Please Note: Our Discussion forums have moved. If you would like to discuss this article or any aspect of Revit, please do so at www.forums.revit.biz We will be more than pleased to help you with ANY Revit query. Welcome to Part 1 of this 3 part tutorial. Revit Architecture is not just about buildings! It’s also about the external environment that your building is part of. Revit provides many tools that allow you to model this environment, thus letting you show your design in context. In this tutorial, we will use Revit’s Point tool to create a topographical surface. Please note that there are various methods for creating topographical surfaces within Revit, depending on what level of information you have to start with, how accurate you need your surface to be, etc. We will look at some of the other methods in other tutorials. So let’s just dive in and create a basic topographical (“topo” for short) surface. Start Revit with a new, blank Project File. For the purposes of this tutorial, I am going to be using millimetres for the Units. Depending on your regional settings, you may have to convert the dimensions shown here. Your new Project File should contain default View called Site:- 
Make this View active by double-clicking on it. We are going to create our basic surface in this View. You can create topographical surfaces in any plan view- but by default Topography is NOT displayed in any plan view except Site. For example, if we look at the View Properties>Visibility / Graphics Overrides for the default view “Level 1”:- 
We see that Topography is not checked. So getting back on track, switch to the “Site” view, and make sure that the “Site” Design Bar is active:- 
You can now select “Toposurface” which will take us into Sketch Mode:- 
You will notice that by default, the Point command is active and Revit is ready to start creating a topographical surface. It’s at this point (excuse the pun!) that we’re going to take some time out to explain just how Revit handles (and creates) topographical surfaces. We need to do this, so that you’re totally clear on just what is it that you’re creating. Topo’ surfaces in Revit are simply faces. Faces are infinitely thin. Faces are made up of THREE points. In fact faces can ONLY be made up from three points. Here is a face:- 
The most simple, basic of topographical surfaces in Revit would be a flat, single face, like the sketch above. If you wanted to create a totally flat, square surface this would be formed by two faces joined together:- 
You will appreciate that if (in the sketch above) all four points are at the same elevational height, then the resulting surface will be completely flat. But what if the point on the far right is higher than all the others? Below I have attempted to sketch out the two faces in 3D- this time with one of the points at a higher elevation than the rest. The orange coloured zone represents where the face would be if “all” points were at the same level:- 
Now this is just 2 faces. What if we added more faces? And we varied the heights of the points that defined the faces? We would have a Toposurface! 
As you can see, no matter how large or complicated the surface is, it is always formed from triangular faces which in turn are defined by 3 points each. Remember: For each face, each of the three points that define it can all be of different elevational heights, but each individual face itself will always be a flat plane.
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