Process Piping and Fitting Colors

[ctolson663568]

The frustration level is getting pretty high here, looking for a tip or trick.

We have an elaborate model with a significant amount of piping in a facility, mostly ductile iron. Now that the model is finished, we are trying to clean it up, add final piping colors (most piping systems are different colors), equipment, etc. The problem is, all of the pipe and equipment in the model was has a hydronic supply system classification. Now I need to put renderings together. Fixing the materials for mechanical equipment is easy, (just changed the material in the family). Problem I am running into now, is I can't:
1) change system classifications for piping and fittings already modeled to assign materials to the piping system (greyed out in the properties box)
2) paint tool doesn't seem to work with my pipes, fittings, or valves (I open paint material browser, select a material, hover over pipe, it looks like it should select, click, nothing happens). Unable to select any pipe fittings or accessories w/ paint tool.

Any thoughts are appreciated. At this point, I think the tedious task of painting pipe & fittings would be most straightforward. Why doesn't this work?!

Running Revit MEP 2016

Thanks!

[matt__w]

What about adding a custom parameter to pipes/fittings? You could then tab select an entire run, filter out pipe accessories, then change the value of your custom parameter to whatever you want so you can use that as a category to filter by. The problem with piping (and ducts as well) is that you can't define multiple material types. It's an all or nothing kind of thing. Using a filter and colors are a hack work-around for that.

Check out this Screencast I created to show you the steps I used to create a project parameter and a custom filter to highlight a run of piping. You can repeat the process for other systems. Just enter a different value for the project parameter.

http://autode.sk/1NpqE1f

[ctolson663568]

Thanks for the tip, my problem was I needed it to show up in renderings, so I needed to define more than one material type.

I found a workaround by using the built-in system classifications, and assigning a different material for each system. The solution was to delete a single segment of pipe, and draw a new pipe with the correct classification. This changed the system classification for most of the connecting pipe and fittings. I ended up having to redraw about 30-40% of the pipes and fittings in the model though. It was extremely tedious and inefficient.

Maybe this belongs on the wish list - providing a VG override for materials on pipe and ducts.

[blasco]

You can give different marks to different systems and then filter those marks with the colors you like.

[OKA_BIM_Man]

Thanks for ideas above. I am an architect and have I have modelled some downpipes and want to tag their paint finish and have them show correctly in renders / elevations. I have used a pipe which uses elbows "Elbow - Plain - PVC-C" adn pipes which use "Polyvinyl Chloride, Rigid - Schedule 80".
I am able to paint "pipes" but not "pipe fittings". Painting is laborious anyway so wouldn't suggest that approach.
I am not able to change the "Projection/Surface Patterns" of pipes or pipe fittings categories in visibility graphics; Revit limitation.
I have, however, added a view filter as suggested above which selects "Pipes" and "Pipe Fittings" categories based on a keynote value: (NOTE you have to add the keynote value to both the pipe and pipe fitting families).
I can then add this view filter to visibility graphics and over-ride the "Projection/Surface Patterns" of pipes and pipe fittings categories.