architects being mechanical engineers

[jjflacdem]

So, I'm a architectural designer trying to layout our own mechanical design/diagrams in Revit, for the first time. Any suggestions for modeling mech ducts in Revit Building? Has anyone had luck modeling these out as mass forms, or tried to create a family for mech duct & register equipment? Or, has anyone tried with success, to simply layout these items with drafted lines? I know “Revit Systems” probably answers a lot of these quandaries but, what is the census from the community on making it a possibility in Revit Building?


Thanks Everyone.

[archjake]

I've used 3D families for ductwork and have also used drafted lines.

Check Symbol Machine, or revit city for families.
We've set up shared parameters into our air registers and equipment families so everything schedules nicely. Just Tag and run.

If you're just using drafted lines I suggest using a really fat line to represent flex duct. It looks Great.
Good luck.

[jeff.95551]

I would love to be able to build ductwork in a reasonable way that didn't take forever to do, if only to make sure everything fit together - for now we just do lines. I've tried using in-place families to make mechanical 'zones' that weave in with everything else, but that, too, probably takes more time than it's worth, and does't translate to CD's. So on houses I've settled for just using the fat dashed line.

There are a lot of mechanical ductwork components on the Revit exchange part of AUGI. I've never used them, but somebody was good enough to upload a bunch...

[crarchitect]

Here's my $/02,

The DUCT parts available for download are not perfect: they were built in much older versions, they have a bunch of LEVEL intelligence built in that I was not smart enough to figure out (ymmv) and they cannot be rotated on axis, rotated to vertical, or inclined to any other sloping angle. It is workable solution, you just need to make a bazilliion duct parts, a second set for vertical orientation, a third set for sloping runs, and in your spare time you can build an infinite number of elbows and reducers.

I really have had much success with this method! it was laborious- but I did find a ton of errors, impossible duct runs, and straight up structural conflicts with this method.

I would suggest you build your own v9.0 stretchable duct part built on the reference planes attached to a sloping reference line. You can make just one basic family with a ton of types (20x16 vs 16x20, get it?) and then set the length as an instance parameter. That's how I did it- but this was pre-Reference Line so sloping duct runs were extra tough.

OR, you can just wait for The Factory to include the East Router functionality that is certainly embedded in REVIT SYSTEMS. I have been waiting for that functionality for a while. I hear it is pretty neat, and EASY TO USE! Can I have some of that? please?

But persevere! There can be great value in trouble shooting the mechanical duct and piping layout, especially if this is all exposed in a high finish area. Our engineers had plenty of errors and they really didn't seem to be too concerned with- oh I don't know, our finished ceiling heights??? Sheesh- some people.