Discover how to manipulate manufacturer families in Revit MEP Mechanical, using them as a launching point to develop your own models and content library. Understand the benefits and differences between manufacturer families and custom-built content, using a kitchen hood as an example.
Key Insights
- The article encourages users to examine different manufacturer families in Revit MEP Mechanical, suggesting they inspect parameters, formulas, file sizes, and other details to gain a better understanding of the content.
- The author demonstrates how to modify a manufacturer family, using a kitchen hood's specification sheet as an example. The process involves adjusting parameters, inputting generic sizing, and adding connectors for specific pieces.
- The article discusses the considerations when creating a new family in Revit, such as hosting options. It suggests making the kitchen hood model a face-hosted family, allowing it to be hosted to any face, including elements within a linked model.
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Welcome back to the VDCI video course content for Revit MEP Mechanical. In the previous video we went ahead and went through a couple of different manufacturer families and kind of looked at some of the specifics and a lot of the information that is included within them. What I would encourage you to do is maybe you have, you're working in an office now or you've worked in an office previously and you know some of these manufacturers, go take a look, download some of their families, take a peek at the family, see what the file size is, see what the parameters are, what the formulas are, what the information that they give you is, and just kind of take some time to investigate that.
I think it's a really strong, a really good tool to have in your back pocket that you can take a manufacturer family and edit it or manipulate it to fit your purposes potentially because it provides a great starting point to build up your own models, build up your own content library, to have stuff that that you want to do and operate as you want it to be. So moving on to the next one, what we're going to go ahead and start looking at is we're going to start looking at a, I've provided a specification sheet for a kitchen hood and we're going to kind of you know mess around with the parameters a little bit and everything and we're going to kind of build it out to like a level of detail 200 or 300-ish series. We're going to be putting in kind of the generic sizing of the unit, we're going to be putting in the connectors of the unit for the specific pieces and a couple of other things.
It's not going to be a super crazy family but it's going to kind of show you a little bit, highlight the differences between maybe what a manufacturer family can provide and what a maybe a custom built or something that we build ourselves provides and a little bit shows off a little bit of the differences between the two. So in your project files I have put in there what is called kitchen hood specifications and this is a real life kitchen hood from a manufacturer. They give some of the sizing and everything here.
Kitchen hoods are a little bit different, typically the lengths are kind of custom made. They can be to set sizes but so you won't see any lengths or really a whole lot of dimensions here but typically you would get those dimensions from shop drawings. If you open that up you can use any pdf viewer to go ahead and open that up.
I'm just going to drag this on here and kind of show you guys what I have. We have this ND2 made by Captive Air, a very common hood and traditionally the hood is just exhaust only but it has an accessory that can make it a makeup air also and we're going to include that accessory in our model here. So I've also pasted in this little kind of 3D isometric so we can kind of talk about what's happening here.
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We have the actual hood, the thin portion here on the front is going to be what is their makeup air. I believe that they call it their PSP but what this does is that this is an exhaust here on the back and this is a in or a supply on the front. So this is exhausting air out, this is bringing fresh air in so that you get a good flow of air and this is perforated so that fresh air flows in right where someone's cooking and then the cooking fumes and everything gets exhausted and straight out.
So let's go ahead and take a more look at this so it gives us some other information blah blah blah okay so you can see we have some dimensions here. So what we're going to say for our dimensions here we're going to go ahead and make this guy like six feet long and then we're going to say that traditionally these tend to be 48 inches. Most kitchen equipment tends to be about 30 or 36 inches deep so 48 inches is a good size to go based on.
We have our 16 inch baffle here as if they're calling it they do have a grease pan and you know we don't necessarily need to model every single little piece of this so that's kind of one of the things I want to highlight between a manufacturer family versus something that we may create on our own is that it gets it across for the documentation purposes we'll be able to tag it we'll be able to schedule be able to do all those things and give manufacturer information and everything but we don't necessarily need to include every little piece. So you can go ahead down here so the perforated supply plenum which is that PSP I was talking about you can see we have some dimensions for that so they can either be 12 inches by 6 inches or they can I believe there's another size on here 22 × 6 inches tall so we're probably just going to go ahead and create the 12 inch one that's what we're going to say that we need for this and that's really the end of the drawing so some manufacturers will give you a little more information we're going to go ahead and have some information that we kind of maybe talk to the rep and we got to talk with the rep and they were all like hey yeah this is the size you want to do we're going to make it six feet by four feet that's going to be our overall size and we'll go ahead and get into that. So one thing when we start with a family when we start creating a family the one thing we need to think about is first of all how are we going to be using this family if I look over here in the kitchen right so I have over here in the kitchen I do have and I believe that this is a wall let's see here so this wall is only up to four feet so this wall really doesn't work too well for us for our kitchen line per se we may want to have our cook line on this side that would be a discussion with the design team the architect and other team members and obviously the client to say hey where do you want your cook line to be how do you want this to be but we're going to go ahead and use this one here right here this wall right here because this is a full eye wall right now that's where we'll be placing our hood now we need to think about how do we want to place it do we want it to be hosted to the wall do we want it to be face hosted do we want it to not have a host and we can just move it and put it wherever we want these are all questions that when you start talking about families that you want to sit down and think about because the main reason is I'm going to save my project here once you've established a hosting for a family it is very very tough to change that hosting you really can't change the hosting once that hosting is built in it's going to be hosted that way so you want to make sure you think about that in this instance I think I'm going to make this a face hosted family the reason being so I can host to a wall it's a wall mounted unit now you might be asking yourself well Tyler why aren't you using a wall hosted family well that's a great question the reason why I'm not going to use a wall hosted family is that yes Revit does know that this is a wall right Revit I can select it it says wall the thing is though is that when Revit comes to detecting the elements when you're trying to host two items a linked model does not register as a wall I'm not 100% sure why that is but if I were to make it a wall hosted family I would not be able to host it to this element I'm going to make it a face hosted family so that I can host it to any face so a linked model the faces within that linked model I can go ahead and host to those so we want to start off with a equipment or with a template for that face hosting I'm going to stop this video here and we'll see you in the next one
