Creating a Topo Surface for Ground Plane in Revit: Section and Elevation Views

So the trick we're going to use for our ground plane is actually going to be created back on our site plan view. And this is going to be a topo surface that we're just going to place roughly around our site. And this is not intended to be anything that is going to be true to form from a grading standpoint, but it is something that we'll use to help with our section and our elevation views.

If I go to my Massing and Site tab and then topo surface, I can place this based on some points around the building. And so what I'll do is I'll just kind of work my way around with these zero-point elevations, just picking points around the building here, and there's nothing too precise about this. I just want to get kind of close to the building with that.

And you can see, we have essentially our first ring of topography here, and then I can go in and I can set my elevation to, you know, negative one, or we'll go maybe a little further, six inches. And then if I were to draw another boundary of these lines, you can see it's going to start to create the ring all the way around the building. And so now I've got the six-inch and zero-inch lines for the topography, and I can even adjust these.

So I'll move this one down. So it's a little bit more of a square. I really don't need that one, just making it more complicated than it needs to be.

And then I'll just pull these out so that it sits around here. When I do cut my elevations, then we'll start to see this topography. And so if I were to finish the sketch and then go to one of my elevation views, you can see, we now have the topography showing in this view.

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And that gives us the bold line at the base, but what we're seeing here is the earth hatch. And so this line right here that we're seeing on the bottom is defined by our scope box. And so we're fine with that, but this pattern we can change by adjusting how the topography shows in section view.

And so we can change this in two different ways. We can change it globally by adjusting the parameters within site here by changing our section cut material to be something else right now it's set to earth by default, which has this cut pattern, or we can override it in view specifically. And that's done through our visibility and graphic overrides.

Now, when we do something like this, you do have to keep in mind that this is a view-specific change. If I go in and I change the cut pattern for topography to have something else like a solid with a light gray color, then that change is only going to occur in this specific view, which is why it's important for us to have a view template set for these elevation views so that they can all look the same and share some of the graphic values, the other thing we can do is we can crank up the cut line here, so that it's a little heavier if we wanted to. And to do that, it's the same thing.

We can go to Visibility/Graphic Overrides and under topography, it's the cut line that we would be overriding. And so I can change that line weight to a higher value. And if you want to know what it's based on, you can go into your object styles under topography, and you can see that the cut weight is set to six.

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And so if I wanted to change that to be something higher than six, like let's say eight, which is a pretty heavy line for Revit, then we can see it grow a little bit now. In the last video, I talked about some of the downsides. And one of those things that we're seeing start to happen here is this heavy line at the top, at the ground level, that line is actually cutting into our building a bit.

And so one of the things that you can do to correct that is you can actually force your topo surface. So back to my site plan here, and I can actually take these values that we put in and instead of having them at zero, which is what our level one plane is, I can set them down a couple inches. Now when I look at the east elevation again, you can see that it's now sitting below the line.

And it gives us the look that we're going for with the ground plane. And we didn't have to mess around with field regions and make sure that we had it all set up correctly on every single view.