Delve into the intricate aspects of Revit MEP for plumbing with a focus on fixtures in our latest article. Understand the different ways of creating fixtures, the importance of connectors, and the role of copy monitor for effective tracking of architectural changes.
Key Insights
- The article elucidates the ways of creating fixtures in a plumbing model in Revit MEP - by placing them individually or via copy monitor. The copy monitor feature alerts the user about any architectural changes such as the movement of a fixture.
- There are two types of fixtures - Architectural and MEP. While the former lacks connectors, the latter comes with built-in connectors crucial for tying in hot water, cold water, and waste systems.
- By using the load Autodesk family under the insert tab, users can access a library of Autodesk-created content. This library, which used to be installed on the machine, is now available online and contains various categories such as plumbing and architectural and MEP equipment and fixtures.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Welcome back to the VDCF video course content for Revit MEP for plumbing. In the previous video, we went ahead and got all of our system for our domestic hot and cool water in, and now I want to kind of change gears a little bit and let's talk about fixtures. So the fixtures that you see here are currently part of the linked architectural model.
Now, those are great, and typically the architect will determine those locations, but we obviously need to be able to connect into these for our pipe network. So what we want to go ahead and do, there's a couple of different ways of creating these fixtures. We could just place them just like you would any other family.
We could go ahead and just place individual fixtures in those exact locations. If we want to, there is also the ability to do copy monitor. So copy monitor allows us just like what we did with our levels.
And if we had grids in this model, we would probably do with our grids too, is that the copy monitor allows us to kind of track and see possible changes. If the architect, say the architect decides to move this fixture left or right, up and down, whatever, the location of it changes, we would be alerted to that and we would be able to match up to that if we so desired. So I want to kind of talk about the fixtures a little bit before we actually get into making copies of them, because how Revit has broken this up or how Autodesk has broken this up is there's two different types of fixtures when you load in a fixture.
There is an architectural version, which does not have any connectors on it. If you go back to our water heater that we created, we created these connectors so that we can have our hot water come in, our cold water come in, our hot water come out, so on and so forth. We want to go ahead and the one that the architect has decided to use here is going to be one that does not have connectors.
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It's an architectural element. We're going to want to use what they call the MEP ones, which have the connectors built in. And let me show you what I'm talking about.
If I go over to the insert tab, under the insert tab, there is this load Autodesk family. Now this load Autodesk family, if you click on it, it's going to bring up a library of content that Autodesk has created. Now this content used to be installed on your machine when you installed Revit, but it is no longer installed on your machine.
It is now under this load Autodesk family. That happened a couple years ago. Now what you can do is you can see all the different categories here.
You can search up here at the top. You can locale settings. So you can change, you know, United States Imperial, United States Metric.
There's many different locales that they have here. So it gives you a little bit of a larger library that you might possibly be able to use. You can change what it looks like.
So do you want it to be kind of large tabs like this, or do you want it to be a list view as such, and then just an about page. So there is a, how do I find and load content? If you want to check that out, that would take you to a webpage that'll kind of tell you how to use this load Autodesk family, but it's pretty straightforward. You just check the box, hit load, and it loads those items in.
If I look here under plumbing and I go down, you can see I have architectural and I have MEP. Well, architectural, we have some equipment and we have some fixtures. MEP, we have some equipment and a little bit expanded list of equipment here.
And under fixtures, we have some expanded items here. We have a couple of different things. You see, we have like appliances here.
We have connectors. Let's see what else is the difference? Emergency fixtures, lavatories, so on and so forth. So there are some differences here.
Now, if I click into sinks here and you look closely at these images, notice that these 3D images, they just have the geometry of the sink. We have a sink kitchen, double sink, kitchen, Island, sink, kitchen, single, so on and so forth. If I go back to my plumbing category, I go down to MEP and I go down to sinks.
Notice how you have these little lines that are like the little colors. Those are going to go ahead and be our actual connectors. So the architectural fixtures do not have the connectors to tie in the hot water, the cold water, the waste systems, those kinds of things.
They just have their, the architectural ones are just the 3D information or 2D in some instances, but the MEP fixtures are the ones that actually have the connectors. And I really strongly recommend using the MEP ones that have the connector. That's obviously what we want to use.
So that's kind of the main difference between the M the architectural and the MEP. There is again in the MEP, you have some additional items. You have some appliances here.
They have like a dishwasher, kitchen, stacked washer and dryer, washing machine. Uh, what else do they have? Um, and their lavatories, they have these specific kind of lavatories, which we'll be using some of these. We're going to go ahead and we'll, we'll come back to this, load some items in.
Cause we need to talk about a couple of things with copy monitor. Now, with that being said, the differences between the architectural and MEP, we have to think about how we want to do the copy monitor before we do it. If we copy monitor in the wrong thing, it can kind of be a little troublesome.
There's a little bit of pre-work that needs to go into this copy monitor. So let's take a look at the copy monitor settings. If I go over to my collaborate tab and I'm going to go to copy monitor, pull down and hit select link.
You can highlight and click on the link here. And then you have this contextual tab come up for copy monitor. You have options, copy monitor coordination settings, or batch copy.
If we go into our coordination settings here, you'll see that it gives us a list of items, a list of categories that we can copy monitor from say the MEP architectural model. If we needed to, and there are more than one model LinkedIn, say we had a structural model LinkedIn or an electrical model LinkedIn, we can pull down here and choose which file that we wanted to copy monitor from, but it's going to apply to this one. Also, we obviously picked the link that we wanted to copy monitor from.
So that's why this pull down is as such. So you see all these different categories here and you see under plumbing fixtures, we kind of have this plus sign. Well, that's because in their plumbing fixtures, I have set the copy behavior to allow batch copy.
