topic Converting Plant 3D Pipe Specs to Revit MEP in Revit MEP Forum

Converting Plant 3D Pipe Specs to Revit MEP

viet_protocad — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 21:03:09 GMT

Were trying to make the jump over to Revit MEP but the issue is that we've invested many hours building hundreds upon hundreds of custom parts to use in our Plant 3D catalog.

Is there a way to convert a plant3d catalog into a Revit part family, or will we have to bite the bullet and rebuild these valves?

A few points:

1) standard specs (PVC, Carbon Steel, etc) might already be available from the manufacturers but sometimes the parts arent 100% accurate. Is it easy to adjust a random valve if its too long/short from the manufacturer/

2) one of the things i liked (and hated) about P3D was the spec editor where you could make dozens of custom fittings in a relatively quick fashion. Is there something similiar for revit where I can get create an entire pipe catalog by entering a bunch of parametric dimensional data?

3) we're investigating Fabrication CADMep as a go-between between plant parts and Revit Families, but I've read mixed reviews about using fabrication parts in Revit. What is the Revit community's consensus?

thanks in advance!

viet

Re: Converting Plant 3D Pipe Specs to Revit MEP

L.Maas — Wed, 04 Jul 2018 07:12:31 GMT

The best way forward should be to rebuild your families. Most of the time native families work best.

Creating them yourselves means that you ae in control. If you are doing it right you will get consistency between the families (e.g. same linetypes, same parameters). This will result in a a consistent look of your project. It also will help with filtering/scheduling your objects. When using families from different sources assembling your views and schedules can become a nightmare. Families from other sources can be a good to study to get an idea how to construct your own. Editing families form other sources might be possible. Normally you will have to studu them to see how they were constructed. When you are getting experience in Revit family creation making your own families will often be as fast as editing someone else his families.

Depending on how you build your families you can make many variations of the same object. If you set up the family with different parameters, this will allow you to create different types by entering values for these parameters. You will have to decide how complex to make those families. You can make them relatively light (e.g an elbow with some variations in length, radius, angle) or make them like superfamilies (e.g fitting of elbow, tee and cross within a single family). Most people tend to make relative light families.

Re: Converting Plant 3D Pipe Specs to Revit MEP

viet_protocad — Wed, 04 Jul 2018 16:10:15 GMT

yeah, that's exactly the answer I was afraid of, haha. the painful thing is the years of investment in our ACAD based blocks.

I know that there's a "link to CAD" functionality in Revit and a P3D/Revit workflow documented by AutoDesk but for us it seems like a band-aid solution as more and more projects migrate to Revit MEP.

Re: Converting Plant 3D Pipe Specs to Revit MEP

viet_protocad — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 00:31:16 GMT

Just as a follow up (and after a lot of spinning of my wheels), i've come around to the conclusion that you have been right all along, haha.

What we're probably going to do is build a few basic parametric fittings and valves, (basic SW elbow, tee, ball valve, etc), then translate all our dimensions and populate all of our specs over to Revit.

I knew we had to rebuild our fittings anyways (since most of our fittings are from Plant 3D), but it seems to make the most sense to do everything else parametrically too. (and not try to mess with Fabrication Parts as they are very cumbersome and aren't perfect either).

I'm learning a lot from the pros.

thanks!

Re: Converting Plant 3D Pipe Specs to Revit MEP

viet_protocad — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 22:57:36 GMT

After lots of head scratching and frustration, I found a way to export all my parametric fittings from Plant3D into an excel spreadsheet! With a couple tweaks to the export, I can convert the spreadsheet into a lookup table and then simply reverse engineer my parameters in revit to find all those same dimensions.

Plant3D 2019 specifically lets me export with dimensions (though I think an add on can extend the same functionality to 2018)

As for valves (eg. ball and butterfly), its easy enough to get the out the box parts and change the length to fit whatever body/handle length i need to meet manufacturer specs.

Re: Converting Plant 3D Pipe Specs to Revit MEP

KREENDURRON — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 16:53:24 GMT

Just wondering how this transition has been for you? What are you doing for your Isometric Drawings now that you've moved to Revit? I've found a macro that exports selected objects in revit to a pcf file that you can run in plant3D, are you doing something similar?

Re: Converting Plant 3D Pipe Specs to Revit MEP

rbarbosa8DQGJ — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 12:06:50 GMT

How to export specs to that spread sheet of Excel that you mentioned? Could you make a step by step procedure?

Re: Converting Plant 3D Pipe Specs to Revit MEP

PSS-PDI_VNguyen — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 15:26:34 GMT

the functionality is already built into the spec editor to export to excel --its pretty easy!

As for the other question, no, we haven't transitioned to Revit Completely yet 😞 Its been a few years since I've had to deal with revit and the current project i'm working on now uses P3D.

Anywho, here's the "howto" to export to excel

Re: Converting Plant 3D Pipe Specs to Revit MEP

rbarbosa8DQGJ — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 16:14:47 GMT

Try to use Fabrication Parts to use specs in Revit. There are many parts already modeled in there.

Re: Converting Plant 3D Pipe Specs to Revit MEP

rbarbosa8DQGJ — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 12:47:17 GMT

Vote for this!

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fabrication-ideas/use-fabrication-cad-mep-to-integrate-revit-plant3d-and-autocad/idi-p/9750085