This article provides a detailed look at the steps involved in creating a mechanical system using Revit MEP. It walks us through the process of placing an air handler on a roof, drawing ducts, aligning systems, and ensuring everything flows correctly.
Key Insights
- The BIM 321 course teaches how to use Revit MEP to create mechanical systems. This includes placing air handlers, drawing ducts, and aligning different elements to ensure a proper flow.
- Some of the commands commonly used in Revit MEP include 'AL' for aligning elements and 'TR' for trimming. These commands help ensure a proper and efficient workflow when designing mechanical systems.
- The course not only focuses on creating mechanical systems but also emphasizes the importance of checking your work. This involves inspecting sections to ensure things are properly tied together and looking at your work in 3D view to have a better understanding of the whole system.
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 got our air handler unit placed on our roof, and what we want to go ahead and do now is we're going to take these guys down the shaft so that we can start tying in our systems together. So I'm going to go ahead and pull my section back first so I can see the shaft and my two ducts here.
I'm also going to go ahead and reduce the amount that I see so I just see the ducts going down. What I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to take this, I'm going to draw a duct, take it, there we go, I'm going to go straight down to here, and I'm going to take it over just a little bit. What that's going to allow me to do is it's going to allow me to align things and everything like that.
I'm going to do the same thing here, draw a duct, take it, bring it down, bring it over. What I want to go ahead and do though is I'm going to go down to my first floor plan and make sure that this duct is not hitting the shaft on either side of the wall, and it's also going to allow me to align with this here. So I'm going to go ahead and go to my first floor ceiling plan here, and let's go ahead and take a look.
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So as you can see, things are a little bit wonky. I'm going to take this, I'm going to slide it out just a little bit, take this, slide it out just a little bit, and then I'm going to go ahead and align this edge to this piece of duct. So AL for align, pick here and here, pick here and here.
I'm going to go ahead now, trim those together, and they should trim just fine. If for some reason they're not trimming, go down to your section view here, and use your align command here to make sure that these are in sync with one another. TR for trim, pick there and there, pick there and there, and we've connected those two systems together.
Awesome. Let's go ahead and hop onto our second floor ceiling plan, and there's that. Now this one is going to be a little bit different.
I want to go ahead and align that to that. Now what I picked was I picked the center point of the duct. Now I'm going to pick here and here, and that's going to align those together.
One thing that for some reason, say this doesn't want to align perfectly like that, what I can do is I can go DL for detail line, and I can draw from the midpoint here and align to that edge there if I needed to. But I was able to get the align off of the center point here, and everything worked fine. All I'm going to go ahead and do now is I'm going to take this, drag it until it hits that center point.
It'll automatically connect. Here, drag it until it hits that center point, and it'll automatically connect. And there we go.
Let's go ahead and take a look at our section and make sure everything's flowing correctly. And as you can see, it's all looking pretty good. Everything's tied in now.
We have our mechanical system tied to our air handler unit, and mechanical is pretty much done. Let's go ahead and take a quick look at our 3D view. So there we are.
We have our basic mechanical system already ready to go, and we're good to go. It's looking really nice. So this is kind of the end of the mechanical portion of this course.
What I would recommend doing is maybe playing around with it a little bit, trying to model some other ducts in if you need to, and we may eventually go back and do an exhaust system, if we have time, for the bathrooms, but that would be pretty easy and fairly straightforward to do. I'm going to go ahead and stop this video here, and we'll come back and we'll start working on the plumbing information. See you soon.