Revit MEP Valve Family

Hi all.

I have been working on a Valve family, and I have everything working right accept for one thing. If you look at the attached picture, you'll see that the pipe comes up to the actual 3D Valve part in the family. In "Fine" view and in 3D that all works fine, however in Medium or Coarse view we want the pipe to come up to the symbol and then stop at the edge of the symbol. So as it is now you can see the pipe coming in under the actual symbol and stopping somewhere in the middle of the symbol. Has anyone figured out how to get the pipe to stop at the symbol? I know you can have the symbol resize to "fit the gap" but we want the symbol to remain the same size for all pipe sizes. Anyone out there figure out something brilliant? I have tried putting in a Void Space, that didn't work.. also tried a 3D solid that I hoped would print out "white" that would at least block it out when I print but that didn't work either. I'm at my wits end on this one..

Attachment 88975

I ran into the same issue. The answer you choose to implement depends on a number of factors.

If the symbol is a Generic Annotation inserted into the valve family, then you can include a masking region in the annotation family. This will mask the pipe behind it ONLY if you print using raster settings, not vectors. Be aware that printing with these settings will increase print time a lot.

The solution I use is making the symbol a detail family. In that family I have an integer type parameter called "Symbol Scale" (set to 96 for 1/8" scale) that allows me to adjust the symbol size per instance in the project. Within this family you can use a masking region and it will hide the pipe behind it in with either vector or raster print settings. (Nicely, it also will hide other pipes behind it, or be partially hidden itself if a pipe is above it). The drawback is that the symbol isn't scaled automatically per the view scale. Personally I like to have control over the size anyways since at 1/16" scale I sometimes prefer the symbols be shrunk so things aren't on top of each other.

The other solution you could implement is to model the pipe on either end of the valve in the valve family. Then control the length using a parameter to make the length equal to the symbol length. Effectively you are putting the connection points at the edge of the symbol. You'd probably have to add visibility parameters to hide the pipes when the valve is already as long as the symbol, and add lines when the valve is longer than the symbol.

Well, I hope one of those options helps.

Thank you so much for the tips!

I used the same option that you used. The only difference is, instead of making it a group i added the masking region into the "symbol" family itself. If I had any parts of the symbol family that had to "cross" the masking region I just broke them into a seperate symbol family and then put them at a little bit of an elevation so they were "above" the masking region. It worked like a charm. Again.. thank you very much for helping me break through that hurdle!

Cool! Glad it worked out.

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Originally Posted by neightyeight

The solution I use is making the symbol a detail family.

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But you can't connect a detail symbol to a pipe so when the pipe moves you have to manually move every valve that is associated with the pipe. Sounds like more trouble than it's worth, no? Or do you have some other secret up your sleeve??

@mattw: The detail family is nested in the valve family, just like an annotation family would be. So it moves around with the valve, which of course is connected to the piping.

The key is to parameterize the detail family to flex it for various sizes, because unlike a nested annotation family it won't auto-size per the view scale. That is where my "Symbol Scale" parameter comes into play.

Why do valves suck so much in Revit?? I'm only ranting/venting because as of version 2013, you can't use nested annotation symbols in the valves (they worked like a charm up to and including 2012) and now I have to go through and essentially recreate all of our valves to use either model lines (which I can't quite figure out how ADESK gets them to size correctly) or use a detail component (which is unfortunately what I'm leaning towards) and then change the scale manually. Needless to say, I'm frustrated.

</rant over>