Multiple buildings, separate files...

[danbwall]

Hi all...

I'm looking for some advice on how to setup for a subdivision project with 8 plus single family dwellings. How do others handle their projects as far as linking site data & topography? I am planning on setting up each house in an individual revit file, do I then also create a separate topography file and pull the topo into each house file? Or should I create the topo in each house file so that it will overlap into the next property a little bit, and then pull all of the houses into a common file and line them up there? Any tips/ tricks or advice would be much appreciated.

Dan

[aggockel50321]

How about one topo for the whole subdivision, which you could lay out the lots with property lines, and driveways, lawns, etc with subregions.

If you wanted show just one house on it's own lot & topo, you could crop the view to get close...

[brakware]

I have to agree that pulling the houses into the full topo would be the best bet. Topo surfaces in Revit take up huge amounts of memory, and can really bog down the file. If you keep the topo surface in its own file, you don't have to worry about the memory issues while you are working on the buildings themselves. In the topo file, you can have all of your site/landscape sheets, and leave your architecture sheets in their own, respective, files.

If you really want to have the topo surface in your house file, you can create the topo surface as a whole, cut the properties out of it with the cut topo surface tool, and then cut and paste the surface into your house file. That way, if you link them all together into one file for views of the whole development, the edges of the properties will match up exactly. You can leave easements and roads and such in the full development file so that you have something to match the toposurfaces to when you link them in. The drawback to this solution is that if you change an individual property too much, you might effect its boundary, then the properties won't match, and the real issue is that you don't know how one property affects the other as it changes. If the topo is all one surface, then you can see how cut and fill affects the whole development, and whether or not you will need to adjust roads, other properties, common areas, etc.

[danbwall]

Thanks for those suggestions. They make sense to me....