ABS 2007 Enhanced Piping White Paper

[Anonymous]

Hello Everyone!

It is finally here! I have been waiting some time for this white paper to go through all of the hands it has to before it can be released to the public. And here it is!!

Hope you all find this useful.

By the way you can find other previously released whitepapers for ABS here:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=5117218

Happy Reading!

Sami

[Anonymous]

Woo hoo! More reading to do!

--
R. Robert Bell


wrote in message news:5256581@discussion.autodesk.com...
Hello Everyone!

It is finally here! I have been waiting some time for this white paper to
go through all of the hands it has to before it can be released to the
public. And here it is!!

Hope you all find this useful.

By the way you can find other previously released whitepapers for ABS here:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=5117218

Happy Reading!

Sami

[Anonymous]

And where in the white paper does it address the requirement for sloping pipes? If your fittings don't take this into account (tees and elbows, regardless of connection type), you're spending a lot of time developing a system that doesn't address a fundamental requirement.

The product is called 'Autodesk Building Systems', not 'Autodesk Piping'. And a piping module that can't be used to draw 3D building hydraulics does the easy stuff OK, and the hard stuff not-at-all. It's the sloping piping that needs the coordination, not the pressurized piping. You can run pressurized piping in a spiral for all that it matters.

It's not like anyone is going to do any material costings from an ABS model, when your design hasn't factored in the location of your waste piping. What will happen when the building contractor runs into a waste pipe that is in his way while he's laying his refrigeration piping? He'll take one look at it and realise he can't be moving the waste pipe. It doesn't flow up-hill after all. What he'll do (while swearing under his breath) is re-route the pressurized piping around the waste piping, thus throwing all of your precious ABS material calculations out the door. More pipe, and more fittings, and the fact is, he more-than-likely won't even tell you what he's done.

Read that very carefully guys... because it's a fundamental issue, and having read that white paper you've just written, it isn't even on the radar.

[Anonymous]

Sorry to dissappoint you. The purpose of the whitepaper was to give everyone an understanding of how the piping works.

There are ways to model sloped piping in ABS to atleast know where the s&*T will flow, but you are right it has not been specifically designed to do that... yet... blah blah, can't talk about the future... blah blah.

If you can't figure out how to make sloped pipe in ABS you will just have to do it the way it has been done for the last few hundred years I guess.

All I can say is, don't lose hope.

It is kind of hard to swallow criticism sometime when you put yourself out there. But the squeeky wheel does get the grease. So your complaints, as agonizing as it is to admit, will help the direction of the product. Keep them coming. 😛

Thanks!

Sami

[Anonymous]

Please don't take my comments as personal, as this is never their intention. I realise you, personally, have put effort into your job, but a white-paper on piping needs to address the layout of the pipes much more than it needs to address the gaps between two pipes connected by flanges. The gap is immaterial when there is no possibility of using the product for quantity take-offs.

The problem is, my company has spent several hundred thousand dollars on licensing, and several more hundred thousand dollars on development and training, and we're still not able to deliver a building information model to our clients that will allow for us to extract material quantities.

We're not being asked to do things the way they've been done for a few hundred years, we're being asked to create complex 3D models that can ultimately be used for construction quantity take-offs.

And right now, we can't do it using ABS.

[Anonymous]

No worries, I try not to take it personally.

Sounds like you are doing some pretty intense stuff over there! Please send me an email at sami.ghantous@autodesk.com I would like to work with you closer offline.

Thanks,

Sami

[Anonymous]

Sami: Any chance I could get this as a book-on-tape??

--
Matt W
"Yesterday I found out what doughnuts are for. You put them on doughbolts.
They hold dough airplanes together. For kids, they make erector sets out of play-dough"

[Anonymous]

hahaha!!

Yes, I am working on that. As my colleague Toby has suggested I am putting a call in to Gilbert Gottfried to do the voice.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Sami

[Anonymous]

AFLACK!!

--
Matt W

[magr-niras]

Hi Sami,
Thanks for this white paper - very informative for ABS newbies like myself. I have a query - you mentioned that each of the 3 piping groups have unique OD's, and that commercial pipe is manufactured to OD spec. So why does ABS only allow drawing of ID pipework? Are there any plans to add OD to ABS? This is a feature we desperately need!

Regards,
Mark Graves

[Anonymous]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for reading the paper, I am glad you find it useful.

I am not sure I understand your question when you say it only allows drawing of ID pipework.

The 3 pipe groups have Outside Diameters (OD) to each other, commercial, copper, iron.

If you would like to have the Inner Diameter accounted for I would suggest that it be a list property on the pipe (ie.commercial sch 10, 40, 80 or copper L, M, K).

Please let me know if I am understanding your question properly so I can address it better.

Thanks,

Sami

[magr-niras]

Hi,
In the add pipe command, we pick a nominal size from the drop-down menu, but these sizes refer to the internal diameter, eg. if I choose a nominal size of 50mm and draw some pipe, then measure the distance across the end of the pipe, it's 60.3mm. We're not concerned with the internal diameter as far as our piping layous are concerned and want to draw everything in OD. Is there some way to switch between the two?

[Anonymous]

Hi Mark,

That list of sizes is actually what is called the Nominal Diameter. It is not either the Inner or Outer diameter. 🙂 Piping is so straight forward isn't it?! It is a rounded off number in order to standardize on pipe sizes.

Attached is a table that shows dimensions of some metric commercial piping to help give you an better explanation. Typical practice is that pipes are specified by their Nominal Diameter on the drawings and then the wall thickness is usually found in the piping specification.

If you still want your pipe list to be called out by OD, what you can do is open the pipe parts in Content Builder and change the ND1 values of the pipe to the OD values you want. Then the list will start showing up with OD values instead.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you need any other instructions.

Thanks,

Sami