Customize Mechanical Equipment Tag

In this video, I'm gonna explain how to modify the mechanical equipment tag. So out of the box, it is just a bit of text. It doesn't have any annotations or adornments. You've got a few options here in the types. It can be transparent or opaque. Demonstrate what that looks like. So that is transparent. That is opaque. And also got a few other options. Two through five, these add a shared parameter to the end of it or a comment to the end of it in the case number five.

So if I did five, which is ID plus comment, and then I selected my unit and I added comment comment, we'll pin that to the tag. So that's what the out of the box options are. But let's say that you want it to look different or you want it to function differently, how would you go about doing that? So first, any equipment tag, click edit family up in the ribbon. You can see there's a few things going on here.

The way we have it set up is that we have multiple labels all stacked on top of each other. So if I select this one, it's titled Mark. You can see that what it is is it is a tag label. It's not text. It's a tag label, and the text type is set to three thirty seconds opaque.

And down under visibility, you can see that it's checked, but it's grayed out because it's assigned to a parameter. So if you click this button over here, we can see that it is assigned to the parameter equip ID opaque. And then if we come up to the family types button, for we can see that for each type, we've got a different parameter selected. So for one dash ID opaque, we have equip ID opaque selected. We have transparent.

We have equip ID, which is just transparent, selected, two, which is ID plus unit type selected, etcetera. You get the idea. And each of these parameters just control the visibility of a different set of labels which are all on top of each other. So when you see a tag and all you're seeing is Mark, basically what you're seeing is you're just seeing this label with all the other labels set to not visible. So most of these are on the tag label three thirty seconds, which is the one with the transparent background.

I'm just gonna move this down back here. And so if we wanted our labels, for example, to have a to be underlined, we could simply edit the type for this. We could add underlines, we'll check that there. And now, you know, as all of these became underlined because they're all the same type, if I wanted the same for this one, I just need to do it because it's a different type. So do that, underline, move that back up there.

If we load into the project and close, we don't need to save the changes because we're loading the tag into the family. We can overwrite the existing version. There's no difference which options we pick here, but I like to just do the first one, and you do wanna make it editable and continue. And now all of the equipment tags are underlined universally in the project. Okay.

So what if we wanted to say add a box around this? You can go edit family, take that underline off both types. Now there is a border that we could turn on. Let's do that for both types. Border.

Project. Now they all have a border around them. And this border is around the text box itself, so it stretches with the length. So if the let's say this equipment ID were a lot longer, let me just make it kinda crazy long that will size to fit. So you won't have the text going outside the dimensions of the box.

That works well. And if you want to do something different, a different shape like a hexagon, that's gonna be a little bit a little bit more fussy. I recommend not doing that if you can get away with it just because sometimes it doesn't work out well. But if you or your boss insists, then I can show you how to do it. So to create, let's say, a hexagon, I'll go create line.

Then over here, you have an option for different shapes. Circumscribed versus inscribed, it's just if it's the point or that. I think we're gonna go with let's go with this one. What did I say? Octagon? Well, maybe it's a maybe it's hexagon. It doesn't really matter just for purposes of demonstration. And you can draw yeah. That's what I wanted. And then you can draw an octagon. So let's let's just go like that. Seems to work alright. And we can load in a project and close. Let's override. And there's our octagon.

And you can notice that the leader line automatically adjusts itself to detail elements within the tag. So that works out well. Now let's say we wanted to control the visibility of the octagon. So I'm going to tab and then select the octagon and you can see it has the visibility parameter here. I can select that and I can add a parameter to it that says, that's a hexagon.

I keep calling it octagon. Hexagon type. Okay. And then so I'm gonna go to my one ID opaque and I'm actually going to keep hexagon checked and I'm gonna rename this. I'm gonna say opaque with hex and then I'm gonna come to a one ID transparent. I'm gonna re rename it out hex. Okay. Gonna uncheck hex here. And then whenever you add a new parameter, visibility parameter, sometimes it it comes as default check for all your types. So I'm just gonna come through there, unselect this for these types.

Because these wouldn't work anyways because these parameters would sort of hang out the end, the the bounds of it. So we don't want hexagon for that anyway. K. So I'm gonna load in a project and close. Don't need to save it. But what I do need to do is I need to overwrite the existing version and its parameter values to save the the parameter states for those different types. So if I select this, this is ID plus comment. I can change it to opaque. I can change it to opaque with hex. I can change it to transparent without hex.

Now you notice that we've we've got some duplicates here because when we made that changed and pushed it back since we modified the name of this, it didn't actually change this type. It created a new type. It's a little kind of funky bug. I don't know if it's really a bug rather, but it's just a little thing you have to know how Revit thinks about what you're doing in the family editor. There already were all of these types in the project, and so when we made a modification to the family in the family editor, it saw this not as a modification of this type, but as the creation of a new type.

It wasn't really what we wanted to do, but basically Revit gave us the benefit of the doubt in favor of not deleting things we may have wanted. But let but in this case, we don't want this type and we don't want that type. We wanted to overwrite them. So we can simply go down to the tag. It's under annotation symbols, and the name is underscore m quip tag.

And these are all the types. And we want to get rid of this type, but we need to make sure that we don't delete tags that we already have in the project that we wanna keep. So right click that, say select all instances in entire project, and there aren't any. If there were, it would give us a count more than one. Same here, I'm gonna say select all instances in entire project, there's 26 of them.

So if we deleted this type, it would delete all these tags and we don't want that. But this is what we want to be ID transparent without hex. And then for example, this one is ID transparent with hex. And now we wanna get rid of these types because these are duplicate, but Revit isn't going to let us delete them. Well, Revit will let us delete them if we come to manage tab, purge unused.

Very important that the first thing you click when you come in here is check none. Because by default, Revit checks everything, which is dangerous. So always click check none so that you don't delete everything by accident, everything unused by accident. And then these are the two types. You'll notice it's not showing us ID opaque with hex or ID transparent without hex, and that's because they are being used in a project. So they're not showing up on this list, which is only showing us unused elements. So watch over here. I'm gonna click okay. And it's cleaned up those two types that were superfluous, that I didn't need. Okay.

Now we need to talk about one more thing which is modifying the parameters that are being looked at here. So let's go back to edit family. So let's say that for this parameter, I want it to be a different parameter. So this is a tag label. I come to the label row, say edit, and here you can see that it's looking for the parameter name as comma equip ID. This just is, you know, you could do something like that and it just updates how it shows there. I guess not in real time. Here, let me click okay. You can see. Okay.

Here we're back in label. So if I wanted to use a different parameter, I could I could pass this out and I could bring in, let's say, if I wanted to change my tags to type mark for some reason, you know, type mark, I could do that instead. And when I pass that into the model, it would use that parameter. And I can also use multiple. So I could add this.

I could do a break. That's how you have one stacking above the other prefixes and suffixes. These are all pretty self explanatory, so you just kinda need to have a sense for what you want your tag to look at look like, and then you can update these to to reflect how you want it to look in your project.