Delve into the nuanced world of Revit MEP with VDCI's BIM 321 course, Introduction to Revit MEP. This course provides an in-depth examination of the modeling aspects of different mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, and how to use the Revit MEP interface effectively.
Key Insights
- The Revit MEP program, while similar to Revit Architecture, offers unique features for working specifically with mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems. It is crucial to understand the differences between the two to be able to use each tool effectively.
- The BIM 321 course emphasizes on the modeling aspect of MEP systems. The comprehensive program also touches upon creating construction documents from models in the subsequent BIM 322 course.
- Revit MEP comes with templates that are already equipped with families and predetermined settings, like routing options for ducts and piping, which simplifies the project set-up process. Specifically, the mechanical template is heavily used in this course.
Welcome to the CAD Teacher VDCI video course content for the BIM 321 course, Introduction to Revit MEP. In this course, we're going to be going over a lot of modeling aspects of different Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing systems and how to actually use the Revit MEP interface. It's not very much different from the Revit Architecture, but there are a few different things that we have going on that I want to kind of highlight—how we start a project, how we move forward, and actually how we do an entire project in Revit MEP, which is slightly different from how we do it with Revit Architecture.
It's a very great, powerful program that will allow you to do many, many different things. In this course specifically, we are going to be focusing on the modeling aspects of the MEP systems. This program is very widely used, and it's such a large program—because of the Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing aspects that it has—that this course here will focus on the modeling specifically, and the BIM 322 course will focus on creating construction documents from this kind of model.
So, what I want to go ahead and do is we want to go ahead and start a new project. Now, I'm going to go ahead—this is just the basic drop screen of that—and let's go ahead and go up to New. You should get this item popped up.
Please make sure that we are going to use the Mechanical template. The reason why these templates are so important is because they come with a lot of families and everything already predetermined for how we need to use them—certain things like routing options for ducts and piping, that kind of stuff.
So, please go ahead and make sure that we're going to be using the Mechanical template. We are going to be using the Mechanical template, but we will also be covering Mechanical, Plumbing, and Electrical information. Create a new project, and I'm going to go ahead and hit OK.
I'm going to take a minute to load up, and here we are. It looks pretty similar to Revit Architecture. It's a little bit different, but you can see up here we have a Systems tab.
We have an Architecture tab, Insert, Annotate, Analyze, Massing, Insight, Collaborate, View, Manage, and Modify. So, it's pretty standard to what we have here compared to Revit Architecture. We have a Properties panel here and our Project Browser.
We're going to want to have both of these here so that we can participate in all the different aspects that we need to access. We will be using the Properties quite a bit as well as the Project Browser. So, let's just go ahead and actually save this file real quick.
I'm going to go up here to the little diskette and go to Save. Please go ahead and save it in your BIM321 folder. What you should have done is create a BIM321 folder on your C drive.
Please also create another folder that is BIM321 Families and then the BIM321 Linked Revit. We will be linking in an architectural file to use as our background. So, please go ahead and name this file BIM321.
I'm going to leave it saying “your name, ” but please replace that with your name there. I'm going to go ahead and hit Save. I'm just going to go ahead and overwrite my existing file.
And there we are. So, let's go ahead and talk about this interface for a couple of minutes. Just a quick, brief overview.
Again, we have up here in the corner the Application button, which is where we have our New, Open, Save, Save As, and all these other different items here. We have our Quick Access Toolbar, which is pretty standard. We've had that in Revit Architecture for some time.
That can either be shown below the ribbon here or it can be shown above the ribbon. I've tended to just leave it above the ribbon. I don't use it horribly too much, but to get to a section or a 3D view is pretty nice.
Then obviously, we have the Ribbon interface here, which is standard for almost any Autodesk program nowadays. And so, we have a Systems tab. The Systems tab will have all of our different items that we're going to use.
So, as you can see, we have HVAC. We have a Plumbing and Piping panel. We have an Electrical panel and a Model panel.
Go over to Architecture. We will not really be using this in this course, obviously, because we're not doing any architecture. But they do have some options.
Say we need to create a wall or a door or a window. Say you needed to create a wall for a specific mechanical item—you can do that here.
So, you can still draw in some of these items if you need to. We have Insert—linking a Revit file, linking CAD, DWFs, a decal, point clouds, and pretty much all the basic things that we've had in Revit Architecture.
Annotate—this is where we do all our dimensions. So, we do all of our dimensioning, our details, our text, our tags, all those kinds of items.
Analyze—this is kind of the newer one here for Revit MEP. So, I can analyze different spaces.
And that’s more with regard to panel schedules and heating and cooling loads. That's going to be more of a BIM 322 item as compared to now. What I really want to focus on in this class is the actual modeling.
Revit MEP can kind of be a bear to work with. Some things will work in one view; the same thing won't work in another view.
So, we have to kind of work with the program and start to understand the language that the program wants us to give it input in. We have Massing and Site options—pretty standard.
We don't really tend to use these here though. Collaborate—work sharing, synchronizing, and coordinating.
We will be using this Copy/Monitor, and I'll go over that in a later vid. View—again, creating views, view templates, rendering cloud, 3D view, section, callout—the same pretty much standard stuff you've seen previously.
Under Manage, we have our materials, object styles, snaps, project information—all these other different items here that we use to manage the overall look and feel of the project. And then our Modify tab—this is where we have all of our modify tools.
Align, Move, Copy, so on and so forth. I think you guys are all pretty familiar with these at this point. So, then we have the Properties panel here, which obviously, right now, since I have nothing selected, is just showing the properties for my floor plan.
My floor plan view. Then we have the Project Browser down here. And let's talk about the Project Browser for a second.
As you can see, we have Views and then Discipline. So, right now, we have our Mechanical discipline. We have HVAC, which is our heating and cooling.
Then we have Floor Plans, Ceiling Plans, 3D Views, and Elevations. And then we have down here another Plumbing. When we get to Electrical, we'll actually have to create an Electrical discipline so that we can actually add that information in here.
And we’ll go through how we can create and manage this Project Browser. Obviously, we still have our Legends, Schedules, Quantities—all those other different things. Down here at the bottom, I have my view scale.
Then we have our detail level, our visual style, sun path, shadows, crop view, show crop region, temporary hide/isolate, and reveal hidden elements. So, what I want to go ahead and do now is—I think you guys have gotten pretty familiar with this—I'm going to go ahead and stop this first video here.
And when we come back, we'll start talking about linking in the model and starting the project. See you then.