Piping Support Iso drawings generated with missing dims

[DLuck_GPT]

Hello everyone,

We are using Plant 3D 2012 for a project that contains many pipes, which we are dimensioning using the Iso Generation feature to do the pipe runs.

So far we have two issues, both of which are directly related to pipe supports. We are using the included pipe supports that came installed with Plant 3D (not custom ones), and we are also using the included items that came in Plant 3D, and have noticed two things:

One:

If we have many supports all located an equal distance from each other, as shown here in this screenshot, the dimension is done to the first pipe support, but the others are ignored. I am attaching an example of how this looks. The drawing is not even marked “TYP” or “1200 TYPICAL, 5 PLACES” on hangers spaced equal distances.

My concern to this is that these Isos are not to scale and we have different distances that are not dimensioned similarly but have large numbers of support spaced equidistant. What happens then is that we could have one section that has supports that are spaced 1200mm from each other, then another section that has supports spaced 1700mm from each other, and the system will dimension one as 1200, the other 1700, and then not dimension the rest. The result could be catastrophic in the field, and we have hundreds of Isos in the project, which would make going through each one manually to dimension these runs by hand a very time-intensive task.

The only workaround we have discovered so far is to alternate moving the supports several fractions of a millimetre so the difference is detected by the system and then the result is rounded off. This however is also very time intensive, and it seems very amateur.

So for one, is there any way to get the rest of the dimensions to be done automatically by the computer, without having to copy-paste them in, or resort to deliberately putting our supports off by several fractions of a millimetre to trigger the roundoff?

Two:

When pipelines are branched off (for example, a water pipeline is split into two smaller pipes to connect to several nozzles on a piece of equipment), and the pipeline is given the same tag, past the point where the Tee or Wye is, the dimensions to the hangers - which also may not be spaced equal distances apart - are typically absent. When the stretch of pipe upstream or downstream of the Tee or Wye is used to generate a user-defined iso drawing, the supports come in fine. However, when the entire thing is done all at the same time, then the dimensions don’t appear.

We’ve recognized that each pipeline should be tagged with its own unique identifier, but at this moment can’t change the line number tags.

What can be done to sort these issues out without changing the model or the intelligence?

Thanks.