Revit – Creating an undulating ground for visualisations

Creating accurate ground surfaces for use in 3D visualisation projects can be an absolute nightmare. We often have to create these from a .dwg file with only a few spot heights. I don’t need to tell you that creating anything accurate from that amount of data is nearly impossible.

Whilst exploring and using Revit within a 3D visualisation work-flow we stumbled across the ‘Toposurface’ tool from within the ‘Massing & Site’ tab on the ribbon.

With this tool you can create a ground surface from a text file of point values in 3D space. This file can be generated from a civil engineering program or similar. It must be a comma-delimited file (.txt or .csv) where the x, y, and z coordinates of the points are the first values in the file.

 

THE PROCESS

Here’s how you get the ground surface from the points:

1 – Activate the Site plan in the Project Browser

 

 

2 – Go to the ‘Massing & Site’ tab and click the ‘Toposurface’ tool.

 

 

3 – Then in the ‘Tools’ panel of the ‘Modify | Edit Surface’ tab select ‘Create From Import’ and finally choose’ Specify Points
File.’

 

 

4 – Navigate to your file and click ‘Open’.

 

5 – Make sure you choose the right units of your point values and click ok.

 

 

6 – Go to the 3D view and zoom all to make sure you can see your newly created surface.

 

The world is now your oyster! You can take this surface and use it within Revit or, as we like to do, export it as a .dwg, import it into 3DS Max and then get texturing!

Hopefully you’ll find this much easier than trying to do it by hand from a 2D .dwg!