14 NEW Topography Tools by Environment for Revit (But who's counting...)

NEHAMA SCHECHTER-BARABAN: Hi, everyone, and welcome to 14 New Topography Tools by Environment for Revit, but who's counting? My name is Nehama Schechter-Baraban, and I'm the COO at Arch-Intelligence. I'm a landscape architect and I'm a heavy Revit user.

Now landscape architects who use Revit regularly are kind of like panda bear. They are very rare to find. And today, I will show you the key ingredient for a successful Revit landscape model. Now I know this is a class about topographies, but hopefully by the end of this class, you, too, will see that topographies in Revit are this very key ingredient.

Now since our time is short, I invite you to learn more about me and about Arch-Intelligence, the developers of Environment for Revit in our website and on our LinkedIn page.

So to start, I want to ask the question, what is our obsession with our intelligence with topographies? And why do we invest so much energies in developing tools for working with them? Well, Environment for Revit was developed for the sole purpose of allowing site professionals to make the transition to BIM technology. And to do that, we had to address the most fundamental requirements of site modeling. So one of the most important parts of any site-related project is grading.

And what, really, is grading? So grading refers to a very wide spectrum of actions. And essentially, whenever you make changes to the existing ground, it can be referred to as grading. So grading can be found in the very beginning of the construction process, and you can also find it in the very final stages of this process as well. So whether you're an urban designer, a road engineer, or a landscape architect, we all engage in grading.

This is why I believe that effective grading is the key for a successful BIM transition for so many disciplines. And to achieve an accurate grading in Revit, we actually use the Topography category. So topography or Toposurface in Revit is a surface without thickness that is composed of elevation points in space and triangulation between them.

So this category has a very straightforward approach, and just allowing you to place these elevation points in space, this goes very well with the material of the ground, which is, unlike other bill of materials that keep renewing, these material is pretty primitive and it will stay this way. So soil will be soil, sand will be sand, and gravel will be gravel.

And the straightforward approach of the Topography category allows us to create very complex geometries while maintaining a high level of accuracy that otherwise, in a mass environment or very dynamic parametric surfaces, we might not be able to create.

But this accuracy doesn't come without a price, and more often than not in landscape project, we find ourself dealing with Toposurfaces that have thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of points. And the question is, how do we manage these massive amount of elevation points?

Well, the answer is very simple. We just work for thousands of hours. Just kidding. This was before we had the Environment plugin.

Now, we have the environment topography toolset, and it allows us an improved user experience allowing you to place each and every elevation point according to so many design requirements, such as the slope that you want to achieve, the relationship with the surrounding landscape, and of course, your design ideas.

So with that being said, let's jump right into Revit and see some examples of how we can work with these elevation points to grade our topographies.

Take a look at this landscape model my team and I have created. There is a common idea out there that landscape models are composed of one Toposurface that represents the existing ground with the modifications of the proposed design. So essentially we get this one big very complicated surface laid on our entire model. And to me, that's really like saying that a building is one big chunk of cast-in-place concrete, and this is, of course, not true.

So if I started with the blanket analogy, I would say that the landscape model is more like a quilt where you stitch each and every part of the landscape in its own unique geometry and position and elevation, and the sewing of all these parts together is what makes the holistic landscape model. The beautiful quilt landscape blanket.

So today, throughout the class, I will take you through some milestones of the modeling process of this project, and we will start somewhere in the middle, and then go a little bit backwards and forwards, so bear with me.

One last thing before we start. You should know that when I first started to design this model, I actually laid out the overall grading scheme. So I knew that the water or the slopes should go something like that. That's about our-- my grading scheme over here.

Also, I already had in place the buildings and the elevations in every building entrance. And you can see that I also had the roads. So I had a lot of elevations to refer to. Now the other thing that I did before starting to actually model the grading was to build a two-dimensional flat geometry of the main skeleton of my design. You can see maybe these walkways over here.

So in the examples you're going to see today, I would actually use topographies as help surfaces to drape those flat floors on top of them. And you can learn more about it from the class handouts, or you can actually see the AU 2021 class that we gave about environment tools.

So let's start with going through this demonstration file that I prepared for the first example. What can we see over here? So you can see these floors over here. They're already graded, they're already in place. And then we have this main walkway that we want to start. You can see that it's a flat geometry.

And creating the grading for that in CAD or maybe other 3D software, I would have to work very hard to just calculate where every contour line should be laid. But working with these Environment tools, it should be pretty simple since I already know the beginning elevation of this path and I already know the end elevation. You can see this model line over here that I created as an anchor. As I said, I've already done the grading scheme for this part.

So I will show you later how to work with model lines, don't worry. But for now, that's just start to create the help surface for the grading of this walkway. So I'll go to Environment tab and I will click on the Topography Tools. I want to show you From Edge tool. This is one of my favorites, the most useful tool-- most used tool also.

And it essentially places elevation points on any model edge. It can be a linked model, like over here you can see. It can be a linked CAD model. So any 3D edge in your model, you can place elevation points on top. So what I want to do to start, I want to click on the edges of these plaza over here. And you can see right away that Environment places the elevation points.

And I will click again on these model line. You can see, there's a lot of elevation points over here, but we will move on. And once I'm happy with the location of the elevation points, let's click on Insert Points to just create a surface. So immediately you can see the Toposurface. I can see the contour lines, which is great, because that allows me to understand the shape of the surface.

It's not perfect yet. Let's click on Escape, and once I click on Escape, I'm transferred to the Selection mode. And I just want to delete some of these points over here because I don't need all of them. So it's still not perfect, though, but I would click on Finish right now and move to a Plan view. You can see all my data lines over here.

So before I go on editing this help surface, I want to place some slope arrows right where my surface is overlapping with my floor. And this will allow me to make sure that I'm within the slow percentage that I want to be in. I want to stay within 1% to 1 and 1/2%.

So let's go on editing this help surface. I will select the surface now. And you can see that in the Modify tab over here, I can actually work-- I can actually work with the Topography tools. There you go. You can see them over here.

So instead of just editing the surface like that, let's go to Topography Tools. And the second tool I'm going to show you today is the Insert Midpoint. So this tool allows you to select any two points in your surface and to add elevation points-- or to add the missing information in order to create the shape that you want between these two points. And let's see how it works.

So I'm going to select one point over here and one point over here. You can see the pink line that I have added. Now I would actually move the arc slider like that to form a shape that is more or less just like my path. Now I can move the density slider to add more elevation points. I can even do with less.

Click on Insert Points and you can right away see how my surface is smoother I can zoom in and see my slope arrows from before, so I can make sure that my slopes are just like I wanted them. And let's repeat these process at the other side of the road.

And I will do something like that. Move the arc slider, and I will adjust it a little bit. Move the density slider to add more points, click on Insert Points, and you can see that my contour lines are smooth. So you can go on with this editing until you're very happy. Maybe you would like to have slopes going here and then going here. So you could play around with this elevation points, maybe select them and move them, whatever you want.

For the sake of this example, however, I will now click on Finish. I'm pretty happy with the result. And let's go back to 3D view and isolate our surface, our help surface and the floors to just be able to see the result a lot better.

So now I have my geometry and the grading design. Let's select all of them, go to Environment, and click on Shape by Topography. And then Environment will essentially drape by-- automate the process of Modify Subelement and place these elevation points on top of my floors just like you can see over here.

Let's unisolate and hide the surface. I'm going to hide it using a view filter. So I just need to select the surface, and in its properties, to type the comment help. And there, it's gone. So you can see a very, very smooth connection between these two elements in my model. That's how we stitch a quilt.

So that was a really nice example of how to create these helper surface. And one of the biggest advantages of topographies in Revit is that they naturally show the contour lines, and the control lines are the best representation of the three-dimensional form of my topography.

So for these next example over here, I'm going to first create the contour lines, and I'm going to do it using Model Line. So I'm going to first create the contour lines, and from them, I will create the helper surface. So for me as a landscape architect, that's the most convenient way of working, but keep in mind that maybe you would have chose a different way of creating the grading for this area.

So for this, we're going to show you everything in 3D view and in 2D view. You can see that all my floors are flat, all my model lines are flat. I have a line style dedicated to the help lines. And I've already designed the overall layout of what I want my contour lines to be.

So, there are several ways of assigning elevation to model lines, and of course, we would use the easiest one. Let's go to Environment, and we will use the Set Elevation tool. I want to type in the value of the lowest line-- you can start with the highest-- and the increment.

So what will be the vertical distance between my lines? Let's go with Set Elevation by Crossing, and now take a look at my 3D view as well. I'm going to click one time at the bottom, one time at the top, and you can see that my model lines jumped right away into their location. I already have text symbols over here to show me what is the elevation of each line, and these are actually dynamic. So if I select these texts and maybe type in a different value, take a look at this line over here. It jumped right out of place. So let's bring it back to place. That was 15.10.

And let's repeat this process again. Environment, Set Elevation to the lower part of the prominade, Set Elevation by Crossing, you can take a look at my 3D view again, one click here and one click here, and everything is in place.

Now you can see that I have left out a few lines. So for them, I would actually use these text symbol. How do I place this text symbol without using Set Elevation? Well, let's use the Check Elevation tool. So I'm going to go to Environment, Check Elevation, and click on these lines. You can see that they're at 0 elevation.

So all I have to do now is to simply change the value of each line to be vertically located wherever I want them. So these are basically contour lines that I'm designing right now. Oops. Sorry about that. 13.8. Everything is in place. I'm pretty happy with the result. Don't forget that there is a little bit of design work as well and thinking work before.

And now I want to take these contour lines, these model lines and make them into a topography. So let's go to Environment, Topography Tools. And although we could have used the From Edge tool I showed you before, there are a couple of advantages to using the Add Line tool over here.

So we're selecting the Add Line. And I will just drag and select all these model lines that I've prepared. You can see that Environment placed all the elevation points in place. And I will now click on Add Line. There are a few ways of placing these elevation points. And let's see the resulting surface that I have here.

So you can see that the contour lines on the surface are not necessarily aligned with my model lines. This is because I've used the Smart Point option that actually optimizes the amount of points that I will get.

But don't worry, all you have to do is remain within the Add Line feature and just reselect all the lines that you want to adjust or all the places that you want more accuracy. And you can see that the Environment adds automatically more elevation point.

You can have an indication of how many elevation points you have added to your surface and click on Add Line. And let's do it just one more to get a very accurate result and click on Finish once you're happy with the result.

So just like before, I have the help surface, and then I have my floors that I want to align to this help surface or to assign the grading to these floors. So I'm going to select all the floors. I'll select this one and this one.

I'm not going to select this circular plaza over here because I've actually prepared a different surface for that, and again, that's just me and that's just how I prefer to do my grading. And let's go to Environment-- sorry about that, Shape by Topography, and click OK.

So I invite you to explore a little bit further about the shape by topography tool because it has so many ways that you can use it. You can use as many surfaces and as many floors as you want. It can be used for both floors and roofs. And of course, as long as the surface and the slab are overlapping, it will work perfectly.

And yes, I think that's about it for these floors over here. Now, again, I will hide the surface using the comment help. This is a custom view filter that I have created. And I really love working with model lines because each line style actually behaves as its own category. So it's very easy for me to right-click, Hide in View, By Category, and that's it.

If I want to see the contour lines on the slabs, that's not a problem at all. Let's go to Environment, Slab Contours. And again, this is a feature that you can read more about in our class handout, but that's great. I have contour lines on this path.

So, I think we're ready to move on to an even more fun example over here. So we saw how to create surfaces from model edges and from model lines. And now I want to show you how to create-- maybe we can call it secondary surfaces between my main paths over here.

So you can see these valley or river, you could say. I actually planned all the water in this project go down over here and fill up these river or pond or whatever as a retention area for water to be able to infiltrate into the ground. So let's see how I created this part or this topography.

Here is my demonstration file. You can see I went back in the process. And over here you can see, I started by creating the surface using the Surface From Edge option in the Topography Tools. And let's see how I created this beautiful, smooth shape that you saw before.

Once you select the surface, you can see in the Modify tab that next to the topography tools, I also have the modified topography. So the reason that it's not entirely within the Topography toolset is because it works according to a different logics. It's more for sculpturing and free form shaping your topographies, and let's see how it works.

So I'm going to click on the Modify Topography, and immediately you can see these grid laid on top of my surface. So what the grid means is that whenever I have an intersection, that's where I will have my points. So Environment will basically lay a blanket of elevation points on top of my surface to create this smooth shape.

You can change the cell size of this grid-- let's go with 2 meters. So you have the option to control the amount of elevation points. And you can also rotate this grid, the placement of the grid. And you will see in a second how it influenced our shape.

Let's go to Inflate Surface. And I will take it to a negative value. So I want to sink this entire area down. So I want to deflate by maybe 13%. You can go up or down in the slider. Once I click on the Show Preview, environment would actually create these pink profiles that would be my indication of what is the resulting shape? And you can see over here, I don't really like the shape that I'm getting now.

So let's go back to Cancel, and I would change my cell size maybe to 1 meter. So I would have more points, more accuracy, more smoothness. And I will change the rotation to somewhere about 60-- yeah, something like that.

And again, that's a matter of trial and error. So it still allows you to go back and forth until you're happy with the result. Let's click on Show Preview now and see if we like the shape that we are getting a little bit more. So rotate around it. And yeah, that's pretty smooth. I'm pretty happy. Let's click on Apply.

And once I click on Apply, Environment actually set these blanket of elevation points. And even before exiting the tool, you can already see these nice contour lines that I have here. Let's click on OK. That's beautiful. I love it. OK.

Reset Temporary Hide, and of course, if you go to Editing mode, you would be able to see the blanket of elevation points very easily. So we have a few more surprises, bear with me. Let's go to this surface and go back to Modify Topography again. But this time, I want to show you the Shape by Point tool. So let's click on it and see what happens.

So once I click on this tool, take a look at my cursor. And I hover over my surface, I can see these elevation points. So this tool is here to allow you to create cute hills to like inflate your surface, but by a point. So the gain value is how I set the overall elevation of this cute hill.

And the size is how I set the diameter of the hill. Let's go to 7 meters. Now don't worry, all these tools will work with whatever units you are working with in your file. So you don't have to worry about the metric system over here. And I will go ahead and move the density slider all the way-- not all the way up, but mostly.

you can see that this way, I have more points when I'm hovering over my surface. And again, the more points, the more smoothness. So, let's click once, and twice, and three times. And that's really, really cute. OK, so I have these hills.

And you can actually use this tool in a different way. So let's enter a negative value. So minus 1 meter and maybe 9 meters in diameter. So now I can use these to create a stormwater retention area under each and every tree. So that's a very common thing that we do in arid areas.

So now all the water are going to flow and retain under the trees, and you can see the trees already react to these changes. This is very cute, and I think these trees are pretty thankful to me right now for making sure the rainwater will reach out to them and just infiltrate to the ground.

So let's click on OK to set these changes, and just rotate to see the result maybe up close. So that's really beautiful, really easy. And it's all up to your imagination what you can do or what you can achieve using these tools.

Next, this is not so much fun, design changes. Nobody likes them, every project has them, but we want to see two examples of how environment tools can make our lives easier even when it comes to design changes.

In this example, you can see the amphitheater and the beautiful topography I designed around it, and somebody came and told me that I have to change the slopes of my path next to it. So there is a gap over here between my path and my topography.

Let's click on this topography and go to the Topography Tools again to edit it. And now we will remain within the Default Selection mode. And I want to select all these points over here and align them with my path. So since all these points are on the boundary, I can use the Points on Boundary feature.

Click on it once, click on the first point over here, drag my mouth all the way-- my mouse, sorry, all the way to the end, and click on the left point over here. So all the points that I selected are blue, and you can also see here the indication of how many points you have selected.

Imagine having to align each and every point manually. Well, you don't have to because there is the Vertical Align option over here. Let's click on this one and just click one time on these floor, and immediately, all the points will align with the path. But I'm still not happy about the result because I want my lawn area or my gardening area to be a little bit lower than the path.

So you see, I cannot change the elevation of each point separately since they all have a different elevation. I would change the relative elevation or the relative location of all of them together. So I will take them down by 15 centimeters-- again, don't worry about the units, Change Elevation, and they have all changed together relatively.

So of course, you could go on and edit the surface as much as you want until you are happy, but that was fairly easy to just make this adjustment and see the consequences of it. Just one last example of the design changes using Selection Tools.

In this surface over here, once I click on Environment Topography Tools and once I go into Editing mode, you can right away see how I created these surface. It's very easy to understand, I created it with model lines.

So let's say that I entered one of the lines into the wrong location over here. So I can start, select all the points one part by another, and then change it. But instead, I could just select the first point since they're all in the same elevation and use the Get Connected Points option.

So now, it's just like selecting a contour line, basically. I can maybe move them to where I actually want it to be. Or maybe I can change their elevation over here if I got the elevation wrong or something. So these were only two small examples of how design changes can be made so easy with the Environment.

And before we finish, stay with me just a little bit longer, I promised you that we are going to go back and forth. So how can we go on without talking about the very first stages of every Revit landscape model? And this is a CAD survey.

So most of our projects today start with a CAD survey containing elevation points and contour lines. Some projects today do have surveys in Revit, and that's great. These surveyors all use Environment for Revit. But in any case, most times we have to take these elevation points and transfer these information from CAD to Revit to be able to model the existing surface correctly.

So the proper way to take these elevation points from CAD to Revit is to use-- go to the AutoCAD and use-- create a CSV file, which is basically a table containing the x-y-z coordinates of each point. And for those of you who know the Import Surface feature in the native Revit Topography Tools, since Revit has a 20-mile limitation, it often falls out of place and, let's take a look, messy inside.

Toposurface, Specify Point File. So I'm going to browse to select the CSV file containing all the points from the survey and click on Open. And you can see that it often feels out of place. So let's click on x right now and do the same process using Environment, Surface From File.

All I have to do now is-- let's go over here-- browse to find my file, my CSV file, click on Open, make sure the units are correct, and Environment immediately would create these surface according to the elevation points in the survey.

So if we had more time, we could show some examples of how to actually use Surface from Edge and Insert Midpoint to correct the Toposurface of the survey and make it more accurate according to the drawing, for example, in this swell area, but we don't have enough time. So I do invite you to read more about that process in our class handout.

Let's now go one step forward and select this surface, maybe market as Demolished at the Existing phase. Two more features I want to show you. So if we talked about collaborating with the engineer for the survey, let's talk about collaborating with road engineers.

The only way to collaborate with Civil 3D right now is to link their surfaces through Autodesk Construction Cloud, but through Environment for Revit, that's even easier. So for example, let me go to Environment over here, and I will select the External Civil Data feature.

So this allows me to basically bring in any Civil data that the engineer had exported as an XML file. Let's go to Add More Civil Data and browse to find the XML file that the civil engineer has exported from us. Click on Open. And before we click OK, in the visible elements over here, let's click on these three dots.

So you can see all the elements within the XML file. I have Toposurfaces and corridors. And they're divided according to the overall profile that the road engineer gave them. For this example, I would turn off the corridor elements, I would stay just with the Toposurface elements. Take a look, you can also assign Revit materials to them, but let's click OK now and OK again and see what happens.

So it's not really a link. Environment we'll create these surfaces with the exact triangulation and exact boundary and place them in my file. And take a look over here, I can basically browse through each and every one of these elements.

And over here, you can see, I can rebuild. So it's something like relink. I can very easily update my files, assign a material, assign a name, delete, or explode to make it editable in my file. So let's delete this one, I don't need it. And I think there is another one here that I want to delete right now. Let me see, that's this one. Right. You can already see them in my file. Let's click OK and take a look at the result that we have here.

So once I select this road, this topography from the road engineer, you can see in the Properties panel that this is actually a Revit topography. You can assign a material to it, you can extract all the data from it, but it's not editable. If we want to edit it, we have to go back to Environment, External Civil Data, and make it editable.

However, we can very easily host elements on the surface, which is great, but what's even better is that we can go to Environment Topography Tool and then have our design-- one second-- have our design relate to the surface from the road engineer. Oh, once again, I selected this road before I entered the Topography Tools. Let's go to Environment, Topography Tools. And now let's go to Surface From Edge.

So for example, it's very easy for me to design surfaces, sidewalks, or any element that would just seamlessly connect with the design of the road engineer just like that.

So I want to thank you so much for listening to me. I hope you enjoyed listening. And if you want some more information about Environment for Revit, you are more than welcome to go to our YouTube channel and our website. And if you have questions, you are welcome to reach out to us through our LinkedIn page and by email.