Replicating Mechanical Systems in Revit: Quick and Easy Methods

Welcome back to the video course content for the VDCI Revit for Mechanical course. In the previous video, we went ahead and actually finished out our complete system. We had a couple little rooms to finish up, not a big deal.

But what we're going to go ahead and do now is start talking about how we can take this information and kind of replicate it around. So there are some caveats to it, it's not exactly perfect. But there are some quick and easy ways that if we have a system such as this that we're trying to replicate, say upstairs, that we can go ahead and use.

The one thing we want to go ahead and do is get this system over to this location. So I think everyone's kind of aware that tab-select in Revit kind of does different things. And in Revit MEP or Revit for Mechanical, it does slightly other things too.

If I hover over a duct and I just hit TAB once, it's going to select the entire system. So you can see when I select it, multiple categories selected, which means that I probably have duct and duct fittings selected. And then I also have four items selected.

So it's giving me all these different items. If I tab, click, it's going to give me those. If I tab over it a couple of times, it's going to give me the actual duct system. So you can see when I tab once it highlights everything in blue, tab again, it highlights some other additional element most likely that was there.

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Let's see. Now I have six elements. If I tab three times, it's going to give me the actual duct system.

And that works for all of these items here. If I hover and tab, you can see it's giving me the duct system. If I hover and tab, you can see the different levels of tabbing that I have there.

What I would recommend you doing is taking some time and just getting used to that. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to tab over this twice to make sure I get everything. And then I'm going to go ahead and hit copy.

Now I'm not hitting this copy to clipboard, I could hit this, but I'm just going to hit the regular copy. I'm going to bring this guy, pull it down here. And then it's going to stay as a group.

When I hit a square, it's going to stay selected, sorry, when I do that. So what I want to go ahead and do is I'm actually going to mirror this. That was one way that I can go ahead and do it is I'm going to go to mirror, I'm going to use pick line.

And I'm going to uncheck copy because I don't want to create a copy. Now I'm actually in the draw line, I meant to use the pick line, uncheck copy.

So I mirror these elements, and I'm going to pick on this center line. Boom, and there we go. So I've made that piece there, put it in the correct location.

I could also move it around if I want to notice it's all still selected. So whenever you finish a command, you don't always necessarily want to keep hitting escape multiple times. So I'm gonna do it one more time just a little faster.

So I'm going to go ahead tab two times over this to get the six elements. I'm gonna hit copy. I'm going to pull down here, drag down, I'm just going to kind of place it where I think it might go.

I can always adjust it later. It's not crazy, but make sure I'm moving straight up and down. There we go.

And you can see that I don't have it in quite the right position. I'm gonna hit escape once, it's gonna leave everything that I copied over selected and then I can hover over it and I can drag it a little bit. Or I could just go to the move command.

It wants to constrain it. Or I could use my directional arrows to adjust. I'm gonna use the pick mirror tool here.

So mirror pick axis. I'm gonna make sure copy is unchecked and I'm gonna pick the center line here. So I mirror over that center line and there we are.

Everything is good to go. Cool. We placed our return system for this area here.

Now, when we talk about wanting to get this information up to the second floor, it's going to take a little bit of finesse, but it's going to work out okay. So what I can go ahead and do is I'm going to select, I don't want to necessarily select from this guy here, but I'm going to select all of this and then holding control. See, I get the plus sign.

I can select all of like this here and these guys and being precise with these controls and selections is a very strong thing in Revit. So take your time, make sure you get those selected. Now, obviously I have way too much selected.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come out here and filter this so I can use the filter. I'm gonna check none. I do want air terminals.

I want duct fittings. I want ducts, flux ducts, mechanical equipment. The only thing I don't really want are spaces and views.

Hit apply and okay. Now I've filtered that list down to what I want it to be. So what I can do now is I now on this instance, I'm going to copy it to the clipboard because I'm going to take it to another view.

So I want to copy to clipboard. There we go. I'm going to go to my level two plan.

You can see what's happening here. I'm going to go ahead, hit paste, align to current view. I could also use align to selected levels, but I definitely want to do align.

I do not want to just paste it because then I have to draw it in and do many different things. I have to place it in the right location. It's going to be hard to get a good reference for that.

So align to current view, pick, and it's going to take some time because we're pasting a lot of elements here and it's saying it's giving me a couple errors. We'll go through and fix that.

You can see I didn't quite get everything that I wanted, but that's okay. We got most of it. I can go ahead and delete the elements.

It's going to remove some extra taps. And there we go. So I have a few extra pieces here.

I'm going to go ahead and back up and do that one more time. Maybe be a little more deliberate with what I select. So what I'm going to go ahead and do it.

The other way to do this is to tab-select. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to hover here. Actually, I'm going to, this is a little trick.

I'm going to delete this fitting to disconnect it from the system real quick. I'm going to tab-select so I get everything I want. Pick—that gave me everything I wanted because I selected the entire run.

So I deleted that fitting because if I hit TAB here, it's going to give me all that stuff. If I delete this fitting, I can go ahead and just tab, tab, tab, three tabs, select. I'm going to hit copy.

I'm going to go to my level two ceiling. I'm going to paste, align to current view. And this might be just a little bit cleaner.

So you can see we're going to have to make some adjustments on some of these, but for the most part, it gets a lot of our system where we want it to be. Again, we're here where the air handler is. We might want to take a peek at that and just make sure that everything is correct.

The one thing it did not get, though, was the return diffusers because those weren't part of the system. So what I'm going to go ahead and do here is I'm going to go back down there. I'm going to go ahead and actually do this.

And I'm going to right-click on these, select all instances visible in view. Now the problem with this method is that I get all the ones up here using shift or control. So shift removes things from my selection set.

Control adds things. I'm going to hold shift. I'm going to actually deselect everything that's up here.

I'm going to go copy, go to my level two ceiling plan, paste, align to current view. Boom. We may have some other systems that we need to adjust, but this gets the majority of our work done.

So there we go. Let's go ahead and start cleaning this up. So I'm going to come down here.

We don't necessarily need all of these diffusers down here. So I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to delete probably most of the, like three of the return diffusers.

I'm going to adjust so I can get three supplies here in the back. I don't need this guy. So I can just delete these.

Just make sure you delete them. You can use that tab to select and delete full runs. If you wanted to, I could also go ahead and slide this out.

I'm going to leave it. I'm going to slide it kind of here against the wall. We're going to go ahead and leave those guys there again, tab once and delete that, tab here.

Delete that. Let's go ahead and align these diffusers back here. Make sure you get the correct references for your align.

And if you need to adjust these taps, like, let's say I want this one to be directly straight off of this. I can go align. I could actually use the center line of the register to the center line of the duct.

And there we are. I'm going to go ahead and move my returns around a little bit. Let's go ahead and place that there.

Move this return up here. I'm going to align these guys and make sure you're getting the right references. There's a lot of references here because of that roof pattern above us.

Make sure I click off. Let's see here. Let me find a spot.

It's kind of tough. Sometimes you might zoom in a little bit and that'll help because your selection area isn't as large. There we go.

We don't have this system here, but we'll go ahead and tie this in. So what I can go ahead and do is I need to tie this into this duct, right? If I select on a fitting, you'll notice there's plus signs. This means that I can add a connector.

So I can go plus there. It's going to create that 48 × 24. So I could just draw duct, drag this down.

Now these two are at the same elevation. I can just go trim here to here. Currently, let's see how it comes out.

Nope. It's giving me a whole bunch of different stuff here. Let's take a look at this just so we can see what we're looking at here.

I'm going to go to this selection box. This is a great tool right here to see things in 3D. It'll give me a selection box and only look at that area.

So you'll notice that I kind of have a transition up. Now in this instance, I may need that, but if I turn off my section box, we can see that then we can go ahead and change it up a little bit. Oh, I noticed that I don't have my connector here.

I can just trim these guys together. Not a big deal, but perfect. So what I can go ahead and do is I'm actually going to delete all of this because I don't want this to come up.

I want it to be the same elevation. So this is at kind of an odd elevation here because we just kind of moved it and you can see we have a few clashes over here. We'll have to adjust that.

But what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to actually make, what is this middle elevation? This is 11' 6". This guy, I don't think I can get to 11' 6", but maybe I can reach 11'. Let's just take a look at how this looks.

Okay. I think we can make that work. So I'm going to take this guy and move it.

And what I can go ahead and do is if I tab-select, I could grab all of that. Notice that I can't adjust it directly from here. I can change it to 11'.

There we go. And I might want to tab-select again so that I can get all of these 11'. And it's going to move that entire system down.

Notice how I did that? If I go back, I'm going to go back. I'm going to tab twice to get the main run. Plus this guy here, I'm going to change my middle elevation to 11 feet.

So using those tabs can be really powerful. I'm actually going to delete this fitting. And then I'm going to go ahead and trim these together.

Boom. And now I don't have that weird angle anymore. So let's