Multiple Toposurfaces and m3

[beralco]

To whom it may concern,

I have two questions from Revit 2017.  I just started with a model of a 3-storey office building with a basement on an extremely irregular site.  I am banging my head about the following two issues:

• Placing walls on a basement floorplan
• Creating a toposurface from an imported 2D AutoCAD file

I imported the basement and the first floor from AutoCAD.  The basement is located at height = -4.50 m, and the first floor is located at height = 0.00 m.  I placed the basement at -4.50 m, but I did not place it at SITE view.  I switched to an ELEVATION view, copied a new floor, named placed it at -4.50 m.  I created walls in what I called “BASEMENT.”  The basement is not completely buried into the ground.  The entire envelope of this basement has contact to the exterior air, not with the earth.  The first issue was that I could not select and edit the material of an existing exterior wall.  I did it 3 to 4 times, the Revit crashed, and an error was shown (“the driver has experienced an error…”).  The only wall I could choose and edit was a Retaining Concrete Wall.  I am not sure if this is right.  Is it logical the error message showed by the software?  Can I go ahead and keep choosing the Retaining Concrete Wall? 

Then, I continued with most of the walls (using the edited Retaining Concrete Wall) in the “BASEMENT” floorplan.  But, I decided to create the toposurface of the site before I keep going to the top floor.  Let me give you a general picture.  There are two “valleys” in the site.  The basement, which is divided in two bodies, is located inside these two “valleys”.  Firstly, I selected the “BASEMENT” view, but I could not create the toposurface.  Then, I tried the “FIRST FLOOR” and nothing happened.  Finally, when I tried the SITE view, I could create one layer of the toposurface.  Should I have created the toposurface and the walls of the basement in the SITE view?  Is there another option to solve the toposurface?  Can I do the toposurface in a second file, and import it to the current file?  If this is right, where should I put it?  Will it be on the SITE or the BASEMENT floor?

Please, could you give me some suggestions?  Any comments will be highly appreciated!

José Luis Bermúdez Alcocer, Ph.D., M.Arch, B.Arch.

[Anonymous]

For the Topography

If you have a 2D cad file that contains either text or blocks that define the location and height of spot levels, you can quickly and simply create a 3D topography in Revit. You need to make sure you know the units for the file as the x, y, z coordinates need to match units.

Step 1, create a points file

Open the 2D CAD file in AutoCAD. Isolate the spot level text or blocks. Check that only the level information remains. If there are non block or text items you will need to remove them.

We can now extract the information we need to create the points file we use in Revit to create the topography.

Using the EATTEXT command in AutoCAD we extract the data to a .CSV file. 

You will be prompted to save your extraction file.

Choose the second option, and use the selection icon adjacent to the text to select the objects that you isolated.

Once you have made the selection the “NEXT” button will be available.

Press NEXT 

Uncheck the ‘Category filter’ to only have ‘Geometry’ and ‘Text’ selected.

The “Properties that you need are Position X, Position Y, and the value.

(As the CAD file is only 2D we are obtaining the Z coordinate from the text value)

Unselect the check boxes at the base of the dialog box so that only the actual data you need is visible.

Then press NEXT 

Choose a suitable location to save the file. Make sure you save it as a .CVS file.

You have now created the file you need to create the topography in Revit.

Select NEXT

Step 2, use the points file to create the topography.

Open the Revit file in which you want to create the topography.

Click on the Massing & Site Ribbon. 

Select Topography icon

Choose the ‘Create from import’ icon. Select ‘Specify Points File’ option.

You will be asked to select the units, this will be the same as the units in the CAD file.

You will now have created the topography surface base on the 2D CAD data.

Hope this helps

[chrisplyler]

I'll suggest this:

Put your building in one file, and put your topo in another file with true north orientation and with survey and project base points set up correctly.

Then link your building file into your topo file, move (in x, y & z) and rotate the building into the right place relative to the topo, and publish a set of shared coordinates back to the building file.