When a Linked Model Has a Complex Coordinates System

Wanted to do a little bit more of a deep dive on the coordinate system in case you get architectural models that aren't quite as simple to pull in as the ones in the original projects. So here we are in the projects. We haven't I haven't reloaded my link yet, and we also have opened the architectural link model. So a couple things to point out is that in our template, the location is set to what was just out of the box when we created it. So it thinks it's in Boston, Massachusetts, and angle from project north to true north is zero.

And all of these are at zero, survey point, project base point, etcetera. And the same is true here, everything's at zero. So this is a very simple easy single location in Boston, and the angle from project north to north is zero. But what if you get a project that is a little bit more complicated if it's somewhere else? So I'm going to change the location to New York.

New York. Yes. And I'm going to move the survey point. So to move it, unclip it and theoretically you would have a DWG or something from the civil that tells you where in the real world there is a survey point, like a property boundary or something in the physical world. And you would move your survey point to this location.

Maybe that let's say that there's a let's put it somewhere convenient so you can read it. Let's say there's a property boundary right here, you get the information from a DWG, you set it there. So we're gonna set that there, gonna clip it. And then the project base point is simply intended to be convenient internally for your project. So this one, let's say the architect decides to move it to the intersection of grid a and b.

Get it snapped into the grid line intersection. And they might also put in that the angle to true north for this project is 26 degrees. Okay. So let's say that when you received your architectural model, this is what it looked like. To be clear, I'm not saying that this is something you would do to an architects model, never ever mess with the project based point coordinate, never mess with any of this stuff in an architectural model that you receive.

I'm just trying to demonstrate how Revit thinks about this stuff. So to recap, we've changed the angle to true north, we've moved the survey point, and we've also moved the project base point. I'm gonna save this and exit the model. And I'm going to go to manage links and I'm going to reload from that architectural link. So let's notice a couple things.

First of all, it looks correct. Let's pull in let's turn on the architects survey point and project base points so that we can see it. So visibility graphics, model categories, we already have ours turned on. That's why you can see ours in this view, but we wanna turn on the architects. They're not showing up, which means they're turned off in the Revit links tab.

So go to the Revit links tab, projects arc, custom model categories, site, and turn on internal origin project base point and survey point. Okay. So we can now see the architect's survey point here and their project base point here. You can see that they they don't this looks right, this doesn't quite look right in the architects, it's over here. So we have a sign that something is a little bit amiss, but our the origins are in the same place.

We're also going to look at location and we're gonna see that our model still thinks it's in Boston, not in New York. Remember we moved the architects link model to New York. So we're gonna do what we did in the in the other video. The next step is to acquire coordinates. It says coordinates acquired, close.

And we still have something a little funny going on because the survey point is over here. That doesn't look right. Right? Like it's not overlay overlapping with theirs here. So what and it says it's at zero, so we are going to unclip, we are going to move this to match with their survey point, going to reclip it, and we are going to select our project base point.

Notice that the angle of the true north is correct. We're gonna move it up to there's. That's strictly not speak strictly speaking, moving the project base point isn't necessary. But if Arctic is doing it, I typically just copy whatever their convention is. And now if we go to location, you can see that our model is now in New York.

So that's what it took from the shared coordinates. The site, the angle from project north to true north, that is coincident as well, and our survey points match up. So we're excited about that. So that is typically how I address our model to conform to the architects when they have a couple of interesting things going on.