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Civil 3D Surface to Revit? Thats Easy! | Civil 3D Plus

Civil 3D Plus
May 22, 2013 Taking Civil 3D to the next level

Civil 3D Surface to Revit? Thats Easy!

Posted by Brian Hailey under Civil3D | Tags: Bridge, Civil 3D, contours, Corridor, points, Revit, Revit Structure, Settings, Structure, Surface, Survey, Topo, Topography | [4] Comments So, you want to bring a surface from Civil 3D into Revit? Its pretty easy, provided you have both Civil 3D and Revit Structure. What? You dont have them both? You only have Civil 3D? Are you sure? Recently, anyone that had Civil 3D on subscription was automatically upgraded to the Infrastructure Design Suite Premium and, guess what, it has Revit Structure! So most likely, unless you specifically opted out of the upgrade, you have access to Revit Structure. Please read this entire post as there is some very important information near the end. First, Ill tell you how to Import the Surface and then Ill tell you about the Limitations and Issues.

Import the Surface

The Bridge Modeling Tools have been around for a while now. If you havent installed them yet, go to the subscription website and download them. Youll need both of them, one for Revit Structure and one for Civil 3D. After you have installed them, simply open the drawing that has the surface in Civil 3D and then open the file in Revit Structure you want to bring the surface into. In Revit, there is a little bit of setup you need to do (if youre a Revit person, you probably already know this stuff). Go to your default 3D view (thats the doghouse on the quick access toolbar) and edit the Visibility/Graphic Overrides.

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Setting Up Revit In the Visibility/Graphics Overrides, turn on the display of the Topography.

Topography Options This will allow you to see the surface when you bring it in. Once Revit is set up (Im sure there are some settings Im not aware of and Im sure a Revit Guru will correct me on this), go to the Extensions tab, expand out the Civil Structures tool and choose Integration with AutoCAD Civil 3D.

Integration with Civil 3D

civil3dplus.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/civil-3d-surface-to-revit-thats-easy/

If you have more than one drawing open in Civil 3D, youll need to choose the drawing with the

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Civil 3D Surface to Revit? Thats Easy! | Civil 3D Plus

If you have more than one drawing open in Civil 3D, youll need to choose the drawing with the surface in it, the surface(s) in the drawing you want to import, and then have it import the surface into Revit.

Import Settings After hitting OK, you then have some options when importing the surface, such as the material that will be assigned to the surface and the limits of the surface (if you dont want the entire thing).

Terrain Definition Once done, youll have a surface in Revit that you can do whatever you want to with it.

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Civil 3D Surface to Revit? Thats Easy! | Civil 3D Plus

Surface in Revit

Limitations and Issues

This tool is really, I mean REALLY cool! A few years ago, one of my coworkers (Brian Mackey) and I worked up a technique to do this very thing and believe me, it wasnt this easy. This is easy but, you need to know what it does. If I take this surface in Revit and I compare it to the surface in Civil 3D (Ive stylized it in C3D to be similar to what we see in Revit) youll see they are quite different.

Civil 3D vs. Revit As you can see, the limits of the surface from Civil 3D arent honored in Revit. In fact, the only thing that comes through in Revit is the surface points. If you have added any breaklines or boundaries to the surface in Civil 3D, Revit doesnt recognize those. For you civil folks, to get a feel for what Revit is doing, basically extract the surface points from a surface and then add them to a new surface and thats what you will have in Revit. This is still better than what we had though so its definitely an improvement. If this is important to you, file a support request with Autodesk so they know and perhaps they will adjust the way the tool works (the method Brian Mackey and I developed has the same issue by the way).

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Civil 3D Surface to Revit? Thats Easy! | Civil 3D Plus

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4 Responses to Civil 3D Surface to Revit? Thats Easy!

1. Kevin Says: May 22, 2013 at 9:41 pm Nicely done sir. :) Reply 2. Tom Says: June 20, 2013 at 8:01 am Thanks for the blog post now how to integrate Infraworks models with Revit? Reply 1. Brian Hailey Says: June 23, 2013 at 11:40 am Export as a .imx file, import into Civil 3D, transfer to Revit. Im sure theres a better way but thats all I can think of right now. Reply 3. Mike Evans Says: September 6, 2013 at 9:05 am The best and only method we use to transfer a surface to revit is to Export 3dfaces, convert to regions and import the data as a mass element family. This gives true surface profiles in sections and is annotateable but is not technically a revit surface. Reply
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