Whether you are a new or experienced Revit user, there are always new and more efficient ways of doing things. So to start off the new year, here is my top list of tricks for working with views in Revit.
No 1. Work in a 3d View, or at least have one open most of the time. It’s surprising how many problems can be found (and fixed) by simply watching a 3d view.
If I’m working in plan, Continue reading
One of the interesting things about Revit is that you will frequently encounter various methods and workflows of accomplishing the same task. This is particularly true of Shared Coordinates. Since posting about the Survey Point in March, I have started to use a slightly different and potentially more efficient method of establishing coordinates. This is an update to the previous post.
Much of what I said previously, still applies:
“The world in Revit is entirely different than AutoCAD. It doesn’t like your project/project base point to be larger/outside 20 miles. Unlike in AutoCAD, your project should never be way off in space from the project base point (origin). […] Revit has two moveable points that control coordinates: project base point and survey point. […] The survey point is key; it has northing, easting, and elevation data that you can set, relating it back to the real world, and thus AutoCAD…”
If using a CAD survey, link in the survey and move the survey so that the Project Base Point is within the survey boundary. Often, it is a good idea to place the survey so that the Base Point is on a known project benchmark Continue reading
If you want to create a landscape base from existing data, your best option is a Toposurface. Revit actually refers to this system family by 2 names: Topography (in Object Styles) and Toposurface (on the Massing/Site Ribbon). But I will simply refer to it as Topo.
When creating Topo, there are 3 options: Place Point, Create from Import Instance, and Create from Points File. But only one of these is really a valid option.
The first step in setting up a landscape/site in Revit, is linking in the CAD survey. While it is easy to do, there are a few settings that you want to make sure you have right (especially if you have CAD files pre-linked in your project template).
I’ve highlighted the important settings below. The rest don’t matter as much, or are personal preference (I prefer to preserve my colors). Import units usually auto-detects correctly, but occasionally it doesn’t (so watch out for that).
landarchBIM 