So, you want to bring a surface from Civil 3D into Revit? It’s pretty easy, provided you have both Civil 3D and Revit Structure. What? You don’t 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, I’ll tell you how to Import the Surface and then I’ll tell you about the Limitations and Issues.
Import the Surface
The Bridge Modeling Tools have been around for a while now. If you haven’t installed them yet, go to the subscription website and download them. You’ll 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 you’re a Revit person, you probably already know this stuff). Go to your “default 3D view” (that’s the “doghouse” on the quick access toolbar) and edit the Visibility/Graphic Overrides.
In the Visibility/Graphics Overrides, turn on the display of the Topography.
This will allow you to see the surface when you bring it in. Once Revit is set up (I’m sure there are some settings I’m not aware of and I’m 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”.
If you have more than one drawing open in Civil 3D, you’ll 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.
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 don’t want the entire thing).
Once done, you’ll have a surface in Revit that you can do whatever you want to with it.
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 wasn’t 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 (I’ve stylized it in C3D to be similar to what we see in Revit) you’ll see they are quite different.
As you can see, the limits of the surface from Civil 3D aren’t 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 doesn’t 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 that’s what you will have in Revit. This is still better than what we had though so it’s 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).







May 22, 2013 at 9:41 pm
Nicely done sir. :)
June 20, 2013 at 8:01 am
Thanks for the blog post… now how to integrate Infraworks models with Revit?
June 23, 2013 at 11:40 am
Export as a .imx file, import into Civil 3D, transfer to Revit. I’m sure there’s a better way but that’s all I can think of right now.
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.
December 3, 2014 at 12:34 pm
Or you could just export the surface into normal autocad to create 3d polylines, link that exported file into revit then everytime that surface is updated so is the revit model. Make a topo surface in revit and bang you’re done.
Or make a points file.