Model Pipe in 3D

Okay. In this video, I want to talk about and demonstrate what I think is a really fundamental core and important workflow for distributions of all sorts in Revit, but today we're talking about Hydronics. So we're gonna give a quick tour of a Hydronic system, how piping works in Revit. But most of what this video is about is a best practiced way of modeling that is very efficient and very effective. It's gonna be a little funky if you're coming from a CAD background, probably, or if you're just new to Revit in general.

It's gonna be a little funky. But taking the time to internalize this method of modeling is going to make you a much faster and more efficient modeler in the long run. So I highly recommend it. So today, I'm in the projects environment. You don't need to be for this particular video. You could be in any project whatsoever. So we're just gonna be doing some pipe modeling over here to the right. So let's get started. You can go to the systems tab, pipe to start modeling pipe, but you should use the keyboard shortcut, which out of the box is p I. So type p I, and now we wanna get the settings set.

So I start in the upper left and go clockwise. So diameter two inches, two inch diameter pipe sounds good to me. Middle elevation of ten foot six, that's good. By the way, can type this in. You don't have to type like 10 foot space six inches. That of course works, but you don't have to do that. You can just do 10 dash six, that works. You can also do 10 space six, that works. Or 10 dot five. Those are all acceptable inputs for the middle elevation.

Alright. The next thing we need to set is the pipe type. So out of the box Revit for the standard sort of design package is you've got MP standard and then p drain and p vent. We want MP standard because we're not plumbing people. Alright. And then coming down, the only other thing we need to set is the system type, and for this video we wanna be doing chilled water supply. Okay. So that is all we need to do in terms of the settings. And to model the pipe, you just need to start clicking wherever you want. So let's go ahead and click, click, click, click.

Okay. Now if we want to go up, let's say there's a beam or a duct or something and we're going up and over, we want to do that. How do we do that? Do we need to go to a section? Well, we don't. We could go to a section but we don't. We can just change the middle elevation. Right? So let's say we wanna go up to 14 feet and nothing apparently happens, but that's alright. Just move the mouse up, click again, and you can see it made that pipe rise.

We've gone up and let's say we wanna return to ten six. There we are and continue on our merry way. So it's done that. Now that's fine, that worked. But here's the deal, we we only know that this has gone up to 14 by clicking on it and checking on it. And we click that and we see it's at ten six. That's all very well and good, but it is not as good as having a robust three d view. So let's pop open a three d view. Alright. And so now we can actually see what we've been doing here.

And I'm just gonna clean up this section box a little bit and bring it over so that we're not distracted by that building. So what I'm gonna recommend for modeling everything, but in particular pipe, is to model mostly in three d. And the reason for that is that if you're modeling in three d, you're actually seeing you are forced to see what you're modeling around. Now as long as you have the things you're modeling around actually turned on in your view in visibility graphic settings. But we would have been able to see the duct in three d space, we would have been able to verify that we're going over it and down and around and that would be good.

So long story short, this video boils down to model in three d as much as you can, which is like 90 plus percent of modeling in Revit can be done in three d and in my opinion ought to be done if you wanna be fast and efficient. So let's talk about how to do that. So we've got a bit of pipe here. Let's go on to the end and let's say we wanna continue this. So I've left clicked this bit of pipe, gonna mouse over to this end, there's a drag handle here.

I'm just gonna right click that and say draw pipe. The the key thing to understand here is that in a three d view, Revo will only put this in the x y plane. So let's say I I move this up, right, scare quotes up, it's that that pipe is not actually pointed up, it's pointed away from me in the x y plane at precisely a 126 degrees away from the continuation of that pipeline. Right? That's what Revit is telling us.

And if I wanted to go down, you know, I might move my mouse here and say like, oh, yeah. I'm I'm I'm pointing the pipe down now. Well, no. It's just pointing towards you in the x y plane at 55 degrees off of the continuation line. So that is actually really helpful on Revit because it makes modeling really super easy once you understand what's going on. And Revit also gives inference lines. You see that that blue dash line along the center line of the pipe? That line is saying that it is parallel with this pipe. So it's saying, you're going straight, you're good. Whereas if here, you know, that's slightly off.

That's that's not what I want. It's four degrees off, that's 18 degrees off, and this is right on. So if I wanna go straight, just have to look for that blue inference line and give it a click and that's a nice straight piece of pipe. If I wanna if I wanna go 90 down, and by down I mean down in y not in z, it's gonna give me another inference line for a 90 degree bend. So I just click there and I can keep on going.

And it'll even give me an inference line for 45 degrees. Now if you have some funky degrees that you want, I think you can change the settings to give you different, but nineties and 40 fives is pretty useful. So nineties, 40 fives, that would be another 45. Let's do another 90. Okay. So it's actually really easy and fast to model in three d in the x y plane. Now what about model now what about going up and down? Well this is actually also quite easy. It's just as easy in plan view except you actually get to see where you're going. So here we are, let's say we wanna go up.

We wanna go up to 14. So you just come up to the middle elevation as if you're in plan view, type in 14. And you'll notice Revit, there's a gap here, but the pipe is pretty clearly moved up. It's in the same space, it's just up, you know, three and a half feet whatever in z. And so I get that inference line, I give it another click and it makes that vertical continuation.

And then same deal, I can drop back down to ten six and keep going on my merry voice. That's really powerful. Being able to do this is really powerful because we get to pay attention to where we're going. Contrast that with when you're in a plan view, you can't really see how high you are. You can't see if you've missed if you're under this structure, if you're above the duct bank you're trying to go over, etcetera.

And modeling wise, it's just as fast. Now there's a few things you can't do that are a little difficult. We'll get to that in a second. But I also want to point out something that's you can also do that's maybe not obvious is you can do take offs and branches. So I'm gonna click this duct here.

And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna type c s for create similar. You're gonna be using this a lot, so get used to create similar. It's directly under the left hand, so perfect spot for it. So now I'm back in pipe modeling mode, and by typing create similar, it has adopted all of the properties of this bit of pipe. So it's at level two or sorry, the diameter is two, the middle elevation is ten six, it's an MP standard and it's a chilled water supply.

So to do a takeoff, I can either mouse over and you can see it's giving me some lines when I mouse over this. So I basically just need to hit that anywhere and then takeoff, get that blue dashed inference line and it's gonna make a good take off for me. Alternatively, since I'm in the x y plane, I could start I could have started modeling out here and then brought it into the brought it in like this. So either way, same same. And you can't really do it on a vertical.

So let's say, you know, if I click this pipe CS and then change the middle elevation to 13. So remember this is 14, this is ten six, so 13 is right about here. I did this. Oh, you know what that's funny? It's this is actually difficult to do. It it it's not super easily reproducible, but it it can work. I was trying to show you how how that can be difficult. Let's see if yeah. See, I I thought that would have worked or you I would have guessed that that would have worked, but it's giving me a warning. I think you just have to get it like right on a certain place and it'll give it to you.

So if you master that then you know, you're good to go. But it it can be a little funky like if I well that I need to go over here now. I need a fresh one. So if I do that, yes. See, I just spent like ten minutes trying to do this and it was not happy with me. And now it's doing it perfectly. So yeah, don't know. Maybe I just didn't have the technique there. But apparently branching off of verticals also works well for piping. So another thing that I wanted to show you, oftentimes I will have a three d view, a plan view, and a section view open all at once.

Particularly if I'm working on a particularly thorny coordination issue like, you know, riser bank or something like that. So another command that's good to know is the tile window and tab window keys. So the window tile keyboard shortcut is w t, and so that's going to tile your windows, all your active windows, and then z e for zoom to extents. So I'm gonna mouse over here into my plan view and type z e. I I have to click in it and type z e and it zooms to extents.

So let's pull open this section. So here I've got my section and now you notice it tabbed these. So I'm gonna say w t and it's gonna tile these all together, and then I can click in here and say zoom extents, zoom extents, zoom extents. It's already zoomed. And then I'm oriented and I could start looking in my section if I needed to.

I can zoom in in here and I could be modeling in here and keeping track of things. And then if I wanna go back to a tab view, just type t w for tab window. That is a brief introduction to how to model in three d in Revit for pipes. So I highly recommend that you start essentially forcing yourself to model in three d for both duct as well as piping. Have a working plan section view handy. Don't be afraid to go into those and do some modeling, but for the most part you should be able to do a lot of your three d modeling in three d.