Wall hosted families convert to surface hosted?

[ken]

If I remember reading somewhere correctly, wall hosted families are useless if the walls have been linked into the MEP plans. I have a lot of symbols I have found and loaded that wont attach to any linked walls but will attach if I draw the wall in the MEP plan. So I have two questions:

First am I right about linked walls not able to be attached to?

Secondly is there a way to take a symbol that has been created in wall hosted moded and change it to a surface hosted object?

Just wondering,
Ken@rlmrlm.com

[sec-k]

1. Yes.

2. Not that I know of.

There is a lot of debate about what types of families to use in a MEP model with a linked architectural file. Some use only non-hosted, some use face hosted. I use a both, depending on the family. But yes, you want to avoid trying to use families that are host-specific, such as ceiling based, wall based, floor based, roof based, etc.

[ken]

Thanks for the reply.

Do you or anyone else know if this problem is going to be corrected soon?

First of all, if Revit is so smart why cant it recognize a wall from its own program that is linked?

Secondly if a wall or ceiling moves don't you want your devices to move with it? You can't possibly put the watch command on every single wall or ceiling to tell you when it moves.

I dont know, correct me if I am out of line here but I have only been messing with Revit for a year now and there have been a lot releases before I got thrown into this mess and it seems to me that the programers need to actually do a couple of real life MEP projects with their software and I bet a lot of corrections would be in the 2011 version.

Ken@rlmrlm.com

[arcticad]

>You can't possibly put the watch command on every single wall or ceiling to tell you when it moves.

Well actually you can. You can import cad standards from the architectural file into the MEP Model.
Then copy and monitor and select the matching wall type for each one in the drawing.
Match the current style with the Architectural style. It's super Tedious. They need to fix this too.
I just want a match all Button.
Anyone have one?

I've been bugging AutoDesk for 3 years about this problem.

[margaretwiggins]

I would highly suggest NOT doing what arcticad has suggested. It will kill the performance of the model. You should create face-based families for your wall hosted elements. They will move with the (linked) wall. We use non-hosted for ceilings b/c there is a bug with ceilings and the fixtures will get "flung" all over the place.

[arcticad]

In practice I don't do this as it is too time consuming.
I'll have to check out the performance issues.
I attach a plane to the underside of the ceiling and lock it and name it.
Then just place the Face Based fixture (light) to the plane at the ceiling level I need.
This way, they will move if the ceiling height does.