Plant 3D or Revit ?

[LyleHardin]

I'm asking this in both the Revit and Plant 3D forums because I'm thinking I may get some biased answers if I just stuck to one forum...

We provide full service engineering for heavy industry. Our work consists largely of adding to existing structures. We seldom do green field work.

We deal with power plants and other large facilities, removing and adding equipment as well as structural steel, piping, electrical. etc.

We need to move on from plain AutoCAD. Even with 3D AutoCAD, things are just too complex. Revit and Plant 3D certainly have features that can make our lives easier. But which should we choose?

Should we move forward with Plant 3D or Revit? I'm sure it's not an easy question to answer due to pros and cons of both.

Thanks for any input.

[jabowabo]

What are your deliverables? If you need to generate isometrics, how will you do that with Revit?

[dgorsman]

If the clients want a model, will they be OK with a Revit model or are they expecting *everything* to be DWG?  What do they provide in the way of models and drawings?  Are they expecting you to coordinate models with other software like OpenPlant, PDMS, or SmartPlant?

If you need to go down to a fabrication-level of detailing structural work you may need to look at Advance Steel either way.  The structural capabilities of Plant3D are limited, mostly something to provide a starting point for the "real" structural designers.

[dave.wolfe]

To me it comes down to 2 features for the piping aspects of the platform selection:

1. Spec Driven - only plant 3d can do piping specs.

2. Isometrics - only plant 3d can do isos.

As noted above, yes deliverables, and other features matter and have an impact, but if you are looking at just functionality, I think the items I note are the key differences.

[dgorsman]

Between more support for PCF in Revit and a variety of 3D viewing systems, I think requirements for the traditional "piping isometric drawing" are less than they used to be.  Maybe not yet to the point of being optional, but more so in situations with limited piping (like power plants). 

For example if Revit can produce a reasonable PCF output along with a Navisworks (or other) model those can be sent to a fabricator who is likely to redraw the iso with ACORN, SPOOLGEN, or similar software anyways for their own material controls.

[Bernd.Gerstenberger]

Hi,

if you cannot decide you can look for AEC collection of Autodesk. In this collection you will find Plant 3D, Revit and also Navisworks to bring all data together (Revit and Plant data).

Regards

[LyleHardin]

Thanks for the responses everyone.

We typically do rehab, so we seldom, if ever, make P&ID or Isometric drawings. We reroute or abandon what is already there.

Our main deliverables are usually Construction Documents in PDF form but we do provide AutoCAD dwgs at the end of the project.

The AutoCAD export from Revit works well enough for these AutoCAD deliverables.

We have 'converted' to the AEC collections and I'm pretty excited about that as we'll 'have it all' then.

I'm pushing to move to Revit but I have dabbled with plant 3D and was pleased with how easy it was to model pipe runs with it. Much more so than Revit. At least with my limited experience with both systems.

When it comes to everything else, however, I think Revit wins.

Sounds like I've made up my mind, but I always try to keep my options open and remain open minded.

[johan.degreef]

@LyleHardin 

Hello Hardin,

I was wondering if you are still using Revit for doing plant design? We are looking into Plant 3d, and comming from doing it all in Inventor.

How do you P&ID's

How do you have shop drawing for pipe routing? Do you have a plan (iso?) per piperun?

What about complexer pumpskids with flowmeters, and PS, PT, PI indictors and transmitters?

Is it still worth learning and setting up Plant 3d or...?

many thanks, Johan

[LyleHardin]

We are using Revit because most of our work is structural and mechanical.

Most of our P&ID work is editing existing (old) AutoCAD dwgs from the client.

If you are designing plants from scratch and do a lot of piping, and the resulting P&IDs I'd have to recommend Plant 3D with sufficient training. Did I mention training? You'll need training. Plant 3D makes it super easy to add pipes, even without training, but if you want to do it right so all the piping and instruments are connected with P&IDs then training will be a must. It's a pretty slick system if used properly. We, admittingly, have never used it to keep the connection of pipes and P&IDs, so I can't really help you there. I've dabbled with it enough to be impressed with it, but it's just not the right tool for us. Revit works better for what we do; concrete, steel, equipment, and dust collection.

[johan.degreef]

This is a fairly recent video on how it should all work together, but if you see at the graphic performance... sorry, but I don't want to wwork that way... Piping specs available or not.

Better do it all in Revit or just stay in Inventor for me

https://youtu.be/22WOnPUWRW0?t=1609

This is even worse:

https://youtu.be/22WOnPUWRW0?t=2938