- [Instructor] So in this video we are going to continue
where we left of in the previous
and we are going to link in the topography
that was exported from Civil 3D.
So I'm here at my architects desk, Dishy
and she's ready to do the import.
And to do so we go to the Insert tab,
and then click the Link Topography button here.
This will open the Link Topography window,
it will list an account and project at the top
with this now familiar drop down menu.
So if you're not in the right account or the right project,
then you can change accounts here
or choose a different project from the list.
But I'm going to go into the shared folder,
and then the civil folder because that's where
my civil engineer saved the topo surface.
So here's the file right here,
it's simply called Proposed.
And notice that there are no buttons,
no options, anything in this dialogue,
we simply have a big Link button.
Now there is a hyperlink here
that would open up a web page and a help file.
And I welcome you to do that,
it does outline the steps that you need to follow
to perform this process.
And one of the things that it mentions
that is important here is that the file
that you're importing the topography into,
must have shared coordinates established already
with the file that the surfaces are in.
So we've already done that when we linked in
the site plan information from Civil 3D,
but in your own projects if you haven't done that already,
then it probably won't come in in the right spot.
So just keep that in mind
and read that help file for more information.
But I'll just go ahead and click Link here.
And you will see the surface come in
into exactly the correct location.
Now, this is a link,
so if I hover over,
you'll see that it highlights as a link, however,
if you tab in you can actually reach in
and select the element inside
and notice that that is a Revit topography element.
So, all the things we can do with topo
we can do with this surface that came in from Civil 3D.
So let me just show you a couple quick examples.
One would be, instead of this slab that I have here,
this patio slab, it's a little bit buried anyway,
maybe what I want to do is replace that with a building pad.
So I'm going to select that floor slab,
edit its boundary,
make a window and select the entire sketch
Ctrl + C to copy that to my clipboard.
Then I'll cancel out of the sketch mode
and press the Delete key to delete that floor.
Now in its place, I will go to Massing and Site,
click the Building Pad tool to create a building pad.
Come over here to the Paste drop down,
choose Aligned to selected levels and Level one
and that will paste that sketch in that I just created.
Now over here on the Work Plane panel,
I'll click Set Work Plane because I'm working in 3D,
it goes to the lowest level in my project
and I don't really want my building pad there
because then it would excavate down to that level.
So instead, I will choose Level one here,
click OK, that moves the thing up,
and then I'll click Finish.
And that creates the building pad.
And if we zoom in a little bit,
you can see that that interacts with
the topography a little bit more nicely.
So that's one simple example of something you can do.
Another is you can add Site Components.
So if I click on Site Components,
there may be several choices here,
but I'll just go ahead and place maybe some trees
out here in front of the patio,
and if I cancel out of there and select one of these trees,
notice that the host for those trees is the surface.
If you wanted to recreate this railing element
and have it follow the slope of the site,
you could host that railing element to the site
by simply selecting it and choosing Pick New Host
and then picking the site,
but in our case the site's pretty flat,
so there's not really any reason to do that.
Now, I already pointed out that you can tab in
and select this topography element.
So I'm going to do that again.
And the default Material is just by Category,
but I could click there
to browse into my list of categories.
I'll type grass in the search field at the top here.
And I've got a couple of grass materials down here
in my library, so I'll add one in.
I'm going to check this box.
Let me widen this a little bit so we can see it better.
I'll check this box to say use the Render Appearance
and it'll give it this sort of mid green color here.
And I'll click OK.
And now when I click away from it,
it's using this grass material instead of
that dark brown material.
Now, maybe I want to do like simulated mulching bed
around where I've just placed those trees.
Well, I could do a Subregion
and I'll just do a simple rectangle for this
and kind of draw a rectangle around
the basis of those trees, click Finish.
And you can see that that is now a separate region.
And it went to by Category,
which means that it uses that brown color again,
and that is suitable maybe to represent
that that is a simple mulching bed.
Now you could do some similar techniques for the parking
and for the roads and add additional Site Components.
But perhaps the most important feature
of this surface that we've brought in here
is the entire time it remains part of this link
this topography link.
So if you go back to the Insert tab,
click on Manage Links, and then Topography,
you always have the option to reload
that Proposed file there
when the civil engineer makes changes to it.
So if there's any major changes
that happened to the site design,
you can simply reload that and then that would bring in
the latest changes from your civil engineer.
Now naturally, depending on what changes they made,
it could affect some of the other edits you've made,
like the mulching bed
or how the building pad interacts and so on.
But then you would just react to their changes
and make adjustments accordingly.
So, if you get surfaces from your civil engineer
from Civil 3D,
then BIM 360 is the required conduit
to be able to use that linking functionality,
but since we are working in a BIM 360 project,
we're able to use that functionality
and bring those surfaces over
and have them automatically converted to Revit topo.