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.
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So at this point, we've finished our mini project area and have gone through a majority of the workflows while modeling a fire sprinkler system in Revit. As we saw, it can get a bit tedious and repetitive, but that's just the nature of this discipline. However, when you're in a more typical area of a building, things do become much easier.
So after having put in some tough work, let's move on to our classroom areas and talk about how we can lay out our sprinkler heads a bit quicker and more efficiently. But before that, let's save. Okay, so let's jump to our level one reflected ceiling plan.
We'll zoom in and take a look. The area that's already been populated with sprinklers, these classrooms and the corridor look to be fairly similar to what's going on in this area of the building. So why don't we try using the mirror tool and see if this can help speed things up.
So first, let's pan over to about right here. Let's go to our filter, check none, and just select sprinklers, hit OK. Now let's go to this tool right here, mirror pick axis.
And if we go to the midpoint between the two specialized rooms and click, let's zoom out and see what happened. So it looks like the sprinklers didn't line up completely in the center of our tiles, but it doesn't look too bad. We can work with this.
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Let's zoom out. Okay, the first thing I want to do is from this classroom to this one, let's go ahead and delete all these sprinklers. And from this classroom to here, let's delete those as well.
Okay, so we'll go into classroom 2009 and let's get these lined up in the center of our tiles. Let's drag over. Let's go to the move tool, find the center of our sprinkler, and we'll go to the corner.
Now we can easily go over one foot and down one foot and we should be good to go. We're already in the move command. Let's press ENTER, click anywhere, let's go to the right one foot, hit ENTER again to repeat the command.
We'll go down one foot. Okay, now it looks like all we need to do is mirror these across these classrooms. So let's select the sprinklers again.
Let's type MM and let's find this wall here in the center and click. That looks good. Let's pan over, hit ENTER to repeat the command.
We'll do it again, hit ENTER, and one more time, hit ENTER. Okay, now remember when we copy sprinklers, they aren't automatically hosted to ceilings. So let's see, we click on these, there's nothing for the schedule level or elevation.
We don't want that. So let's pan back out. Let's select all of the ones in the classroom and set them to level one.
Alright, let's go down to this area of the classroom. So again, these aren't in the center of our tiles, so we can move them to a corner and move them over and down one foot. Zoom in to find the center, find the intersection.
Let's zoom out a bit to make sure they're all where they should be. Okay, let's hit ENTER to repeat the command. We'll go over one foot, hit ENTER.
We'll go down one foot. Now we don't want to mirror this because these classrooms aren't the same size. So let's move on to this classroom here.
Okay, we'll go to the move tool, zoom in to find the center of this sprinkler. This time, let's move up to this corner, make sure they're all at the intersections. Okay, hit ENTER to repeat the command.
This time, let's go left one foot, hit ENTER, go down one foot, escape. Okay, let's select them all. Mm, pan over, hit ENTER to repeat the command.
Again, enter to repeat the command. And one more time, let's zoom out. Okay, now we know these aren't hosted.
We need to remember to do that. Let's select all of these, level one, good.
