yourself but often we're building sites and landscapes are built out of like essentially shape edited floors or slabs and so kind of the old school method they you do is basically you can have you can have these floors and then you just have to shape it at them manually which is how i started out doing it like it works it's just it's just like super it's kind of kind of super slow and can be super painful um but essentially yeah you just you're going to modify sub elements you can like grab them all to like speed things up if you see if i know what i'm working at it'll be a good test yeah and i can like set the elevation of those and they're there somewhere yeah up there somewhere but yeah it's it's just you can see it's just a super it's super tedious process um and that's something that that i learned how to you can augment that a little bit with dynamo um and you can start to automate that and then the awesome thing kind of about like revit and the back end of the api is like topography and floors can interact like they basically both have points and they can like you can pull points between them so you can do that with dynamo or you can do that um with an atom so that's one of like the big things that we're doing with foreground this as an example drape slabs was kind of like one of our big tools where you can basically just pick a whole whole bunch of slabs and then uh let's sit here and think about it it's gonna find try to find a host you can see it grabs that topography there um and then it's gonna basically just start calculating what needs to happen to bring those floors up to that topography um so we have we have some different like interior exterior point methods um that lets you kind of control how many points you put in i'll just go ahead and run this really quick um it'll take a second because i have eight slabs selected but then it's just gonna bring them up to that topography basically the method i i chose was basically looking for kind of all the minimum boundary points and then also adding like points along the contours as well that's awesome yes so yeah so the process that lauren's talking about there is without using this add-in you would be manually placing and modifying these points of the slab to adjust to topography and i'm sure anyone out there who's done that process knows how lovely and fun it is because i know i've done it before and actually probably one of the worst things about that process is when things change because because it can be you know it can be a nightmare sometimes to to reupdate especially if you have multiple things aligning at the same plane so that's super helpful yeah and you can still good and then modify things manually after the fact but it yeah it helps you kind of so was that was that adding elements too based on the add-in as needed yeah it you can do it so it doesn't add any points um but depending on like what your topography shape is so you can see like here even like the areas where i didn't add as many points like the topography is kind of like bleeding through a little bit um so yeah we you could kind of fix that with shape topo which is sort of like the inverse of drape in a lot of ways but it essentially lets you like align a topography to the underside um you can also like change the offset so i can go ahead and grab a few of these guys and then it's going to do kind of similar but reverse and it's going to push those points back into the topography so that it it follows it effectively um and in general like my my approach with topography is that it because of the way topography works in revit it's like it's a very limited documentation tool like you can't typography doesn't have any sort of like hatch pattern and plan like it's a mesh like it has so many limitations that we generally in my experience and and how we're treating in foreground is we treat it as this like kind of big host like visual element tool but like not like super useful for documentation um so a lot of our tools for like for grading are much more focused around like slabs so i mean that's interesting so so before before foreground before adding let's say or before any of that um were you treating toppo the same way where it was sort of this the blanket of let's say grass or dirt whatever and then you're kind of hosting above and below and that's how you were building your site plans or were you working with sub-regions and the topography environment to try and make these things work yeah i mean sub-regions i just never use those anymore it's because because you get nothing but errors when you try and use them you're right well they're they're just they're like topography but more useless i would say because these are you just get missing pieces of message right like they can't yeah they can't share edges this is like yeah they're like super useless i'm talking like if you're just visualizing like i can understand how people throw them in really quick because like yeah it follows the topography perfectly and you just need like a material or a path or a road like that's great but when you're actually making documentation like like what i do and and revit yeah like there's no hatch patterns and no edges and like that just immediately falls apart and so it doesn't really work um what about if if the host is changing so if if you're showing an existing or or you know existing a new graded grading plan or something like that it does you know how how are you interacting with let's say floors and or i shouldn't say streets and sidewalks with topography in that in that form you're still just using the the topography as the visualization of those changes but still managing the other stuff on top of it yeah i think it depends on the project like on a on a site like this where you have like a big kind of sprawling site and like not like the topography is more useful as a visualization tool but i've worked on like a number of like very urban sites where essentially there's like you might start with the topography as like a big base element to build up but then you fill in your sidewalks and roads and then like suddenly it's all floors like even your planters are floors um and that's like just much more useful because those are all solids with thicknesses that you can define um and so that's often the route you'll see on like on urban sites where you're you have like your building is so much of your footprint and it's just like sidewalks and like that interstitial space that's like almost all hardscape anyway right so like you're not even using topography and on those sorts of projects really yeah yeah yeah that's we we have plenty of sites where it's like you know it's like a five or ten foot change between like you know four or five hundred feet really that's flat that's flat sorry for the purpose of our visualization this is flat because then we could just use floors yeah that's true yeah and then one one of the other things about topography that i mean always drives people crazy like using um for documentation is like the whole triangulation issues that you get with topography um like if i get and i yeah you look at the surface you can you can see that the only thing you can put in a topography is points like you can't and as like a landscape architect or a civil engineer like you wanna you wanna be able to control where those contour lines go and you get like you get weird things like this is a small example of it but you get weird things and like this we're like oh yeah this is where the this is where the contour line should be going but yeah like you'll drive yourself crazy trying to fix topography and so that's what i get that's another big reason why we generally don't true so in that in that case so the only way that i've really overcome i mean the the flat part of the the close notch that's just a nightmare right but in the other area i guess the only the only way i've ever been able to overcome it is to to draw points for every single contour right for every single height then you can at least control a little bit of that i mean is that like for example when you when you were implementing this to create site plans for you know for the design firm for example would would you just deal with some of those imperfections or were you trying your hardest to to remove them no so so in general yeah we wouldn't use topography for our contour lines we would either be using model lines or you'd be using like a cad link like some something that actually like has the lines that are correct um because yeah you'll drive yourself crazy and it's like pointless exercise so so you manage that manage that topography file let's say it is a cad file that has uh poly polylines at at all the right heights you would just manage that um make a topo from it if you wanted the topo but then use that for the graphics per se just because right you would use that for the documentation because yeah like it is useful to know like there are some times where you want to fix things like this um and like so it is useful to know that you can go in and if you turn on your like triangulation edges you can start to see like why why these things happen like basically it like all these weird typography things are just a result of like interpolation along those edges um so like understanding why it's doing that is helpful if you like really need to fix it but in general like i i try to not want to fix it just because points more and more points the more points yeah but then you're you're adding yeah but then you have yeah then you have more points management right right right real quick uh reggie actually had a question hey reggie how's it going man um about the i guess this is probably in relation to the tool uh to the the drape tool you're just talking about um and i think i think it's a two-part answer but um he asked if they uh the floors relate to the topo or does the topo relate to the floor and i and so uh i think you can answer that hopefully yeah so it can be either either way depending on how you want to do it um like they're not establishing any like set relationships so you can still go in and modify the floor and then if you want the topography to follow you have to come back afterwards and like tell it that um and so yeah it could be either way depending on what you're doing and yeah we wanted to have to so i think maybe a second part of that question which i don't think he said but i could imagine him thinking is uh is you know when things change your you have to rerun that because there isn't a an associated relationship that right maintained i should say yeah yeah like we've thought about like when you start establishing relationships i was just thinking no don't do it don't do it you don't have to go down that road i'm thinking so like yeah that's good to know though yeah like i people always ask that and yeah we've like thought about that for some of the tools but yeah it likes quickly becomes like like you have to chase like all the relationships around yeah i was just thinking i'm just i'm just imagining my mind having something auto running and then you're moving that slab up in the topo trying to reform to it i'm just that's not even not even worth it yeah awesome awesome cool all right so uh so that's some topo slab edge stuff so uh what else we got yeah so after you kind of go floors and kind of one of the next steps is often you'll get people wanting to model curbs and so yeah out of the box one of the ways we often do that is with with railings um so yeah on the architecture tab you can go in and you can just like sketch a railing and if you have the right type of railing made um you can you can do it kind of old school out of the box but we have kind of a quick efficient method to do it with foreground um a quick curve and we have kind of two types that we ship out with foreground just to make it a little bit easier for you um so i have one supposed to like a sidewalk or one that's hosted to a road basically it's just like a six inch offset and then it can it will just start generating from edges so i can i can pick edges and i i checked the option where it's going to grab the entire segment length of that floor boundary which which speeds up the process considerably so this is not a railing it is a railing it is oh yes but it's usually it is using the pick line got it okay yeah so i was gonna go we'll look at this railing here for a second but yeah kind of one of the out-of-the-box trips tricks that i've learned kind of even just like when developing this tool is that railings are actually more stable if you use the non-continuous rail as opposed to like uh the top rail or a handrail which is which is like the older right there's an old school profile yeah yeah yeah yeah the old-school profile is actually more stable like it will give you less errors and it behaves a little bit better on like weird conditions which you can get like lots of weird conditions um on that yeah and then the great thing about yeah curbs as railings is that you can modify these sub elements it's going to stay it's going to stay and update whenever those things change so so it's automatically placing a a hosted rail to that floor you're not hosting photography in this case you're hosting to the floor right yeah it's you pick the edge of the floor and it's going to grab that floor as the host and then yeah it does a couple of things kind of but it's still just a railing like i could go in and edit the path manually too so amel had a question which i think is why i asked is it a railing he said could you use a slab edge for the curb yeah so slab edges don't host on slopes at all which is like a deal breaker yeah they kind of need that right so so yeah and that's why i was asking i was curious if it was just some sort of a sweat profile that you were creating or if it was the right the rail is way more useful i'm just i was curious yeah design tool uh in revit that it was trying i think what it what it developed was a masked sweep or something if if memory serves me right which was not used and i've i've even tried it with yeah in place sweeps and you start to get like essentially that the hardest part of a model of any curve is a curve that's sloped so you have a curved edge that's also sloped and like that's where like almost all out of the box rapid tools like will fall down even the railings do sometimes i i know we've had even the railings do sometimes yeah we've had some issues and our solution was usually to segment it uh you know to segment the curve and when we run into but that but you're talking a really wonky situation when that happens right it does it does happen um but that's where if you're using the older rail it's a lot more stable right as opposed to the top rail or or what not cool yeah yep that's awesome i was checking there was a question about um the cad link for contour so um i guess this is all on the lines he's asking so who was this junior matthew was asking um uh is there any uh toppo tool topo creation tools in foreground or or actually i guess maybe he's asking i'm trying to understand exactly i was asking but the way you create the the the contour does or the topo doesn't make a difference for foreground so if that toppo was created using a cat import versus making a regular topo from scratch is there a difference i think that's kind of what you asked matthew let me know if it's not but i think that's what you're asking yeah no i mean the thing is that once it's a typography a typography is topography is topography regardless of how you made it like it still only allows for unless you're like doing the bim 360 linking a typography which is like a different type of typography like that you can't edit um but you so we do have some different typography generation tools in foreground where you can make typography from model lines okay um so yeah so you can make typography from csv from a cad from orland xml or even model lines but it still is just going to generate points and make the topography from that points because that's just how typography works in revit like there's there's nothing we can do on the back end that changes how topography works ultimately yeah i guess the only yeah and with the cad import i guess if the only difference would be no i guess once it makes the points it makes the points right i was saying if you update and stuff but points to points in topos topo like you said yeah yeah we're hopeful that um they sound like the remnant roadmap and like that there might be some some new things coming out of the dev team but for now yeah typography is typography and um yeah we like the slab tools and like drape will work with like so the nice thing about like if you bring in a civil topography via like link topo surface people know that workflow um the nice thing about that workflow is it that kind of that topography is a different kind of typography and that it maintains its shape from civil 3d so you can export it out and then link it in but it like then you can't edit it like i can't i can't mess with those it's not made of points it's it's made slightly differently but it becomes like a static object and rabbit that can be updated but like you can't touch it awesome so so so we've we've got a topo we draped our slabs we adjusted our topo we draw some curves curbs so we talked a little about out of the box and versus foreground so what what's next for out of the box versus foreground sure sorry i kind of created this dichotomy i like it it's kind of cool no i mean that's how that's how we view it yeah you can yeah so i was gonna talk a little bit about kind of planting planting content because like yeah people are always interested and and how that works let's see it's my i want to flip over to 2019 and this is i noticed you shared an image of some of these old um these old little tree fans yeah yeah i was i was digging through it i wasn't sure what kind of what kind of content i wanted to show for the image and i you know i just i loved i loved those especially the uh the the high the high quality looking trees look pretty sweet so i figured out i would toss those on yeah so this is kind of the next step that we're working on at parallax is like foreground we'll get into a little bit more uh next but yeah we're going to get we does a lot of like clicking placement tools and so we're developing a content library sort of separately that will kind of work with foreground this is like yeah this is an old school uh i call it classic lauren content that's yeah very old from the blog but it's using a lot of the principles that we're using in our our uh content library essentially this is i think i downloaded this because i i don't even know where some of you downloaded it from yourself i love that yeah and so yeah one of the like one of the cool things about planting content is it has these like really interesting like scalable features which can be a little bit of a headache when you're making content but it has like really cool properties so let's see if this works here so you can set up your width to be separate from your height by like nesting components down and like yeah this is the example that i posted um so that it let's see so there are a couple people who are um are complimenting those tree families and so i will let them know and i'll put the link to that you can get them from your blog which i think you posted them to revit city a long time ago right is that where the download is yeah yeah that's because i think wordpress it's like posts or something content yeah hosting content down wordpress is like a little funny so yeah they were just up on reddit city um so we'll definitely post links to all this anything that's available for you guys for sure for sure yeah so the parallax content library is not on there sorry folks okay but some other tree right there is that one tree right there is online yeah there's a couple of them but you can take a look and see how it works basically there's you have to kind of mess down and there's like some funny things that are happening um with the parameters but yeah the nice thing is then you can have that width and that's often the way landscape architects work is you want that width to be controlled separately from from the height of the plant so that you can so because sometimes you have like really narrow and tall trees and so it needs to be kind of all separate and then yeah and then you can do that also with like a number of different ways so like we have that in our um planting families as well and like elevation so you can see you can do elevation symbols that also have like less scalable and one of the things that we're also building in to our our tree and plant library is like the ability to have an instance height um as opposed to like out of the box private planting families it's usually just all type parameters like the height it's a type parameter and it's not an instance parameter um the nice thing about having it as an instance parameter is then uh you can you can have it like be adjustable in elevation like this like on the fly and then you could also like start to like randomize heights and have like your planting just look a little bit nicer so you'll see actually on on my ribbon we're starting to build out some of those plant tools to allow you to kind of randomize rotation randomize like heights within a range that kind of make some of what we're doing on foreground is like kind of purely visual but also because like we know that's what like some people just like to model the landscape for the visualization purposes but it's also useful um for documentation as well that's awesome they look great so so i'm looking at the i'm looking at the elevation in the 3d view and then when you clicked it i'm seeing this low poly christmas tree can you explain in the in the family browser up there so is there a 3d object or something that that that's representing it so click click one of those i don't know i think i picked up on it yeah so see the little family oh yeah this guy so so yeah is this are these how is this content this is the the parallax content that you're looking at uh this is kind of like a test file that has a couple different types built into it um but yeah essentially what happens with this low poly guy is it's taking i think it's pulling maybe it's even pulling from this first type i don't i don't know okay i'd want someone else who knows more about so i thought maybe you're doing something funky with with the el with the symbolic views versus whatnot but it's just the fans well yeah that's just the thumbnail that's uh that's just the thumbnail that's generating you can see like so we're building it in so that you can swap out um different like 3d types yeah so you can see that's that's what's that one and maybe that's people who know more about the properties palette can make you tell you that that maybe because that's what's the first type that's the general thumbnail that's making yeah yeah yeah so we have like a lot of different nested types in here and you can see yeah we have the plan symbol the elevation symbol we have like the 3d 3d model which is a solid in this one or it could be rpc or it can be a custom geometry and then yeah we've got root the root ball [Music] yeah so yeah so yeah there was a couple questions on that that's why i was bringing it up too and focusing on a little bit is um i think people were interested in how it looked in elevation which you showed them but what you just showed there by clicking it and showing how you're using symbolic representations to to view all those different things i think is something people can can learn from that if you want to have a specific even if it's a lower quality just like like you showed there or like even just like a round sort of ball like a push pin tree or something like that you can have that but then you can also have all these higher detailed views for different things which is pretty neat but by building in these detail items or or message families however you want to do it really yeah awesome awesome so i think that was the question i just want to make sure i didn't miss that yeah yeah so so so cool so the one of the things um i guess then um which i see on foreground and i'm interested in as far as previous versus nat versus foreground is the the placement in in those those planting placement tools um so i don't know maybe maybe talk a little bit how a little bit about how how you did it before foreground and then maybe show some of the cool foreground tools for that because i'd love to hear some of that yeah yeah so out of the box revit is like really good at like kind of some baseline planting stuff like automatically generates schedules like like it does some of the base drive and stuff but but placing plants like if you're trying to like fill an area is like something i generally like would avoid doing before foreground like i'm not sure i would generally i guess the one good thing site components and plantings do is they do follow the topography which is nice right they they sort of host to it but yes i was curious the sort of creation of large planting plans must have been interesting to uh to approach right yeah so when i have so previously yeah when i would use areas i would either use like rooms or areas so these are actually rooms specifically okay like rooms and areas are very very similar in revit um and essentially like then you can have the area you can you can use that area to calculate the number of plants and now with like calculated values and tags like you can even tag and schedule those things like when i was first doing this stuff like that was like before like it was even in schedules or it was only in schedules and not in tags i don't remember but it was like it was a little bit more cobbled together than it even is now um and so it would just be kind of like pulling that from the area itself and then not necessarily placing individual plants but yeah the nice thing about foreground is it does allow you to place so i have a few areas up here where i've already placed some mixes um it does allow you to place those plants and then yeah we have like tagging and updating tools so that when things change you can kind of update them all together are you still using rooms to generate that is that why you have this file so yeah you can use so we use areas yeah so you can use rooms areas or floors essentially it needs to be kind of like a bounded area um and so that's what we're limiting it to so you can also also do floors yeah which is pretty cool because i guess with floors you could you could make a similar type of plan you're showing here and even have different floor types with different graphics if you wanted right and then you know or whatever or shaded or hatches or something like that and then you could also generate the actual plans on top because that's pretty neat and you can make a contour to the topo right yeah you could the thing about floors that makes it like if you're doing an area like a planting plant like this where you have a lot of shapes that are like sharing boundaries is like you have to start like this was if these were all different floors they'd have to be like you'd have to like go in and edit the boundary and come back out and then if they share boundaries when they change so the nice thing about that is like you can just kind of like drag these guys around and then you don't have to i like that it's affecting both instead of affecting one of the other and these floors share overlapping floors air every time you check yeah exactly um so that's kind of i started out using the areas when i use rooms now but they're very similar in a lot of ways yeah yeah i wonder what the big drawback would be uh between either or i mean is there a reason why you jumped to rooms from areas so areas are limited to like an area plan which is one of the like it's a big one of the bigger drawbacks so like you can only see them in an area plan so if you wanted to see them in any other of like your site plan view like your floorplan views you wouldn't be able to that's a little bit of a downside um the other and that kind of comes with like some documentation downsides like his area plans you can't do view references and with area plans like which is like a strange limitation yeah but if like so that's there's just like a few things with area plans it's just like why it's because like they're different like they're not real plans almost the way rabbit treats them right they're like yeah they're like these these separate things sitting on top of everything else yeah yeah so i can see that yeah i guess my only thought was um i understand that the idea of a room is like really weird to an architect it's weird but it's also cool i mean i i i'm all for different uses i'm curious as to if you're linking in architecture models if you have any issues with bounding and that kind of stuff by using rooms like you know like you said the area is nice because it's kind of like its own thing but is there issues with with links and bringing in room bounding objects through links of you yeah i've i mean i've never had any issue i mean you want to make sure like in your schedules you're not like pulling in linked things but in general you don't want to do that anyway yeah yeah yeah so yeah no i've i've never had an issue like usually like a link like i don't think you can even room bound through a link anyways so like it becomes less of an issue uh scoured uh scoured x who's a regular viewer of the show what's up man um or woman actually i don't even know uh if you're a man or woman i'm sorry you're just a username on youtube i thought uh anyways asked about any chance to add roof roof to any of these selections instead of floors so so it seems like you know it seems like you're using even even just for the out-of-the-box stuff you're using floors for a lot of this is there a reason you chose floors over roofs because i guess yeah so so the slabs flab editing tools actually do support roofs and floors both um for plants we are limit yeah like one of plants actually can't host to a roof um and so that's why we don't have roofs enabled as like as a plant area element like feasibly we could but like it creates this like weird thing if you're up on a roof like those plants actually can't host to that element so you better just use a freaking floor instead i i mean i didn't ask this question but now that now that you're mentioning it i'm sort of thinking about the nice thing about the roof object is that it goes from the base up right which could be helpful when you're sitting on top of your host right as opposed to going from the top down as far as the way it's hosted i mean obviously you don't have to have to worry about it too much if if the add-in's doing the work but but just just something that i was thinking about now is so if you change the thickness of stuff it would grow this way instead of into your topo which is kind of nice right yeah and so we have i had we had originally planned for the for the plant tools to support roofs um but when i was doing some testing i was like oh plant can't actually host to like two of the roof so if you don't pick new host it actually it does say yeah pick a floor surface or level like that's what plants are limited to as far as this as far as a host um is concerned so so i can go ahead and show the planting tools a little bit in action it's a little bit more interesting than just watching it will just green roof good point i guess you have to put a floor up there if you want to host to those if you want the ho level or you host the level but yeah or you host a level but if it's like shape edited certainly that doesn't work yeah so yeah the way yeah our placement tools work is i'm not going to get into mixes just because we're a little short on time but essentially you can can build mixes from from planting components in the model so i have a few mixes that i have already kind of built out and then you can select multiple areas you can select single areas we'll go ahead and just grab a few of these and then it starts to preview like the points based off of based off that and then the default is triangular it can be a grid spacing and then you can see it it grabs the host and then i can i can run it and then it's going to place and fill the plants in that area nice and you can see this is a mix of like three different types and then yeah the big part is like the updating like you said like it's easy often to like make something initially but it's updating later it becomes like a pain in the butt um so yeah like we're essentially managing a little bit of a database here so like whenever you place uh a plant like area like we're keeping track of it so that if it changes we can it'll update when you hit update all right um and that is that update per session or is that always managing it so if you if you made all these changes save close revit and reopen and then update is it still working yeah awesome yep and so i was just curious i'm thinking of workflow and right right yeah no it's not it's not in the session it's it's basically it's saving to it's saving to an element and then we can like retrieve and check that element to see if it's changed even if i closed down and reopened it so that's the area yeah one thing i think maybe maybe to make sure we cover in time because i think it's going to be something that people are interested in and i'm interested in how you've approached it before and after or whatnot is um is sight walls so retaining walls that kind of stuff i'm curious to hear and i i know that i've had that question a few times so i'm curious to hear sort of your your original approach to you know sight walls that maybe follow landscape or retaining walls that retain landscape that kind of stuff how how how you approach that and is there any have you learned something new over the years or developed a tool over the years that makes it easier yeah so i think there's kind of two different ways you can go with that like you can use actual revit walls um which can be great if you have like a more complex wall and you like want to show different materials and thicknesses and if you have like but yeah where that starts to fall apart is if you're following topography for sure it's curved and it's sloped and yeah and so i've found in those instances where i i'll use a floor to model like a wall um so like a three foot deep floor for a three foot tall wall type of deal right right yeah so i could let's see we should be able to do this on the fly here uh let's see if i i think i have a type in here yeah this one's a 251 but yeah if i have a wall here the downside is yeah then you have to kind of like trace it out and plan but then the upside tends to be that you have those points like we tend to want to control our walls with like points more like like how you edit floors and like a wall profile is just like like i don't i don't want to edit a wall profile if i'm doing like sight walls that's just like a pain in the butt so then i can use drape slab uh yeah it's warning me that it needs to have a 3d view it should still work um and then maybe i'll just do my boundary points and i'm going to go ahead and do that two foot offset we'll run it yeah and you'll see that it's a floor but but you have the points yeah but yeah but you can use drape slab with it just the same as with anything else and so yeah now it's it's essentially following that topography with the minimum possible points which usually minimum is just easier to manage but you can yeah yeah you know if you need it to like do yeah yeah no that that's that's that's an interesting word yeah i've i've you know the the way i've approached in the past has been the railing which i think i showed in one of the previous uh episodes but to what you mentioned before with curbs is that you you have a little less control over how when it gets a little wonky how that looks and here is kind of nice because i guess you could you could use the points now to sort of modify that at the really wonky site areas and make it a more smooth right yeah or if you wanted it to like do all sorts of crazy stuff like here you wanted this to be up you can drag drag that guy you would need a deeper wall but yeah you can you can start to like sculpt your wall which is how landscape architects typically work with walls and so then what about if it's retaining and you have a high high side of topo and a low side of topo on each side of the wall are you just still rocking that with points like anyone else would or is it have you found any any easier way than dealing with a thousand points next to each other that have you know a three-foot difference or whatever yeah i mean that's where i tend to not use topography yeah like i mean it depends on the site like if you're out here in the site yeah topography might be the best way to do it um but typically yeah we're working with we're working on a landscape and this is gonna it probably is gonna be end up being a floor over here yeah my question was more long lines but please tell me you found an easier way to do it but it doesn't sound like you have so here we are yeah someone had a question uh radao uh it looks like you joined late and i don't think we mentioned it um is there any tagging um enhancements uh for planting with with the foreground tool or just i guess in general i guess any tips for when you're when you're actually doing tagging here yeah yeah yes that's yeah you'll see up here we have um so maybe i'll do a couple other things so we can see all the tags happening a little better so yeah you can do place along which will place plants along lines i'll go ahead and show off the manual group which also so if you're placing plants individually which often with trees we are placing those individually you can come back kind of afterwards and establish like a grouping for those guys and what it's going to do is it's going to let you add connector lines if you want and then you can also tag it on the fly i'll go ahead and not tag it yet and then again it has the updating capabilities so like i thought that guy moves this one gets deleted and this one moves um and i can run that update all and it's gonna replace those lines and then i can do a tag also which will sit there and it'll basically it finds all the groupings of the plants that we've established and then it's going to it's going to tag them all so it's going to tag which is neat right yeah yeah yeah so it's going to tag each type within the grouping so this one has three different types so attacks each one it's going to tag all the ones up here also um yeah so yeah you can do a tag all or you can like tag individually as well and then it's going to automatically generate these and then you can move them from there and then it there's a little bit of stuff happening so it should kind of remember so if i move this guy let's see which one i move like this one down here um it's it's moving like some shared parameters around like that's how it's getting that number um and then if i change the shape of this and do another update all it's gonna it's gonna try to keep those tags in the same place effectively so every time you run an update on on like the ones that have been placed automatically it's actually going to replace all of those because yeah if the shape has changed it needs to replace them effectively and so then it has to like re-tag them all but there's some stuff happening so that we kind of keep track of where this stuff is so it looks like it doesn't kind of move on you that no that's that's awesome that's seems like something that'd be super useful to anyone who has to do that awesome great well i think we're running up against it is there anything um is there anything that you really wanted to show that you didn't get time to show i think the plan to be finished with planting that's kind of what i was hoping that's great no that was fantastic there's some awesome little little tips and tools in there as well as the introduction to foreground and so i will put links in the description here on youtube as well as in the blog post to how you guys can get all of this stuff um you know foreground is a parallax tool app um i can put a link to that i'll put a link to uh lauren to your to your blog uh land arc bim as well as i assume uh your twitter handle as well um is there any final words for for the bim after dark audience that uh or how how would they best uh contact you if they wanted to would it be on twitter uh yeah twitter is fine yeah we have there's a contact we have a contact form on the parallax team website i could post a link to that um sweet yeah there's lots of ways we can get in touch but yeah we're all very active on twitter so you can reach out to any of us on twitter as well well lauren thank you so much for joining today i really appreciate it this was great um i think it's awesome i i can definitely see some use out of out of many of these foreground tools but also the discussion was valuable and i think everyone else seemed to enjoy it too so thank you so much for coming on i appreciate it thank you all right all right and everyone else thank you for joining us today on episode actually this was episode 60. i didn't realize this was 6-0 which is pretty awesome so um thank you guys for joining me today if you're interested in seeing all the other previous 59 episodes head on over to live.bimafterdark.com don't forget to check out dot polycam.bimafterdark.com or roll back and use that qr code and thank them for sponsoring this episode you guys are amazing have a great week end and and i'll talk to you guys soon so [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: TheRevitKid

Views: 15,364

Rating: 4.9462571 out of 5

Keywords: revit, revit design, architecture, architecture design, autodesk revit, revit tutorial, architect, revit tip, revit tutorials, revit architecture, BIM, building information modeling, autodesk revit tutorials, architecture tutorials, landscape architecture, Site Modeling in Revit from a Landscape Architect's Point of View, site modeling in revit, revit site modeling, revit landscape architecture, revit add-ins, revit planting, revit topography, revit sidewalks, revit curbs

Id: Q91PB8yF4tw

Length: 60min 40sec (3640 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021