Explore the process for setting up the plumbing system for a building's second floor using Revit MEP. This detailed guide walks you through handling floor plans, adjusting visibility settings, working with the pipe command, and more.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step guide on how to manage floor plans and level 2 plumbing when setting up a building's second-floor plumbing system using Revit MEP.
- It highlights the importance of adjusting visibility settings to better see and manage the plumbing system. This includes adding filters, rotating sections, and changing the view range.
- The guide also provides insights on how to effectively use the pipe command for waste piping and sanitary systems, the importance of checking slopes, and how to handle the alignment and trimming of pipes.
Welcome back to the CAD Teacher VDCI video course content for the BIM 321 course, Introduction to Revit MEP. In the previous video, we went ahead and actually got all of our information done and tied in our entire plumbing system for the first floor. So let's go ahead and start looking at our second floor.
So what I want to go ahead and do is I'm going to go to my floor plans and I'm going to go to level 2 plumbing. Here we are. I'm going to go ahead and expand it out.
I'm going to go ahead and actually close hidden windows and I'm going to go ahead and bring back up my section, WT, for my window tile and again, I just kind of like to work with the plan on the left, section on the right, again, just a personal preference of mine. We can see our second floor here and I'm going to go ahead and actually bring this up a little bit so that we don't worry about the information on the first floor. Now, I want to go ahead and accidentally click on the scroll bar here and again, I don't really necessarily want to see this but I do see this pipe here and we need to adjust these settings just a little bit because we're not seeing what we really want to see.
So let's go ahead and go into VV first. I'm going to go to my filters category here, my tab, and I'm going to add my Domestic Cold and Domestic Hot and hit OK and I'm going to uncheck the visibility so we can see those and OK. One thing I do want to do is I want to go ahead and rotate so RO for rotate my section 90 degrees because I know that I have a pipe that's running under here and as you can see as I change this section, my section view over here is changing.
So I still have this pipe running here that I need to tie all of these guys into. The issue that I'm having right now is though, is the fact that I can't see it here and that's a view range issue. We're already in wireframe here so I need to go ahead and be able to see this for my view range.
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So I'm going to go ahead and go down, I'm going to go, select this floor plan, have nothing else selected and go down here and find view range. Now I want to change the bottom, let's change this to negative 2 feet, negative 2 feet, apply and there's our pipe and hit OK and so now I have my pipe here which is exactly what I want. I'm going to hit escape to say I'm done.
Now I want to go ahead and start working with these connections over here. So I'm going to select this, do my rotate 90 degrees and come down to here. Again, I don't really want to see this fitting here so I'm going to go ahead and slide my section just a little farther forward, there we are.
The one thing that you do notice is that I am seeing my secondary architectural units there. So I want to go ahead and go VV, I'm going to go to my Revit links, I'm going to go to change this from by host view and again I'm in my section, visibility and graphics overrides, I'm going to go custom, model categories, custom and find plumbing fixtures, there it is, apply, OK, hit apply and OK and now I just have my units. I'm going to go ahead and we're going to tie these ones in maybe a slightly different way.
I'm going to go ahead and select here, I'm going to pull this down, again I need to check my domestic water supply, nope, I want my waste piping and I do want to slope down here. I'm going to go ahead and bring this down and bring it over. Now, instead of tying these two together, we don't necessarily have enough room to exactly tie these two together, I'm going to run both of these pipes directly into this line here.
But to do that, we have to do a couple of special things. We have to actually draw a pipe from this edge. This guy here is going to come straight into it and this one is going to have to come down and then angle over and then go in because of the fittings.
So I need to go ahead and draw a pipe from this location. So let's go to our pipe command, I'm going to go ahead, make sure it's a 4 inch, I'm not going to worry about the offset, I'm going to show you something special here in a second and then I'm going to make sure my type is sanitary, and I'm using waste piping. Up here my placement tools, for some reason my ribbon bar is scaling down just slightly, I'm not 100% sure why but hopefully yours is not.
There are several different tools here and the icons are all the same. We have justification, so I can change whether I'm placing based on the center line or the center line, the lower line or the top line. I can inherit the size of the element being snapped to, I can automatically connect the system or I can inherit elevation and this inherit elevation is the one we want to go ahead and use.
So please check to use inherit elevation. We're coming from the main going to the fixture, so I need to go ahead and slope up. So make sure that your slope up is checked.
I'm going to go ahead, pick here, I'm going to drag up. Now there it is and I'm going to go ahead and hit escape to end the chain. Now what I can do is I can align these two pipes together.
So I'm going to go AL for align, pick here and here. They're already aligned in plan but I can just go ahead. Again, the align command doesn't necessarily like it when you go between two different views so I'm going to hit escape.
I'm going to go AL again, pick here and make sure I get the center line of the pipe. There it is. I just hit TAB once and align those together.
Then I'm going to go ahead, go trim, TR, pick here and here and trim those together and I've tied it in. Beautiful. That's just another way of tying it in.
Instead of tying the two pipes or the two toilets together, we're going to tie this one in and then we're going to go ahead and bring this one down. I want to go ahead, I'm going to bring, draw pipe, I'm going to bring it down and over. Again, I need to change my slope to slope down because I'm going from the fixture now.
So there we are. Just like that, again, I need to change the pipe type. I did not check that aspect, I checked the slope but not that one.
I'm going to select here, click here, change to slope down, change my pipe types to waste piping. There we are. Bring it over and there we go.
Now the thing is, I cannot tie this directly back into here. I could put a Y in this or a cross and we might be able to fix this. The problem is though is it wants to keep it at the same slope that it's going into.
So this pipe doesn't really necessarily want to do it. If I were to draw a pipe from here, slope up, see how it doesn't like that because it's not staying in that same. So what we have to do is I'm going to go ahead, come in here, tab select to select just the pipe.
I'm going to go ahead and bring it over 45 degrees. Now the one thing you'll notice that when you do rotate like that, the problem is that it's going to go ahead and actually change your slope. So go ahead and make sure I can click on that slope number when I have that pipe selected, and I'm going to make it 1/8 inch over 12 inches.
There we are. And then I'm going to go ahead, select here, draw a pipe, and I'm just going to draw a short piece. Again, I want to make sure that I'm sloping down.
I'm going away from the fixture towards the main. There's that. I need to go ahead and draw my connection from this pipe here, so I'm going to go to my pipe command.
I'm going to go ahead, slope up, waste piping, and then I also need to make sure I inherit the elevation. I'm going to go ahead and pick about here, drag up, and it fit. I need to go back over to my section view now.
Again, I'm going to align, so I'm going to pick here, pick here. It looks like they're aligned in plan, so let's go ahead and trim those two together. There and there.
Perfect. It aligned them. So there's kind of a workflow to this that we want to go ahead and develop because it's a pain to go to this pipe command that keeps switching between these two.
So I want to go ahead and we're actually going to draw our connections off of the main going to each individual unit for the toilets. So I want to go ahead. I'm going to go pipe.
I'm going to make sure it's 4-inch waste piping on my sanitary system. I'm going to choose slope up and I'm going to choose inherit elevation. So for here, I'm going to come, go straight up, I'm going to hit escape to end the chain.
I have to go back and hit inherit elevation. I'm still sloping up, so I'm going to come here, go out. There it is.
I'm going to come inherit elevation. Here, go up. Inherit elevation.
Here, go out. Now what happened here was that I did not draw a piece of pipe long enough to fit the fitting. So make sure that when you're drawing in these connections that you actually go ahead and bring those in.
So I'm going to hit cancel. Inherit elevation, and I need to make sure I'm drawing it long enough to fit the fitting in there.
And there we go. We're just going to draw those in for the toilets and fixtures. And I'm actually going to go ahead and pause this video here and restart this process in the next video.
See you then.
