Can Revit Place Objects at Imported Control Points

[cburgessYUD2V]

I'm a BIM coordinator so I don't use Revit very much (although I'd like to get better), so I'm hoping someone can answer my question. 

I have a bunch of geothermal well as-built coordinates from a surveyor, and I've used Point Layout to import them into a Revit model so that I can make a rough as-built progress model. Essentially my geo wells model is a lot of 6 in. diam., 500 ft. deep vertical pipes that are roughly 18 ft apart from each other.

I believe the way Point Layout is meant to work is that I can model all of these wells (pipes) and use Point Layout to put control points at each one and add tags to see the coordinates and/or elevation. What I'm wondering is if this can work backwards, where I have all of the points first and have Revit put a pipe at each control point. In other words, I want Revit to (automatically) place objects at control points, instead of putting control points on objects. (In the image below you can see that the as-built points don't form a nice grid; in the field they had to move some slightly, or the drill was a little off, that's why I can't just run my well model through an array, which are the red marks in the mage, and call it a day.)

Any thoughts of how this might be done? 

 

 

[s.hamel · Accepted solution]

Quick answer for now, will need to circle back to this later today or next week for a more thourogh answer, but figured I'd give you something to play around with for now:

There are two abilities are potentials.

The first is on the ribbon as Connect Pts, this was added to capture  underground pipe locations and automatically connect those points by placing your pipe.  Unfortunately it is very much for Horizontal pipe runs, so not a great fit, but worth playing around with.

The second and more likely candidate is when you Import the csv, you are asked what type of location points they should be, one of the options being Nested Family, where you can pick a family that you have nested a point into, and it will place instances of that family.
The problem here is that I don't know if you can add pipe into a custom family.  But if so you could add in that 500ft vertical run, add a point at the top, save it into your project, and have it place those for you.  If not, perhaps you could get away with using some other object like a pier, just to simulate.

Thanks,

[cburgessYUD2V]

The idea of using nested points sounds promising, I'll play around with that and see if that will do what I want. If it turns out that it won't let me use pipe, it can certainly be something else since this can be a fairly rough model.  

I appreciate your input!

[cburgessYUD2V]

So I created a new family just making a vertical extrusion 500ft long, and used "Add Points>Manual" to put a control point on the top, and that worked like a charm. Thank you for telling me about using Nested Family--I don't think I would have found that on my own, and that did exactly what I needed! 1,000+ wells all at the individual elevations and coordinates provided by the surveyor!

I have a follow-up that relates to using the "Connect Pts" tool that you mentioned. That actually does the next thing I need to do, which is put in the lateral piping that connects the wells. The tricky bit is I want to have parallel pipes going to the top of each well (see my screenshot):

You gave me the idea of making a family that contains a point, and since I don't have coordinates for those pipes specifically (only for the tops of the wells), I made a family of a double pipe with a point in the middle:

This is again just an extrusion made with the Generic Model Family category, but I saved the Type Name as "Double Pipe." The trouble is, when I go through the "Connect Pts" windows it asks what items it should connect with, and gives the choices Walls, Conduit, Pipe, Model Lines, FlexDuct, FelxPipe, or Cable Tray. But after selecting Pipes my double pipe doesn't appear in the list of Types I can choose. This is probably less of a Point Layout-specific question than it is a basic Revit modeling question, but what should I do to make that Family part of "Pipes?" 

[cburgessYUD2V]

Update: I've figured a stop-gap solution: I duplicated and renamed the "Default" pipe type to "Geo Laterals-S" and "...-R," and used "Connect Pts" normally two times (one for -S, one for -R). Then I just manually moved them 3" north/south as needed (by hiding the wells & control points and mass-selecting the whole line and using "Move").
This works but has more steps than I'd like ideally, so if you have any thoughts about my Part 2 question above I'd appreciate it!

[s.hamel]

The reason that connect points is limited to those kinds of items, is that the Revit API contains the logic for drawing instances of them properly from point a to point b (or in the case of FlexPipe/Duct point a/b/c/d/etc), but it would not for a custom family regardless of whether that family contained pipe in them.  So I think your solution is going to have to work for this.
You could get really inventive and maybe do something like:

Import all your well points a 2nd time with your custom family, alter it to have the 2 offset points, it use the families insertion pt, so doesn't care where those points are.

Then Use Connect points to connect each of those sets of points with model lines.

Delete all those instances of your custom family

And then I believe there is a built in way for Revit to draw pipes based off Model lines.

Thanks,

[cburgessYUD2V]

Oh, I see now why it won't show a custom family. I'll play around with importing the points a second and third time and trying various offsets like you suggest. I appreciate your help and explanation!