Revit 2015 Tutorial Creating Topography with the Toposurface Tool | Black Spectacles

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Let's get into the modeling aspects of this. The project that we're building today, of course, is the Case House, also known as the Stahl House, Number 22 in Los Angeles, and I did not have any topography information other than just Google Earth and doing a little bit of research. So I went ahead and built the topography of what I sort of think it is in Los Angeles. So this is the topography as you can see right here and I have also built some what are called, "Pads" which are essentially the foundation or the flat pad for where the building is going to be built. Now, the reason I went ahead and did this ahead of time and not part of the class is because this can be a very tedious process to build. You're going to go to "Massing & Site" and on the "Massing & Site" tab, there is this "Toposurface" button. You click on that and it goes into what's known as a "Sketch Mode" and these are all of the buttons. You can see that this tab on the ribbon is kind of a teal color, that color indicates that it's called a "Context Menu" which means it only appears when you are in the "Toposurface Edit Mode" and these two buttons right here is an indication that you are in an "Edit Mode." So this is "Finish Edit Mode" or this is "Cancel" the edit mode.
Now, the other thing to keep in mind when you're building a topography is that it always deals with what are called "Absolute Elevation Numbers" or "Elevations Above Sea Level." There are no relative elevation numbers so keep that in mind. I'm going to leave this as zero but obviously your site is going to be higher than zero. So to create a topography from scratch, the way that I built the one for this class, you're going to just simply place points. So if I had just clicks four points here, it's all at layers here or all at elevation zero, if I just click those four points and then say "Finish," this is my topography. If I go to the "3D View," you can see that this is it right here. Now, I'm going to turn on the "Shade Mode" which is this button right here, set it to consistent color, that's just so you can see it a little more clearly. So this is the topography that I created, completely flat.
Go back to "Level 1" view. If I click on that topography again and I say "Edit Surface," once again, that only appears when you click on the topography, it goes back into the "Sketch Mode" and I can manipulate these points now and to start to add some contours to this surface. So if I click on those two points or I select those two points, I can go up here and I can change that to "3 feet." And you can see as soon as I change that to three feet, it adds a couple of contour lines. By default, Revit will add a contour line at each foot. Now, you can change that. You can have it do every five feet, every ten feet, whatever you want in terms of how the contours are displayed. That's completely up to you.
So this is just changing these two points and what Revit is doing is it's just interpolating between these two points, zero to three, and it's putting the one-foot and the two-foot at equal spacing between those points. But as we all know, contours aren't always equal, so you can place additional points. So if I say "Place Point" and I put a number "1" in there, I can then place that point anywhere on this surface, and I can do something like that. And so now, Revit is interpolating between these two points but now, the distance between these two is set.
Now, there's a problem here. You can see that as I add these points, Revit doesn't always want to follow exactly where I'm putting these points. I would like that contour to kind of dip down and go around where those points are but you can see how it takes this shortcut across there. Well, Revit has a tendency to do that. It's one of those things that you just have to kind of deal with and how I deal with it is I add extra point that is ever so slightly higher than those. So I say "1 foot 1" and I place that point right in the middle. Now, sometimes you have to place multiple points but basically, by doing that, it forces the contour to follow the point path that you've created. Now obviously, the more points you put in there, the smoother the line begins to look. This is basically how you create a topography from scratch.
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