Learn / Advanced Mechanical Equipment Workflow Videos
Create Pipe Connection Geometry
Mechanical · Building Infinitely Customizable Mechanical Equipment Families · 6m
This lesson focuses on creating pipe connection geometry for mechanical equipment families in Revit. You'll learn how to design and nest various connectors, including gas, condensate drain, and chilled water coil connectors, to enhance your mechanical equipment models.
Key skills covered include setting up instance parameters for diameter and length, creating dimensions to locate connectors, and flexing parameters to test configurations effectively. This lesson equips you with practical techniques to improve your workflow and customize your mechanical equipment families.
Transcript
We would like to add some pipe connectors. And so we've with this family, we've got options we can create, you know, a gas connector, condensate drain connector, hydraulics connectors, and that will complete that will that will complete the basic shapes for our kit of parts. We've got boxes, but some stuff is cylinders. So once we've created a cylinder, we can, man, we can do anything. Okay.
So we'll create a new new family for nesting. We're gonna create a new family, and we're gonna go English imperial, generic model face based. Here we go. And before I do anything else, I'm gonna make it a mechanical equipment, I don't forget again. Mechanical equipment, and I'm gonna do a file save as, and I'm gonna call this occlusion cylinder.
And because this is a cylinder, I actually don't need any reference plans for this. So I'm just gonna create an extrusion, and I'm gonna choose a circle as a base for my extrusion. Make sure that I'm, you know, locked onto the center, those two reference planes. Click once to set. Escape a few times.
And then I'm gonna say I'm gonna type in DI for design aligned, but I actually want the diameter diameter dimension tool. So I click that, click my circle, click away, select that, and I'm gonna create a new parameter. It's just diameter. And it's gonna be an instance. And then I'm gonna click away so nothing is selected, and I want the extrusion end.
I'm gonna call this parameter length, also an instance parameter. Okay. And green check to finish. And then I'm gonna load this in. I'm gonna nest this into my RTU. Okay. Bit No. Big. But it's a starting point. So we've got this. Let's just let's just get this a little bit let's put this a little bit more more wieldy, less unwieldy. I'm gonna make the length two inches. K. And then so let's say, like, okay. What am I trying to do here?
I've got options. I'm gonna make a chilled water coil. We're gonna make this a a hydronic unit. We're gonna add the capacity for having hydronics hydronic coils in this family. So the diameter, I wanna map that, and I'm gonna create a new parameter. I'm gonna call it chill water coil diameter type. K. And I'm gonna I'm gonna do a a create similar to create another another connector because we've got a coil. Right? So diameter, I'm gonna set this one to that chilled water coil diameter.
The length, I'm gonna leave it two inches for the same reason that I left the thickness here. I didn't map it to a a parameter. You know, it's it's basically fine. I'm not worried about it. If I really need to change it, I can. Otherwise, I I would like to keep my parameter list only as long as it necessarily needs to be. Okay. So I've got I've got those, and I would like to locate them. I would I would like parameters to locate them so that I can set, you know, where the chilled water coil is on this. So you can probably probably guess where we're going with this.
I'm gonna create a dimension from the front reference plane, and I'm gonna zoom in, and you can see that it's referencing that the reference point that's in that nested family. So I click that. Let's go there. Select there. I need to do it for both of these. And then I'm gonna I'm gonna control click, so I've got both of these selected, and I'm gonna set them to a new parameter, which is chills, water, coil, distance from left. K. They're both set. And then I'm gonna create a dimension from the bottom, make sure I've got the reference plane selected. So I'm gonna make sure I've got that horizontal selected.
There. There. And there's probably a way it's normally done. I I forget which one of these should be supply versus return off the top of my head. But since this is a parametric family, I'm just gonna decide, and the designer can change it change it if they want. So I'm gonna make this one. I'm gonna say this is chill water supply distance from bottom, and I'm gonna make this one show water return distance from bottom. K. And then I can I can actually just click okay? Well, let me do it there.
Yeah. So in this editor, if I select the geometry, it'll give me a dimension here. And this one, I can I can change the value, and it'll change the value of the parameter? I just wanted to move it down so it looks a little less ridiculous. Okay. So I've got those set, those parameters set, and the let's go to the view. So if I go to the family types again, I can I can flex these? So chilled water supply distance from bottom. Let's say it's six inches, and let's say chiller chiller return distance from bottom. Let's say that's three feet. Fly. Okay. So that looks good. Alright. Did that move?
Should shorter distance from bottom, two foot? Yeah. It did. Okay. I just didn't see it. Cool. Alright. So flexing a chilled water cold distance from left. Let's say it's six foot. Yeah. They both moved over. Okay. Good. Three foot.