Toposurfaces VS Toposolids in Revit Tutorial

with the latest version of Revit Revit 2024 Topo surfaces have been replaced with toppo solids this has caused quite a stir in the Revit Community some people love the new topography some people hate it personally I think it's a step in the right direction my team and I have spent the past 6 months exploring the new Topo solids and more importantly figuring out the best practices and workflows for using them I have now compiled all of this knowledge in the new update to the existing site design and coordination course on balcan architect.com in this course apart from all of the existing content you will now learn how to properly fit buildings into Topo solids how to do Advanced earthwork with Topo solids how to generate a topo solid with buildings and terrain from scratch in minutes for any location in the world and much much more if you want to get this course the current price will be available for the next 7 days and then the price will be increased to accommodate the increase in the course quality and length as I said it's available on bulcan arc.com the link is going to be up in the cards above and then also down in the description of this video if you have already purchased the course well then you already get the update absolutely for free now this video is going to be a comparism of Topo surfaces and Topo solids what are the differences what are the similarities and this is actually a video from the course itself this is one of the first lessons of the updated chapters so that's what you're going to see now let's go this video will be a quick comparism between the Topo surfaces and too solids in rabbit so with ravit 2024 we had this major change to topography and with the introduction of Topo solids so here on the right side of my screen I have Revit 2024 opened up with a topo solid here on screen on the left side I have Revit 2023 and here we have a topo surface so if you're using Revit 2023 or earlier versions you will only be able to use Topo surfaces so when it comes to changes uh the first one the obvious one is the name and well basically how it looks so the Topo surfaces are are well surfaces and Topo solids are well solid geometry up until Revit 2024 with the Topo surfaces basically this was something that's completely different to any other um rabit building element so if I select this Topo surface go into edit surface you can see it's just built out of points it then connects all of those points into a surface and that's how it worked now if I just hit finish here and then select this Topo solid you can see the Topo solid has the sketch function so we can edit it sketch and it works perhaps more like a floor than it does uh to traditional Topo surfaces which we had previously so if I select this I can addit its points or its shape by going here to shape going to modify subdivision or modify uh sub elements and then here I can just add points and change their elevation now we already had this functionality with floors previously so if I go to Revit 2023 and if I just place a simple floor here this will also work with ceilings as well so let's just create something here what you'll notice is I do have those uh shape editing tools and now I can add points I can select some of these I can change them so on and so forth so it works quite similar to how floors do however we do have some additional uh functionality which makes this actually topography now we're going to compare the Topo surfaces and Topo solids just by going through the basically the approaches to editing them so the first thing is the boundary with the Topo surfaces the boundary is determined by the points that you place so here I have placed some points and now if I select one of these points and if I move it the boundary will basically move with that point and you can't really Define the boundary outside of the the points uh and one of the uh major issues I guess you can say with this is that if you select one of the points and if you want to change the boundary and you move that point well if we have any other points there in the way the boundary isn't going to change it's just going to basically connect the most outer points now with the Topo solids uh it's completely different the boundary is edited by a sketch so I can go here to edit sketch and then I can just sketch it out it doesn't have to be convex here it can actually be concave so what I can do is I can go here to draw tools and then I can simply create a Arc like this and then I can split it just like that connected and as you can see now we can have a concave Edge to our Topo solid so this is something that's uh really different between Topo surfaces and Topo solids now moving forward uh we have the materials or while layers so with the Topo surfaces you can just select your surface and then you set the material here in the uh materials and finishes in the project browser alternatively for the uh material in the section view so if we cut a section view through this uh well then here on mask and site we have the model site and then here we have that Earth material which will be in the section cut uh so that's basically how you set the materials or the layers for your topus surfaces with the Topo solids uh just because it works uh similar to floors basically go into edit type and then you get this menu you go to structure and it's just basically layers so you build this up as layers you can have as many as you like and you can have different functions different materials and it will all show in the section view the only thing to take a look at is the V variable function so this is the layer that's going to change its thickness the rest of them are always going to keep their kind of thickness as as it's defined here so that's how you basically set up the materials or layers differently in Topo surfaces and Topo solids next we have the contour lines one of the most important things about Topography is the contour lines because that's how Architects tend to look at the site through these contour lines and for the Topo surfaces the contour lines are defined here in The Mask in site model site and then here we can define those uh contour lines contour line display and we can set that up for the Topo solids everything is now located in the edit type menu so here we can go to Contour display and we get this menu which is just a little bit different and then we can set up the Contour display here moving forward let's talk about splitting Topo surfaces and Topo solids so with the Topo surface es here on the massing and site tab we have the modify site tools and one of the tools is the split surface tool so you just click on that you click on the surface and then basically you draw where you want to split that surface and now it's going to split that into two surfaces uh on the Topo solids it's a little bit different you want to be on the modify Tab and then you can just pick the split element tool so just like you would use for splitting a wall or something like that and and then you just click on the Topo solid and it goes into into draw mode and then you can split that just like so and now we have two Topo solids which are well split moving on to subdivisions or the Topo surfaces again it's located here on the massing Insight tab uh we have the subdivision tool we can select that and then we just draw a subdivision which we want to see and it's going to create that subdivision and here we can edit its material uh now these subdivisions uh are going to be completely flat so it's not really going to be any different from the rest of the Topo solid or sorry the Topo surface however the material can be changed here in the properties panel for the Topo solids you just want to select the Topo solid and then here you get the Topo solid shaping here we have the subdivide and then you can just use draw tools to draw a subdivide just like this now this subdivide f is a little bit different because as you can see it has the thickness and then here in our properties panel we can Define so the material the height of this thing and also is it going to inherent the contour lines from the too solid or is it going to well not have any contour lines like this so it works basically like a floor that's kind of patched on top of that surface and perhaps most importantly the building integration is completely different with Topo surfaces and Topo solids so for Topo surfaces what we have is again here on the massing inside tab we had the building pad tool so basically it's called a building pad uh you come here you draw a shape so let's draw a shape like this and now this is a building pad I can set its level I can set a height offset and it's just going to uh basically bring the surface up if necessary or it's going to uh bring the surface down so let's try like this yeah so it's going to cut the surface where necessary it's going to bring it up where necessary and this is how we accommodated the buildings uh now this worked kind of like a floor so if you're go into edit type you can set its layers and thickness and so on and that's how we did it now with Topo solids again it's completely different because now we really don't have that tool but we don't really have a replacement tool so with Topo solids we're relying on the fact that Topo solids are now solid therefore they can be cut with voids and we use those voids to cut uh the Topo solid to accommodate our building so what we would do is we would go to component uh and then we would use the model in place function here this can be a generic model okay and now I'm just going to draw a quick void form Extrusion shape something like this extend it a little bit there we go uh and now I would just go to cut geometry and cut that Topo solid with that void and this is how that works so uh it is a little bit more difficult I guess in terms of how much time it takes to create this void um compared to creating this building pad however this is much more flexible because you can build voids in any shapes that you like you can have Earth above that void for some underground buildings which is something that just wasn't available with the Topo surfaces so that's just going of a quick comparison of these two and then we're going to be exploring uh the functionality of each one in depth throughout the rest of this course and that's going to conclude this video so as I said if you want to check out the full course it's available on balcan arc.com the link is in the description just below this video thank you for watching guys make sure to check out my website balcan arc.com for more uh rabit courses there I have over 120 hours of content uh 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: 23,286

Keywords: Revit, balkan architect, BIM, tutorial, Autodesk, Revit2024, Toposurface, Toposolid, Subdivisions, Contour Lines, Materials, layers

Id: aeMRfcDxxLg

Length: 12min 17sec (737 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2023