Connect into is a very useful, but often overlooked method of connecting things in Revit MEP. To demonstrate the functionality, I'm going to pipe together a small sprinker layout. The building that I'm using actually comes from the Revit MEP 2010 tutorials and is the north east end of the 2nd floor of the building if you would like to try it for yourself.
I've already added the sprinklers (and will readily admit that I'm not a fire protection person, so If the sprinkler layout is wrong, sorry) and added a sprinkler pipe to the corridor outside of the rooms that I'm working in.
The first step that I'm going to complete is to complete drawing the pipe to the farthest thing that I'm going to connect to. Are there other ways to do this? Yea, but this is probably the easiest.
So I'll select the pipe that has already been added and right click on the connector control at the end (you have to right click the blue control, not the pipe itself), and when the context menu appears select Draw Pipe.
Starting the draw pipe command this wall will set the size and offset of the pipe to match the one that I'm starting with, so that I don't have to worry about what size / elevation the existing one is. Once the pipe command starts I simply drag my cursor to the right, until I get a remote snap from the sprinkler that has been placed in the right-most room. and click to draw the pipe to that point.
The next step is to change the size of my pipe from a 3/4" to a 1/2". I'll do this on the options bar. Then I will drag my cursor over the "upper" sprinkler until I get the point snap on the sprinkler. Once I see the point snap, I click to connect to the sprinkler.
After connecting to that sprinkler, I'm going to repeat the process, but in reverse for the other "farthest" sprinklers. To start I'll go to the sprinkler just to the left of the one that I just connected to and when I see the connector snap, click to connect to it.
Once I've connected to that sprinkler I'll simply drag my mouse down screen to connect to the pipe.
Now do the same thing for the "left most" set of sprinklers.
For those of you already yelling that the sprinklers aren't connected yet, I know. The whole point of the "tee into" tutorial starts here, I just had to get enough done to get to the "connect into" part.
Revit is not very good a drawing things that go perpendicular to the current view, so drawing the small pieces of pipe that connect to sprinklers to the pipes above them is a bit of a challenge. To make it so that you don't have to draw these pipes manually, a way was created to not have to worry about drawing them manually.
Get out of the pipe command. Select any of the sprinklers that are not already connected to a pipe, and notice that in the ribbon a command called "Connect Into" will appear. If you select this command you will be prompted to select a pipe to connect into. If you pick a pipe that is directly above the sprinkler that you had selected, the sprinkler will simply create a pipe to "tee" into the existing pipe.
A simple 2D before and after view doesn't quite do this justice, so I'm going to show both 2D and 3D views of before and after.
By using the "connect into" function for each of the sprinklers that are disconnected you can quickly change the layout from the way it looked before to one where all of the sprinklers that are directly under the pipes are connected.
In addition to using connect into for the sprinklers that are directly below the pipes, I can also use connect into for the sprinklers that are not below the pipes. The "procedure" is exactly the same. Simply select the sprinkler, select Connect Into, and then select the pipe that you want to connect into.
No comments:
Post a Comment