Creating a simple toposolid - Revit Tutorial

In this video, we're going to create a really simple toposolid element just to kind of introduce you to the basics of the tool. So I'm here on the Revit home screen. I'm not providing an exercise file. We're just going to create something from scratch, and we're going to do that over here by clicking the New button under Models. Now you're welcome to use whichever template you like here, Imperial or Metric. I'm going to choose the Imperial one, and notice that it is a multidiscipline template, which simply means that when this file loads, we will see views for each of the disciplines. So I've got architectural as my active view, but there's also electrical, mechanical, plumbing. We're gonna ignore all of that. And in fact, I'd rather work in the site plan view since we're gonna be talking about topography. So I'm gonna double click the site plan view here, close the architectural floor plan. And then I wanna just make two quick modifications to this view. The first is I'm actually going to get rid of these two scope boxes here. So for this example, I don't really need the scope boxes. Scope boxes are helpful to set the extents of views and datum elements. But in this example with topography, I don't really need them. So I'm just gonna delete those to simplify the screen a little. And then this rectangle here is the site plans crop. And I wanna just turn that off. So I'm gonna come over here to properties, scroll down to extents, And I can uncheck crop the view so that it's no longer cropping. And I can even hide that rectangle by unchecking crop region visible. And then that rectangle will just simply disappear. So that leaves us with the four elevation symbols, which we're just gonna use as a kind of reference here. And then I'm gonna come over to the massing and site tab. And if you're working in Revit Lt. this will just say site. But in both cases, you should see the toposolid button. So let's just click that button. And if it looks kind of familiar to you, then that's because it is. It's very similar to the floor or the roof tool. So if you've ever created a floor or a roof in Revit, then you should be right at home here. So what I'm gonna do is come over here to the draw toolbox, and there's a number of shapes you can draw with. We've got all the standard enclosed shapes like rectangles and polygons, and we can draw with straight lines or curves. So for this example, I'm just gonna do a simple rectangle. And I'm just gonna draw it any size within those elevation markers that we left on screen. So it doesn't really matter exactly how big it is. And let's go ahead and click the finish edit mode here. And that will create our first simple toposolid. Now, a little difficult to tell what we've got here in the site plan. So let's go to the default 3D view here at the top of the screen. And as you can see, the toposolid that we created does have a little bit of thickness to it. So it is solid geometry, thus the name. And it's completely flat. Now, you'll also notice that the name said grassland. And I can see that if I go ahead and select it. And you can see it right here as the type for this object. And there are other types available. There's a generic type. There's a number of paths of different materials. And there's even water. But we'll simply leave it set to grassland. And what that means is a little bit easier to understand if I turn on the shading. So I'm gonna go to the view control bar here and click shaded and notice that the top surface of this is this green color. So it just simply means there's a layer of grass on the top of this topo solid. Now it would be pretty rare to have a completely perfectly smooth and flat grass plane. I suppose it could be a playing field of some kind, but usually we have some sort of slope or variation in our topography. So in order to do that, let's go back to the site tab here And there actually are a few ways that you can do this. The first two that I'm gonna show you are a little bit less commonly used, but I'm just gonna show them to you quickly and then I'll show you what's a little bit more common. But let me go ahead and select the rectangle here, click the edit sketch button. That puts me back in the sketch mode. And just like you're able to do with floors and roofs, you can select one of the edges of the sketch and you can turn on the defines slope option. When you do that, you'll see a slope appear right here, which you could modify. Now I'm in the Imperial file, which is rise over run. I'm gonna raise that up to about three and 12. If you're working in metric, you know, maybe try 10 or 15 degrees. And when you click finish, you should now see a series of parallel lines appearing along the shape there. And the reason for that is if we go back to the 3D view, what we've actually done is sloped the entire plane there. Now, those parallel lines are the contour lines. So they're set to every one foot in the Imperial file or every 300 millimeters in the metric. And so you're seeing that by sloping it that much, we've actually gone pretty steep there and we're getting a lot of contour lines in there. Now I'm gonna go back to the site floor plan, edit the sketch again. I'm gonna turn this off with define slope. And then in its place, I'll do a slope arrow instead. And slope arrows can be handy because they can go at any angle that you like. So instead of going straight, I'm gonna go to diagonal there. And then you can set the slope arrows properties either using slope, which is what we just did, rise over run or degrees, or height at tail, which allows you to just simply come in and specify the height that you want at the high point of this arrow. So I'm gonna put in 10 there, that's 10 feet in Imperial or 3000 millimeters if you're working in metric. And I'm gonna click finish, And you'll see that the parallel lines here now are following a diagonal and they're a little bit farther apart. So if we go back to the 3D view, maybe need to hold the shift key and orbit a little to kind of see the effect, but it's not sloped quite as much as it was a moment ago. Now, both of these examples work, they're effective, but it would be pretty rare for you to have a perfectly smooth slope on topography. Usually there's a little bit more variation in it. So what I'm gonna do is go back to Site Plan, edit the sketch one more time, delete the slope arrow. And this time I'm going to use a different method entirely, which allows a little bit more freeform shape. So I'm gonna click Finish here and keep it selected. And notice that on the ribbon, we see a number of shape editing tools. So I'm just going to click the Modify Sub-Elements tool. You'll see some green dashed lines superimposed over the shape and at each of the corners, there's a little green dot. And you can select one of those green dots and then edit the value and put in whatever number you like. So I'm gonna put in 10 there or 3000 millimeters, and then I'll click the modify tool to finish. And this time the contour lines are following sort of a curvature. And the reason for that is because if we go to 3D, hold down the shift key and orbit by dragging the wheel. I'm gonna spin around to the backside here so you can see. So now this is a little closer to what we were looking for. So what you'll see is the three corners that we left alone stayed at zero and we only raised that corner up in the other location to the value we typed in. And so the entire topo is sloping up to that point and thus the shape of the contour lines that we're seeing there. Now, we could certainly modify further and we could add additional points and we could do a bunch of other modifications. We're gonna look at all of that in future videos. All I wanted you to see here was the very basics of what a toposolid is and how it behaves. And so now with that information, you should be ready to move on to our future lessons.