From the course: Creating Construction Documents with Revit

Coordinate systems in Revit - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Creating Construction Documents with Revit

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Coordinate systems in Revit

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- [Instructor] Let's talk about ways and means to locate your model with regards to reference points provided by Revit. Let's talk about coordinate systems in Revit. Revit has two coordinate systems. The survey coordinate system that provides real-world geographical context on the surface of the earth to the project and the project coordinate system, which describes locations relative to the building model and serves as a reference for measurements and object locations in relation to the model. Let's take a look at what these references are. These references are the internal origin. This used to be super-secret and hidden. The ability to see this came with Revit 2020.2. The project base point. This is useful for establishing a reference to measure distances and locate elements in relation to the model and finally, the survey point. This represents a known point in the physical world, such as, maybe, a geodetic survey marker or the intersection of two property lines. This can be used to correctly orient building geometry in relation to another coordinate system, such as the coordinate system used in a civil engineering application. Let's take a look at how they work in Revit. Let's go to Revit. In Revit, let's stay in a floor plan view. Quick tip, make sure that the view is not cropped. How do we do so? The bottom of the screen, look for the Crop View button. Make sure that it's Xed out. We are going to look for visibility graphic overrides. We're going to go to the View tab, click on Visibility Graphics, and this will bring up a dialogue box, or let's try something quicker and easier. Let's use a shortcut. When I type in VG, this brings up the visibility graphic overrides for the floor plan dialogue box, makes things so much easier for me. We are going to now search for site elements, and we can scroll down but again, that's just too much trouble. We can type site in category name search. This brings up the category that we want. Now we see that the internal origin project base point and survey point are unchecked, which makes them invisible in the view. You know what? You can see these in a floor plan. You can also see them in a 3D view. Let's take a look at them. Now, remember all of these points live at coordinates zero, zero, zero. Let's start with the project base point. The project base point is what is relevant to this course, and this is what we would find most helpful and which would keep visible. Let's take a look at the internal origin now. The internal origin is similar to the origin, zero, zero, zero in AutoCAD. This is used to locate linked files in our model, and this was hidden prior to Revit 2020.2. Finally, let's look at the survey point. Unhide the internal origin. This is used to create shared coordinates for use between multiple linked or CAD files, and now we have learned about the three major references provided to us in Revit.

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