A Match Made in Coordinates: Bringing Revit, AutoCAD Civil 3D, and InfraWorks Together at Last

DONNIE GLADFELTER: All right, folks. Well, welcome to A Match Made In Coordinates. Sounds nice and close, kind of like the seats like we were talking about a moment ago. We're going to make this work. So hopefully you weren't expecting something else.

We're going to be talking about some Revit, some Civil 3D, some Navisworks, some InfraWorks all through live demos. So what could go wrong?

PURVI GANDHI: Nothing. Nothing.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: I'm just going to put that--

PURVI GANDHI: It'll be perfect.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: --little disclaimer out there. Everyone here-- and experience the undocumented features that usually come up as like unhandled exception. Anyone have experience with that? OK. OK, cool.

So as long as we're all on the same page here, Purvi and I-- we've rehearsed this. It worked perfectly in rehearsal.

PURVI GANDHI: Of course. Of course.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: But this is live. And we're dealing with like five or six pieces of software. So I'm just going to put that out there.

PURVI GANDHI: And a couple computers.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: And two computers and two presenters and-- anyway. We're going to have fun though. So I want this to be as interactive as possible. So we'll try to ask some questions throughout.

Let's have some fun. We will, of course, leave some time at the end for Q&A that you guys might have. And obviously we have a lot to get through here.

So without any further ado, as if you couldn't recognize the two mugs up here in front of you, I'm not Purvi. That's her. I'm Donnie.

I have been an AU presenter here. This is my both 11th AU attending and presenting. So I've done this a few times now. And this is actually one of the very few classes that I have done multiple times.

So I did a very similar version of this class probably two or three years ago. I don't know if anyone happened to be at that one. Very similar. We've added a few things to sort of update some of the newer workflows.

But my background is in civil engineering. I come from a residential design background. I worked on a project named Homestead Preserve. That's kind of my big career project.

It was named one of the top residential subdivisions in the world by Travel and Leisure. It was a mere 10,000 acre conservation-focused community. A really awesome project. I worked on that and shortly thereafter jumped into the role of CAD management.

That was a little more than 10 years ago and oversaw a training program for my former company, which was about 250 people with nine offices and all of the herding of cats, the CAD management. Any other CAD managers here? We've got a few. Awesome, awesome. So you know what we're talking about here.

PURVI GANDHI: Definitely.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: And for the last seven years, I've been part of CADD Microsystems. CADD Microsystems is an Autodesk Platinum partner. We are headquartered just outside of our nation's capital in Alexandria, Virginia.

I work out of our Richmond office. And Purvi works out of our Alexandria office. And obviously I've been around for a while. I know a few of you, so welcome back. Nice to play along. And I'll turn things over to Purvi to say a little about herself.

PURVI GANDHI: All right, so hi everybody. So I am playing the architect side of this. So I am an architect. I'm a registered architect in Virginia.

Before I came to CADD-- I've been at CADD about two years now. I spent 10 years at an architecture firm. And my background specifically is in historic preservation in existing buildings.

So I know a lot about how to use Revit for existing buildings. That's one thing that I love doing. That's pretty much all I've done.

I've done work on Smithsonian buildings, being in D.C. I've done work at the national zoo. I've done some great landmarks in D.C. and was very happy to do that.

About two years ago, I had twins. So I decided that I needed a switchover from the crazy life of an architect with deadlines to something a little less stressful. Having twins is stressful enough, right?

So that's what I do. Most recently I've-- this may be my first AU, but I spoke at Built this year. And I spoke at a couple of local architecture conferences. So--

DONNIE GLADFELTER: Any other--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

PURVI GANDHI: --getting out there. Anybody that was at Built this year in Toronto? Yeah, it was a pretty awesome-- my first Built also. And I really loved it. So--

DONNIE GLADFELTER: Excellent.

PURVI GANDHI: So yeah, that's a little about me.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: All right. So let's start jumping in here. So probably by the fact that you're in this class, you understand that there's a bit of a conflict here, right? There's the civil engineer. And darn-it, I'm right.

PURVI GANDHI: No.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: And then there's the architect--

PURVI GANDHI: I'm right.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: --who also feels she is right.

PURVI GANDHI: Of course.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: So which one of us is right?

AUDIENCE: Civil.

AUDIENCE: Civil.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: I like you. I didn't pay him. I promise.

PURVI GANDHI: Oh, sure.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: So there's this sort of conflict. And it's something that we've encountered time and time again with many of our clients that we work with on a daily basis. There's this sort of civil is wrong if you're an architect. And if you're a civil engineer, then the architect is wrong. And that's just the way it's been all along.

PURVI GANDHI: Just keep it the other way.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: Oh, did I--

PURVI GANDHI: To the architect, the civil engineer is wrong.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: See, that's why I have somebody to keep me accountable. And as the sort of eye of BIM has become more and more important over recent years and more and more of our clients have come to us asking us how can we make these two worlds that otherwise is impossible to bring together-- how can we bring them together? And that's really the substance of the why we felt inspired to put this class together and bring it to you guys today.

So that's what we're going to be kind of diving into. And you guys read the bio. I don't know if you want to go through those, Purvi. But--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

PURVI GANDHI: Yeah, I mean I'm sure you saw this. These are our learning objectives. I don't need to read them verbatim.

But I just do want to tell you the purpose of this is to make the Civil files and the Revit files talk to each other. So we're going to show you how to do that. We're going to show you how to put them back and forth, so taking the Civil information and putting it into Revit and taking the Revit information and putting it into Civil.

And then that may be as far as most of you need to go. But we like to take it one step further. And we're going to show you how you can then take that information and do some visualization with it, because we all like to see our things together. We like to see them and be able to walk through them or fly through them or at least just see them in 3D all together to help us understand our projects better.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: Out of curiosity, how many InfraWorks users? All right, we've got a few.

PURVI GANDHI: Good.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: Awesome, awesome. So we want to kind of get a couple of ground rules out of the way here. So surprise, surprise. There's probably the stuff that you understand just from reading the description that we're going to be using today-- Civil 3D, Revit, Navisworks, InfraWorks. OK, no surprise there.

Now maybe the surprise is the fact that this workflow that we're going to share with you is not possible out of the box. Nice and convenient for Autodesk to do for us. We do need some extra pieces of software.

The first that we're going to be taking a look at is the shared reference point extension. And the nice little convenient thing about this is it has a Civil 3D version and a Revit version. But any Revit users found this plug-in? We have a couple. OK.

PURVI GANDHI: Yeah, good.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: So the nice little convenient organization sort of trivia that you need to know about this is the shared reference point extension exists in the AutoCAD Civil 3D productivity pack, because that's where Revit users go to find extensions for their software. So for you Revit users, you're going to have to look someplace that you probably wouldn't have otherwise looked. So with that in mind, we have both extensions here for Civil 3D and for Revit. We're going to be taking a look at both of those.

The other piece that we have to have to kind of facilitate this workflow is something known as the Site Designer for Revit. This is something Autodesk acquired, I don't know, it feels like five-ish years ago. I don't know.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

DONNIE GLADFELTER: It's been around for a while now. So kind of regardless of what version of Revit you're using, the basic kind of substantive workflow we're going to be talking about here-- we're using 2018, of course. But I'm fairly confident in saying we can go back to 2014 or '15, somewhere in that range.

PURVI GANDHI: It's been around for at least that long.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: It's been around for a while. So this is sort of the landscape of what we need from a software perspective. And from a procedural perspective, this is what we're going to be kind of walking through here.

PURVI GANDHI: Yeah, so for those of you who've seen our handout, you'll see that it's divided up into these six steps. So Donnie already kind of talked about the point of this. We want to talk about an end-to-end workflow between the civil engineer and the architects and all the design data in the project.

So the first thing, though, that we're going to do is talk about kind of a higher level issue of the coordinates in Revit. And I'm sure most of you kind of know a little bit about that. And we're going to dive into that a little bit deeper.

Then from there, we're going to talk about how we can take the building information and give it over to the civil engineer. Then the civil engineer is going to take that information and put it on their site, send it back to the architects. And then we're going to make it all go back together. And then we will end with that visualization part to kind of round it out and kind of give that extra pizzazz.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: Absolutely. So the first and perhaps most critical part of this whole journey that we're going to go on in the next sort of hour at this point is the coordinate piece. And there's some sort of harsh truths here. And I think this is the very sort of notion of where the civil engineer kind of digs our heels in the ground. Anybody else wear heels?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DONNIE GLADFELTER: I don't really, but anyway. And on the other side of the fence, the architect also digs their heels into the ground and says darn-it, I'm right. And it all kind of comes down to the way that we sort of view coordinates in this sort of chasm of data that we have here.

So just real quick here. We have this sort of conflict between real world coordinates, AKA, what all of us civil engineers use, and the Revit world coordinates. And they're kind of the special coordinates. Purvi is going to talk about these in a bit.

So a couple of points that we need to make clear. First and foremost, the world is not flat. Do we have any Flat Earthers? Thank goodness. OK. That makes me feel very, very comfortable that we have no Flat Earthers here.

But kind of as a continuation of that, and this is maybe the jarring piece here. Every map that you've looked at is a lie. If you take a look at Google Maps as an example, Greenland is about the same size as Africa. If you actually take a look at the total square miles of Greenland and compare it to Africa, they are nowhere near the same size.

And the basic sort of challenge that we have here is that we have a sphere that we are representing on a flat plane. And so as a result, every sort of plan that we create that kind of represents the build space is a lie in some certain capacity. Or as we like to say it in the sort of design world, it's within a reasonable tolerance, right?

I did a sort of quick little study the other day. If you take the world's tallest building-- I forget the name of it over in--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DONNIE GLADFELTER: Yeah, there you go. Perfect. I can't say it. So I'll stick with you guys. And you sort of extracted that and assumed it was square-- with the curvature of the earth, if all sides of that building were plumb, it would be about 2/3 of an inch wider at the top than at the bottom. And it's simply because of the curvature of the earth.

And so kind of with that, every plane sheet we create is kind of within this tolerance. And this is kind of where this objection starts coming into play. The other thing I'd like to point out is even though AutoCAD is in our product name for you Revit users, we create models too. And they have feelings. OK? They have feelings too, OK?

And so with that, we do place our civil models where they exist on earth through this thing called coordinate systems. And we could probably do an entire class just on geographic coordinate systems. But this is the very thing that we have to align with the Revit world. And sorry architects, the world doesn't revolve around you.

PURVI GANDHI: Yeah, well, that's what Donnie says. But in the Revit world, the world actually does revolve around your building. So you model your building in Revit.

And then if you need to change its relationship to the world, you actually move the world around your building. That's what editing the coordinates does. So in the Revit world, yes. The world does revolve around the building, which is pretty awesome.

So the other thing is that I'm sure most of you have heard about the 20-mile limit in Revit where you need to keep all of your modeled objects within 20 miles of what's called the Revit origin, which I'm going to get into when we get to the Revit part a little bit more. It's actually not 20 miles. I've tested it. It's more like a mile. Things start doing weird things. Graphics start doing weird things.

So that's why we're starting out this presentation with the coordinates, with the conversation about the coordinate. And the 20 miles, as I've been told, is after about 20 miles. The curvature of the earth starts to make a difference in the projection of your building. So that's why there's that 20 miles.

So I mentioned the three points. Everybody knows about the project base point and the survey point. There's that third point, that's the Revit origin. Who knows about the Revit origin?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

PURVI GANDHI: All right. So this is good. I'm glad that I'm explaining this to you.

I went to a really amazing talk at Built about this. And this is why I'm now evangelizing this, because it blew my mind. And it made me really understand a lot better how to model my building so that things don't go weird. So with that--

DONNIE GLADFELTER: So let's I guess start taking a look at this, right?

PURVI GANDHI: Yeah. So now we're going to jump right in. And we're going to show you how this all actually works in real time, right? Remember, live demo. What could go wrong?

DONNIE GLADFELTER: All right, so we're going to begin this as you might expect over in the Revit world and talk for a brief moment about these three points that--

PURVI GANDHI: Exactly.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: --a good portion of these folks seem to know about.

PURVI GANDHI: Seem to know about the two points, right? Does everybody know about the project base point and the survey point? Yes. All right.

So this is a brand new Revit file created off of the default template. All of you will create files. Any of you who work in Revit are just going to create that file.

The first thing we need to do is we need to see where these points are. So there's a couple of ways we can see them. I'm just going to temporarily turn them on.

We can see those two points. They're right there in the middle of the screen, right? We have our triangle, which is our survey point. We have the circle with the x through it, which is our project base point.

So when you start a project from scratch, those two points sit on top of the Revit origin. The Revit origin is the 0,0,0 point of Revit. And you can't change it.

It's always there. Everything that you model in Revit is relative to that point. So the important thing is to keep all of your modeled objects as close to that point as possible. Now, because it's--

DONNIE GLADFELTER: But if we can't see it, how do we find it?

PURVI GANDHI: Exactly. You can't see it. How do you find it? Well, I learned another trick about how to find it. So I'm going to show you that in a second.

So the survey point can be off in space. The Revit origin is that important point. So from here, I'm going to show you kind of how to find it.

So here I have a project. Now what you should do before you draw an entire building is you should know where those points are. And you should place those points relative to something on your building. I like to make it a corner, something that's measurable.

I worked with a lot of existing buildings. Pretty much every project I did was an existing building. So we would pick an existing corner and make that exterior corner that point. We'd make that our project base point.

So just a quick overview. Project base point is the point that all of the models for a particular building are going to use to line up with each other-- structural model, MEP model, architectural model, fire protection model, whatever models you have, right? The survey point is used to then take a bunch of different buildings that are on a common sight and line them up together. So every building has its own project base point.

And then all of those models have the same survey point. So when you link them in together, they will all go in the right spot relative to each other. So that's important to note.

So again here, we're going to go ahead and see-- so I'm just assuming that most of you know these steps. So I'm not going to walk through step by step exactly what I'm doing. We do walk through it in our handout, how to find all of these things. So if you need the actual picks and clicks, you can go back and look there.

We have a lot of information to cover. So we don't really have-- we don't want to run out of time with doing all of that particular step-by-step play-by-play. So I turn those points on. You can see they're right here in this corner.

If I click on one, you can see that it's 0,0,0, right? So I have not established any special coordinates in this file whatsoever. Both of those points are just at zero.

Now the interesting thing is you could move them. And if you move them, they're still going to stay zero. They're going to say zero, but they're not going to be on top of the Revit origin.

So this is how you find the Revit origin. What you do is you actually use a CAD file to help you find the Revit origin. So you take a CAD file. You draw an x or something in that CAD file at the CAD 0,0,0.

And you link that in origin to origin. And it's going to put that at the Revit origin. That is the only way to find it. Yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PURVI GANDHI: There is another way to find it? What's the other way to find it?

AUDIENCE: If you were to click on a project data point, [INAUDIBLE]

PURVI GANDHI: You can. That is true. That is true. But I don't like to move it.

I feel like once I've moved it, I don't want to reset it, because that could mess up something else. But you are correct, yes. That is true. But to find it without changing anything else-- I should put that caveat-- you can link in a CAD file origin-to-origin. So I'm going to do that just to show you--

DONNIE GLADFELTER: That we can easily find this.

PURVI GANDHI: That we can easily find it.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: Where are you?

PURVI GANDHI: So I'm going to make sure it's origin-to-origin, right? The rest of this-- I mean, you can change it based on the settings that you like. Look! There's Waldo. He's at the origin. Sorry, we had to be a little silly.

So I made an x. I made a plus sign at Waldo's chest, because I couldn't really find another point on Waldo that I liked the best. There's Waldo. We found him. There's the origin.

So that's kind of the easy way to find the origin. Does that make sense to everybody? So we did this-- this was sort of-- the overarching-- this is how coordinates work in Revit, because that will help you understand what happens when we now coordinate it with Civil.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: Coordinate theory or therapy.

PURVI GANDHI: Exactly.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: Whichever one you might prefer.

PURVI GANDHI: So then the next thing that we want to do now is we're going to start this workflow. So we figured out where our coordinates are. Now we need to hand off sort of something with the Revit building over to Civil so that they can then coordinate it together.

So what we're going to do is we need to make a CAD file for the civil engineer. So all the civil engineer really cares about, right, is the outside edge of the building. The footprint. They don't care about the inside walls, the furniture or the fixtures, anything.

So we're just going to create a view that we can export to CAD that's just going to be a very simplified version of our building to then be placed on the site. So I, as general practice, like to have different types of views in my model for different purposes. So what we're going to do here is we're going to create a civil coordination view.

So I'm just going to make-- so I'm going to go-- my first floor plan here is sort of the ground level of my building. So I'm going to go to that view. And I'm going to make a new plan.

So I made a new plan, best practice, rename it, put it in the right spot. I'm not going to do all that. But that's what you should be doing.

Then we're just going to go ahead and we're going to turn off everything that we don't need. So all I really want are my walls. I don't want any of my annotation. And I'm going to turn off Waldo, because I don't need Waldo.

So I still have the inside parts of my building. So here I'm just going to use a filter. And the step-by-step for exactly how to make the filter and how to apply it are all in the handout. But in this case, I'm just going to apply it here.

Actually I guess I do need to make it real quick. So I'm just going to make a filter. What a filter is for, for those of you who don't know, is to control the Visibility Graphics of a subset of a family category.

So I only want to see my exterior wall. So what I've done and what's a good practice when you set up your files in Revit is to make sure that your exterior walls are set to function exterior, that your interior walls are set to function interior, if they're a shaft, if they're a soffit. There are like five or six different functions of walls.

Make sure you set them to the right one. It's not that hard to do from the beginning. And it will make it possible for you to do things like this later on and control their visibility and their graphics very easily.

So I make my filter. I'm just going to go ahead and make my filter. So it's going to choose all the walls. And then all I need to do is I've added that filter. And now I just need to uncheck it so they're not going to be visible.

Ta-da! So now I have just my exterior walls. So then I just export this to CAD. And I send it over to Donnie. You all know how to export to CAD? File export CAD? All right.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: So let's--

PURVI GANDHI: No, you have-- sorry. You have to hit this. And then hit yours.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: There we go. OK, perfect. So exporting from Revit, this is what I end up with. And this is pretty good. I don't have your tables and all the other sort of apparatuses that I don't frankly care too much about.

Of course, as the Civil, I'm going to simplify this down a little bit more, because really all I care about are the outer extents. So again, assuming that most people know how to use the fill it and the trim and extend and basic sort of AutoCAD 101, this is what I am cleaning things up to be for my footprint. And because I am such a skilled designer, I have designed my entire parking lot without knowing where my building is going to be. Thank you very much.

[LAUGHTER]

OK, maybe I do. But anyway, so this is the building site that we're going to be placing our building onto. And all I'm going to do here is bring in the footprint that I received from Revit and did some cleanup on here.

Now this is where I do like to kind of take things a little bit further here and kind of quickly talk about some of the surface analysis tools that we have inside of Civil. So when I'm picking a finish for elevation, one of the things that's important to me is trying to figure out kind of the cut fill, trying to balance that across the site. And this isn't a grading class, so we're not going to go kind of in depth there.

But to kind of get a ballpark of this, I do like using the surface analysis tools that if you're not familiar with can be quite handy. So this is just using the default, out-of-the-box Civil 3D template. I'm going to use the elevation banding at-- here we go-- elevation banding right here.

And if we come over to the analysis tab, Civil 3D gives us many different ways that we can analyze this surface. Among them is elevations. And what I really like to use here is this range interval with data, only because I feel like I've been using Civil 3D so long now, this feels new. But I don't think it's really all that new anymore. Anyone happen to remember when this got added? I feel like it was probably like 2012 or '13.

So anyway, nevertheless, range interval with data. Basically I can say I want to create a range every one foot. And I can type in an elevation that I want to quickly analyze. And so what I'll do here is just hit Apply.

And it changes the entire surface. Basically anything above the elevation I specified is in a hue of red. Anything below it is in green.

And I can just kind of quickly use this to study my site and kind of step through the different elevations, just rerunning the analysis and applying that. And we can see this sort of change until the point that I get to a place where at least for the building itself the site kind of balances at least in that building site. And hopefully everyone can kind of understand where this building is going to go.

So kind of with that in mind, I know what my elevation needs to be now. I am going to just change this back to a border only, because I don't care about things too much. And at this point, it's really just a matter of inserting the drawing that I cleaned up, the footprint drawing. I will just use the basic AutoCAD insert command to browse out to that cleaned up version of the footprint.

Since I don't know where this needs to go, I'm going to use the specify on the screen and say OK for this. And through the magic of movies, I just magically have points in my drawing that I can snap to, to place my building. This is what you call generative design.

Nonetheless, so I'm going to place the building in here. The important piece here is I have not only established the horizontal location of this building. But if I click on this polyline that I've inserted here-- and I know this might not be easy to see in the back.

But if you look at the coordinate read-out in the bottom of AutoCAD, you can see that third coordinate is at elevation 190. And that's the big part here. I just need to have elevated geometry that has both horizontal and vertical.

But this is that first sort of checkpoint that I run into a roadblock without the sort of extra tools we talked about. This is where I'm going to employ the shared reference point tool, because getting this information into something that Revit can understand unfortunately is not something we can do out of the box. So I have to install that shared reference point tool.

And once installed, I'm going to find that over on the toolbox tab of the tool space. And it's under the Subscription Extension Manager, Shared Reference Point Tool, Export Shared Reference Points. And so when I click on this command, the prompts are probably what you kind of understand or expect.

First is origin. And this is where you just have to communicate with your architect. It doesn't really matter where I pick just so long as the points I pick correspond with the points that Purvi is going to ultimately pick here in a bit.

So in my case, I'm just going to pick the bottom corner right here and just use my AutoCAD OSNAPs which we know of course acquire not only horizontal, but also vertical. So it's got that one 90 elevation. And for the prompt that every civil engineer is absolutely going to love, pick something in the quasi-north direction, because that's typically a good compass to go by in the world of civil. So I'm going to pick something kind of north-ish, kind of west-ish, being this corner of the building right here.

What that has done is picked up kind of the key geometric components of those two points I've selected. You can see here that I have x and y, which of course correspond with easting and nothing in civil engineering speak. Finally, I have the z elevation of 190. And then the other fun part here that can be somewhat difficult to acquire manually without this is the rotation in the xy plane, because again Revit doesn't really understand true north. So we kind of have to talk in Revit terminology here.

Likewise, the other sort of gotcha, at least for those of us here in the States, since the rest of the world works in metric, this tool defaults to metric. And it doesn't matter how many times you change from metric. It always defaults to meters, which if you work in metric, you love. I already saw a couple thumbs up there.

But for the rest of us here in the States that like to work in our feet, we have to go ahead and choose feet. If you don't pick this, it will make the Revit site go a little bonkers. But nonetheless, I'm going to say OK.

I'm going to export this out. I'll give it a name. I'll just take the default here. Let me do this and save that guy out.

And if I quickly look at this file that I just exported, there's really not much to it. I'll just open this up in Notepad. And you can see here it's just an XML version of those points acquired from AutoCAD. At this point, I can go ahead and email this over to my architect, who can begin the process in Revit.

PURVI GANDHI: All right. So now we have that file. Donnie's told me-- I clicked on this point first. And then I clicked on that point. So you need to click on this point and then that point.

So now we're going to use the Revit portion of that tool, right? So to get to it, you've installed it. It lives in the add-ins tab. Autodesk spent a whole lot of time making it look pretty, as you can see it at the far end over there.

So you know what it is. Import shared reference coordinates from XML files. Pretty straightforward. You can't lose the tool, right?

So now the interesting thing with this tool is when you click on it, it doesn't really look like anything happens, right? I'm going to click on this tool. My mouse is going to change to a little plus. As we know, for those of us who work in Revit, when we click on a tool and we don't know what to do, we look in the bottom left corner of our screen. And it gives us some instructions, right?

So just remember, the instructions are on the bottom left. It's going to tell you what to do. So it says select origin point to align to.

So I know that Donnie picked this point over here. So I'm going to zoom in. I'm going to pick that point. And then it tells me select a point on the y up direction.

So now in the simple file, the building was kind of rotated, right? Like this. So I need to pick that same point. So in my actual file, it's horizontal. So that same point is over here.

Once I pick those points, it's now going to ask me, all right, what file do you want to use? It seems a little bit backwards, like you should put the file in first and then pick the points. But you know. So that's the file.

Are you sure? Yes, of course. Yay, it did it.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

DONNIE GLADFELTER: --command in AutoCAD.

PURVI GANDHI: It didn't really look like it did anything. Well, what we have to do now is we have to actually set the location of our building to that site. So we have to go to our location, right?

And under the location in the site tab, we're going to point to that file that we just loaded in, make it the current, doesn't really look like anything happened. But the button's grayed out, so we know it's done. We say OK.

So now we need to test it. It still is set to project north, right? But for every view in Revit, you, can set it to either project north or to true north. So to test to make sure that it works, we're going to go over here and we're just going to change the orientation of our plan to true north.

And now our building, true north, matches the true north in the Civil file. Didn't that seem like it was so easy? Right?

DONNIE GLADFELTER: So at this point, our models are technically coordinated.

PURVI GANDHI: They are.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: And this is where we can start kind of having some fun, making the two worlds kind of collide--

PURVI GANDHI: Exactly.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: --and kind of work together.

PURVI GANDHI: Yeah, so the next thing that we want to do now is we want to take sort of the 3-D information and share it. So what we want to do is take the Revit model. And we're going to pull it out-- the 3D parts of it out.

And Donnie is going to able to put it in a Civil model. So now he can have all the 3D parts. And then he's going to take his site, send it over to me, and I'm going to show you how to put that into the Revit model. So then they can really be all the way coordinated.

So the first thing that we're going to do is-- and this is actually something kind of newish, right, this whole Navisworks.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: Yeah, I think [INAUDIBLE] 2017 AutoCAD gave us the ability to import a Navisworks file. I don't know if you guys knew this or not. And so Navisworks files are pretty darn lean, mean--

PURVI GANDHI: Yes, exactly.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: --efficient, won't blow up your AutoCAD. So that's what I'd really like from Purvi--

PURVI GANDHI: Exactly.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: --is a nice, clean Navisworks--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

PURVI GANDHI: --do that, because typically you could export to 3D CAD. But that's going to be pretty heavy. And we don't really want to add all that extra weight to the Civil files, which already have a lot of information in them.

But to do this, you have to make sure that you do it from a 3D view. So I'm going to go ahead and go to my default 3D view. And I'm going to go ahead and export. And I'm going to export it to Navisworks.

So the important thing about this dialog box is to make sure that you check some of the settings. So there is a button at the bottom for the settings. And because we have coordinated our models and we've coordinated our coordinates, we want to make sure that that box there under coordinates says shared. It should. It's just one of those things that I like to-- we just like to double check, just to make sure that it's accurate.

It's going to say shared. You shouldn't have to actually change anything in this box, just check it and make sure. So I'm going to go ahead and export it. So now I've exported it.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: [INAUDIBLE]

PURVI GANDHI: There you go. It's there.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: Did I do it?

PURVI GANDHI: Yeah.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: Perfect. So picking things back up here in the AutoCAD world, we can bring in the Navisworks file. And this is something I find not a lot of folks-- some folks know, but not many do. And it's basically a function of our xref command.

And the somewhat confusing part is it isn't sort of phrased as Navisworks here, but instead as a coordination model. So coordination model, just think of it as Navisworks. We'll go ahead and pick on this. And I can pick on the NWC file, the Navisworks cache file that was exported directly from Revit.

And if I pick on this and choose Open, the awesome news is because my coordinates actually match, I can just insert this as sort of 0,0 like I would any other sort of civil document at this point. So keeping just the default insertion point information here. I'll say OK. And just like that, I now have the Revit building right there exactly where I told it to be.

And this is a Navisworks file. It's really lean. I can kind of orbit around without too much of a fuss.

So this is awesome that I can bring the Revit model practically here into AutoCAD without completely blowing up AutoCAD. But what would be really nice is if I could take my kind of pertinent civil information and get it over to Revit. Now what I find is the common workflow that I encounter with this and I think Purvi too is that most people take their civil file, they kind of export to AutoCAD with contours at some interval, and then their architect kind of builds a surface from contours.

And anyone in the civil engineering world knows that building surfaces from contours is not necessarily a best practice, because the surface is actually built from these triangles that you see on the screen here. And so the question becomes how can I get this actual sort of representation of the surface-- the actual triangulated irregular network, or TIN, from Civil 3D into Revit. And the secret to this is something called LandXML.

For those of you who are the Revit type, you might be familiar with IFC, which is kind of this 3D sort of BIM model exchange format. LandXML is kind of like an IFC for civil. Any self-respecting civil application can export to LandXML.

So to do that, I'm just going to the output tab of civil, [INAUDIBLE] export LandXML. I will pick the surface or surfaces that I would like to export and just say OK. And that is going to export out to a XML file

That is much more jibbered than the other. I won't-- it's somewhere in here. But anyway, it is a much longer XML file. But the good news is from here, we can take that exported LandXML and with the help of the site designer add-in, bring it into Revit.

PURVI GANDHI: Yeah. So like we mentioned, we have these two sort of add-ins that you have to get to make it work. So here in this case, we need that site designer add-in. And it turns it into a whole tab in Revit for those of you who have used it.

The site designer is there to do a bunch of stuff in site. We can talk a long time about the pros and cons of it. We're not going to get into that right now. We're just going to use the pertinent tool, which is that very first tool on the top left-hand corner, which is import LandXML.

So it doesn't matter which view you're in, because again our files are coordinated. It's going to bring it in at the right spot. So I'm just going to do it here from the 3D view. We hit that little import button. We just have to go and find it.

We find it. The most important things are making sure that first box is checked. Import the Toposurfaces and make sure that it's set by survey point. Let's say all right.

It's going to stay here are the Toposurfaces that are in your file. So as Donnie mentioned, you could have multiple surfaces in the same file and just choose the ones that you want. So in this case, I'm just going to choose this one. You would do them one at a time.

And then you choose how you want to bring it in. So a brand new Toposurface. It has a name. You can change the name later if you want. You choose what phase you want to bring it in on.

Again, you can change that later just like anything else in Revit. You can change its phase after it's created. If you have an existing Toposurface that you want to replace with this new one, then you can choose the second box.