Building sites from Revit.

As many of you have probably heard there is a new tool in the Revit products that allows us to export a building site to an .adsk file format. This means that we have to have a way to get into our Civil 3D, right? Yes we do, and we will take a short look at that now.

In the picture above there is a simple surface with the footprint survey data already in place. Our goal is going to be to get this model placed correctly on the surface. This is surprisingly easy.

Tucked away in the Import panel of our Insert Ribbon is the Import Building Site command. Once we access the command the dialog should show, as seen below.

Then we can simply choose to browse for our ADSK file that contains the building site exported from Revit. Once we get that file we will get a preview of what we are going to see in our Civil 3D model.

When going through the dialog you will confirm the units that being exported from Revit. You will also choose the Building Site Style. This style is controlled just like any other style in Civil 3D, although it is a little limited at the moment.

The main thing is the insertion, especially the elevation, as it is hard to change the building site elevation after import. We will insert ours at 150.93 elevation, but then manually move it into place.

As long as we inserted at the right elevation our regular AutoCAD commands can get them into place fairly easy or we can choose “specify in drawing” in the insertion dialog.

Once in place you should see a result similar to the picture below.

With these tools, collaborating with Revit becomes a much less daunting task and allows us to create a much smoother process when it comes to working with a Revit model.