Hello all,
I have a complex piece of equipment that I am trying to place into a family.
It is equipment used for surgeries in hospitals, and it includes an adjustable bed, several booms, & ceiling tracks.
Since we don't need to see this in 3-d, I created the family using symbolic lines.
The family catagory is "specialty equipment".
I set certain line types as subcategories in order to control visibility in various plans.
For instance, I have a line type for bed, one for "machine movement", and one for overhead lines.
I set certain lines to be visible at coarse, others at medium. This way, I can control how much detail is in the model by toggling the project view detail level.
This works fine for my various floor plans, but I have yet to add the ceiling tracks to the model.
As I mentioned before, the family is categorized as "specialty equipment", and is set at floor level.
My ceiling tracks need to be ceiling based I believe: they need to cut though the ceiling tiles.
I am at a loss for how to do this. I can think of a few ways - but do not know which is ideal.
-My first thought is to create a separate subcategory for "ceiling lines" in the model. But the problem with this is that I will have to go into each floor plan's overrides to turn this off. The other problem is that they will only show as lines, and not "cut through" or "mask" the ceiling above.
-My seecond thought is that I could create a nested family and add the ceiling-based track and specialty equipment into that family. Honestly, I don't know enough about nested families to know if this would work.
-My third thought is to create a completely separate family for the ceiling track and add it to the project model. The problem with this is that the floor and ceiling equipments will not be associative, and if we move one the other would not move with it.
Any thoughts?