Xref Equipment & Nozzles

[Anonymous]

Whats the best practice here?

Usually I create a piece of equipment (AutoCAD Entities) in a seperate dwg file then I insert that into a master piping model which holds all the equipment.

I return the the equipment model and convert the entities to a Plant 3D Equipment Entity then add nozzles, then refesh the master piping model which hold the xref's.

I click the piece of equipment in the master piping model and it shows the disconnection symbol as expected, but if I click a nozzle there is no "+" symbol to add pipe to the nozzle.

I can draw pipe from the nozzle if I use "Route Pipe" from it, but I'm a little confused why there is no "+" which you get from a piece of equipment that exists within the model and is not xrefed.

Whats the best practise here?

[PeterQuinn · Accepted solution]

Chbiz,

I'll let others speak on best practices, but I can tell you that your workflow was considered one of the primary ones when we designed Plant 3D.

The reason that you're not getting the + grip on the nozzles in an xref'ed piece of equipment is that typically you don't get grips on objects in xrefs. I've heard several other requests for this, so it's something we're considering to change in a future release.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Peter for the reply,

I would agree though that the + grip on xref's for the new release should be a must addition.

Best Regards

[scotttgracie]

I have the same problem in P3D 2020, but the current documentation  link below appears to indicate that it should now work ... I have checked insertion and tested with attachment and overlay of the equipment file to the piping file  ... I still can not start routing a pipe from the nozzel of the equipment file xref. What am I doing wrong?

Workflow: How to use external References (XREFs) for piping in AutoCAD Plant 3D | AutoCAD Plant 3D |....