Solid Mesh Topography with Boolean Operations

[arek_keshishian]

There are many cases where we need the topo mesh to finally be completely solid and still give us plan-area calculation values, this would be a general solve to most topography problems we're having. We could add and subtract volumes from one another and create tunnels, sub-terrain volumes, easier and more realistic sidewalks and roads, rocky mountainous areas that have more than one point in a specific X-Y coordinate with a different Z value, create caves and more. Specially with the help of Dynamo, the possibilities would be endless and achieve high-end industry professionalism.

[FreakinWeird]

Hello dear Autodesk,
I have suggestion for the new featere to implement in revit 2017 please!!! I had struggled a lot with cutting a horizontal hole in topography, and it's been impossible to succed. Building pad cuts topography from its very beginning all the way up to infinity no matter if I don't want that. Also shaft openings when hit floors cut it completely. If u can fix that easy issue would be really nice. The problem is when I want to make a tunnel in groundl or underground garage so I want that soil layer above the top of the underground floor. Thx in advance !!!

[Anonymous]

If you have been working with the Toposurface tools you might have experienced that is tricky to manipulate the topo, because you only have the option to manipulate the elevation of placed points. If you want to make a hole in the toposurface you can use the Building Pad for straight cuts level based. But if you want to make a cut with a sloped wall you will have to use the Site Designer tools. 

But how easy would it be if you could create a family/mass/in-place mass in which you can model a volume, place this on/in the toposurface and cut it out using the cut tools. If we are creating volume for the toposurface we might as well create the possibility to join volume to the toposurface.

I am curious whether you like to have this kind of tooling as well in order to manipulate the toposurface on an intuitive way.

With kind regards,

Kelly Pelzer

[arek_keshishian]

Parallel concept with more votes. please vote.
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/solid-mesh-topography-with-boolean-operations/idi-p/67037...

[Anonymous]

Hi Arek,

Thanks for the heads up, i voted for your idea as well.

With kind regards,

Kelly Pelzer

[Anonymous]

It would be very helpful if you could set a default thickness to your topographies, similar to a floor thickness.  When doing site studies or adding area roads to a project, I will usually use the "Split Surface" tool to add streets into an already modeled topography.  When offsetting the newly split road topo to adjust for the curb height, you are left with an empty space where the curb would be.  Being able to add a set a default topo thickness of would fill the gap.

When creating floor, you can add as many sub-element points as needed and adjust the height of those points to mimic topo lines while maintaining your floor thickness at each point, so hopefully the process would be very similar.

[harlan_brumm]

Thanks for your submission and votes on this idea!  We are evaluating where this request falls into our roadmap and will provide an update when we have made a decision. 

The Factory

[boccisalvini]

please vote! it's important!

[Anonymous]

At moment is not possible to draw an underground building like parking, i asked to Autodesk Support too. The only solution is to insert a pad and another topography over it, but is so difficulty to manage, especially in the views where I need to use a massive masking with hatch.

It would be very useful to use Booleans on the topography.

[Anonymous]

Agreed. We need a more general solution for dealing with topo surfaces. We should be able to represent tunnels for example.

-t

[Anonymous]

Pad and topography is not the only solution...

Another option is to use a roof as your topography which in turn can be used to cap off your underground structure.  It also cuts better in sections. 

[Anonymous]

The thing is that these are all hacks. Using roof for topos goes against
the principles of BIM. How is that going to schedule? You’ll end up with
extra roofs.

I’m not suggesting that Revit must become a fully blown civil engineering
design app but we should be able to have much better control over the topo
surface object. The tools and techniques for manipulating triangle geometry
are well understood, it’s not a problem. The problem as always is making
the change to a well established system without disrupting the whole
system. It’s difficult. But I have faith in the dev team.

-t
--
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Tomek Piatek
about.me/tomek_piatek
<>

[Anonymous]

@Anonymous

How does it go against BIM?  Doesn't matter what is used to create an object as long as the information is there.  You can assign materials to a roof the same way you can with topography.  

Principles of BIM?? Do you think Revit is BIM??  Revit is just a tool in the BIM process.  Just like Autocad, Civil3D, ArchiCAD, Bentley, Catia, etc are tools as well.

Keeping familes and methods by what they are....door for a door or a wall for a wall or roof for a roof, just shows that you can't think OOTB.

It's not a hack...it's using the software to do more than it was originally intended.  ArchiCAD was doing stuff like that way before Revit came along as well.  You must hate Dynamo too...which is a way to hack the API to get "information" from where the software can't.

[joslindave]

I agree, we need better topo tools - site designer really is just a band aid, and while better than nothing, is still very cumbersome to use: a nice band aid, but a band aid nonetheless.

The ability for a topo to be represented by a solid (preferably not a mesh only, but something more nurb-like), while retaining the surface workability would be ideal. And host-able, as in, more things being able to be hosted to it. The railings in 2018 is a step in the right direction.

[lionel.kai]

One other problem with the Roof (or Floor*) WORKAROUND/HACK** is that you can't use a point list like you can for Topos - you have to painstakingly place points manually (or create something using Dynamo).

@Anonymous / @Anonymous It's not so much going against "BIM", as making BIM harder - it's hard to use the "information" if it's hidden in non-standard places/categories. The "information" that says it's a "Roof" is wrong, etc. Also, workarounds are fine for one-offs, or rarely-encountered occurrences, but now that Revit supposedly has the backing of this "huge" software development company (Autodesk), it's time to start addressing some of these issues to make the workflow (and resultant product/model) more efficient and robust.

NOTES:
* I've used Floors because: (1) we generally use Floors for everything anyway (since Roofs can't do steel decking), and (2) railings couldn't be hosted to Roofs until 2017 (though it would only follow simple slopes, not shape edits, before that anyway)
** "a usually creatively improvised solution to a computer hardware or programming problem or limitation", i.e. "using the software to do more than it was originally intended"

[m.steffannoe]

@lionel.kai

I agree with you, tha a workaround is bad.

If a workaround is needed, then it is not the apropriate tool for this task.

In our case we get these points from lists by a surveyor. this would be quiet easy. If Revit would handle large coordinates better... Recalculating official measurements is not good.

Our contacts at Autodesk intended us to use Civil3D for this task (Soil and excavations, Inventor for modleing Tasks, because Revit is unable to model the forms we need). New programs to learn, inconsistent model, Overkill for simple task anyway.

Revit should be able to model everything in one application. Not to use other products where data exchange produce other flaws and difficulties... But this seems not to be in behalf of Autodesk.

My look at Revit becomes more and more critical. 17 years old and not even rudimentarily good enough to produce plans for execution plans in that quality our customers demand for...

[m.steffannoe]

@Anonymous

Revit is unable to do real boolean operations.

When you model a common family, create a body and do two or more bools on that body which overlap you will get an error.

In IFC export added bodies will be exported as two bodies, as I tested a few month ago. For mass control and calculations for prices this is bad.

Our supporters at autodesk said this is not possible to do. Even in the newest Version. You can workaround that with dynamo...

[MichaelWSullivan]

Be able to cut voids through toposurfaces such that a tunnel structure would show surface all around but be void inside tunnel....or be able to create multiple toposurfaces with different "Elevation of poche base" and/or "Section cut material" settings

[PDAjasonpfeifer]

Yes please.  To that list I add the following:

• the ability to be able to schedule the regions of a topo surface (when split into different materials)
• the ability to snap to the drawn geometry of a topo surface (you can't snap to existing when drawing different subregions)

[lionel.kai]

Or just change "Elevation of poche base" to "thickness of poche" instead.

And/or layers in Topography (like with Floors, such as 2" Asphalt over 4" Basecourse, etc.) would be nice, too.

[Anonymous]

I ran into this issue on a recent project. If you create a building pad all of the toposurface is eliminate above that pad. But what do you do if the perimeter of a basement exceeds the perimeter area of the building above it?