Topography & Cloud points. Correct method?

[lautarolzl]

First of all, thanks for taking the time to read my post.

I work in a small architecture firm and we have this urban project at the riverside, so we hired a drone service to generate a Cloud point and a topography. We received a ''.LAS'' file, then in ReCap we generate the cloud points. The problem starts when trying to import them both in Revit. The topography and the cloud point in theory shares the same geolocation but in Revit they wont overlap, they appear to be sharing the "Z" axis only (Cloud points and topography.jpg). You can see the dark brown surfaces is the topography and the cloud points. I could't overlapped them so I used Civil3D to generate a  new topography from the cloud points and luckily it worked, they shared coordinates. The seccond problem starts when we recieve new topography files (.CSV), they want us to use the new points but its a disaster, I can't locate them where they are suppose to be. All I can do is move it manually, but it won't be precise.

So my question is, what method is used in your workplace, or how does autodesk suggests the workflow between topographies and cloud points. Do I need to add more programs to my workflow, am I missing a step? How do I manage the coordinates?! I tried a lot of diferents import settings regarding shared coordinates and none have worked so far. 

Lautaro Lanari

PS: Sorry for the bad quality of the image and my english (Not native)

Revit 2019 - Windows 10

[Yeu.Ng]

Hi, I not sure my answer is going to help your workflow but here are our practice workflow related to topography and point cloud.

When we ask our surveyor give us the format, we asked for LandXML (or csv point file), point cloud in rcs format and dwg format. All of these will have the same coordinate system. (depends what coordinate system you use)

We will set up the Revit project as a Master file, acquire the coordinate from dwg that provided from the surveyor. Once the coordinate setup in the Revit project, we either use landxml or point file to generate the toposurface. 

After the toposurface is done, we open the rcs file in Recap and save as rcp format, then link the point cloud to Revit. This workflow should align everything correctly as we have several project work on this workflow. Hope it helps in some way to you.