Learn to enhance your skills in building design and construction with a practical guide on modeling a fire sprinkler system in Revit. This article provides step-by-step instructions on how to efficiently lay out sprinkler heads in a classroom setting, utilizing tools like the mirror tool to speed up the process.
Key Insights
- The modeling of a fire sprinkler system in Revit can involve repetitive workflows, but these processes can become easier in more typical areas of a building.
- Efficient layout of sprinkler heads can be achieved by utilizing the mirror tool and proper positioning techniques, such as aligning sprinklers to the center of tiles and mirroring them across similar areas.
- Remember to properly host sprinklers to the correct level to ensure functionality; for instance, all sprinklers in a particular classroom should be set to level one.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
So at this point, we've finished our mini-project area and have gone through most of the workflows involved in modeling a fire sprinkler system in Revit. As we've seen, it can get a bit tedious and repetitive, but that's just the nature of this discipline. However, when working in a more typical building area, things do become much easier.
After putting in some tough work, let's move on to our classroom areas and discuss how to layout our sprinkler heads quicker and more efficiently. But before that, let's save first, and then jump to our Level 1 reflected ceiling plan.
We'll zoom in to take a look. The area that's already been populated with sprinklers—these classrooms and the corridor—appears fairly similar to what's happening in this other area of the building. So let's use the mirror tool and see if this can speed things up.
First, pan over to about here. Go to our filter, check none, select only sprinklers, and click OK. Now, select the "Mirror—Pick Axis" tool.
We'll click on the midpoint between the two special-purpose rooms, zoom out, and see the results. The sprinklers didn't align perfectly in the center of our tiles, but it doesn't look too bad. We can work with this.
Learn Construction
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
Zoom out. The first thing we'll do is delete all sprinklers from this classroom to this one, and from this classroom over to here, delete those as well.
Next, let's go into classroom 2009 and align these sprinklers to the center of our tiles. Drag a selection box around them. Select the move tool, pick the center of one sprinkler, and align it to the tile corner.
Now we can easily move them over one foot and down one foot. We're already in the move command. Press ENTER, click anywhere, move to the right one foot, hit ENTER again to repeat the command.
Move down one foot. Now, all we need to do is mirror these sprinklers across these classrooms. Select the sprinklers again.
Type MM, find this wall's centerline, and click. That looks good. Let's pan over, press ENTER to repeat the command.
Repeat again by pressing ENTER, and once more press ENTER. Remember, when we copy sprinklers, they aren't automatically hosted to ceilings. If we select these sprinklers, we'll see there's no scheduled level or elevation set.
We don't want that. So let's pan back out, select all sprinklers in these classrooms, and set them to Level 1.
Now, let's move down to this classroom area. Again, these aren't centered in our tiles, so we'll move them to a corner, then shift them over and down one foot. Zoom in to find the sprinkler center and tile intersection clearly.
Zoom out slightly to ensure correct positioning. Press ENTER to repeat the move command, move them right one foot, hit ENTER again.
Move them down one foot. Now, we don't want to mirror these because these classrooms are different sizes. Let's move on to this next classroom here.
Select the move tool, zoom in to find the sprinkler center, and move it to this tile intersection. Press ENTER to repeat the command.
This time, move left one foot, press ENTER again, and move down one foot. Hit escape. Select all the sprinklers again.
Type MM, pan over, press ENTER to repeat the command.
Repeat the mirroring by pressing ENTER again, and once more. Zoom out to confirm.
We know these sprinklers aren't hosted yet, so let's select all of them and set them correctly to Level 1. That looks good.
In the next video, we'll confirm a few more details and add additional sprinklers as needed.
