Revit 2015 Tutorial Creating Topography with the Toposurface Tool Black Spectacles

View the entire course: Revit 2015 Basics- Conceptual Schematic Design Lets get into the modeling aspects of this.
The project that were 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.
Youre 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 whats 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 its 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 youre 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.
Im 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 youre going to just simply place points.
So if I had just clicks four points here its 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 Im going to turn on the Shade Mode which is this button right here set it to consistent color thats 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.
Thats completely up to you. So this is just changing these two points and what Revit is doing is its just interpolating between these two points zero to three and its putting the one-foot and the two-foot at equal spacing between those points.
But as we all know contours arent 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 theres a problem here.
You can see that as I add these points Revit doesnt always want to follow exactly where Im 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.
Its 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 youve 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. Black Spectacles is the home of online learning for architecture and design.
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