When do you use assemblies?

[Marcus.Isacsson]

Hi fellas!

I've got a short question for you, when are you supposed to use "assemblies"? 
When do you use it in your projects and how does it benefit you?

Thanks in advance!

[loboarch]

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@Sweco3600 wrote:

Hi fellas!

I've got a short question for you, when are you supposed to use "assemblies"? 

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The intention of the feature is to help with prefab construction processes. You can create an assembly of items that are going to be prefabbed and the assembly tool helps with creating shop drawings to get that work completed faster.

I can't say how people are actually using them, but that was the intended problem the functionality was trying to solve.

[Marcus.Isacsson]

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@loboarch wrote:

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@Sweco3600 wrote:

Hi fellas!

I've got a short question for you, when are you supposed to use "assemblies"? 

---

The intention of the feature is to help with prefab construction processes. You can create an assembly of items that are going to be prefabbed and the assembly tool helps with creating shop drawings to get that work completed faster.

I can't say how people are actually using them, but that was the intended problem the functionality was trying to solve.

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Thanks for your answer.
Someone mentioned using assemblies for kitchens and bathrooms. Could that be useful? I haven't used it that way but sounds interesting.

[loboarch]

Sure, those have a pretty high potential to be pre-fabbed in a shop. I would fully expect those to be uses cases.

[chrisplyler]

Cabinets and such - things that can be pre-fabbed - is a good use case. I've used them for pre-fabbing mechanical piping spools.

Another good use case is things that are repeated a lot. You might make an assembly out of some structural connection elements, or maybe a lavatory along with its drain piping out to the wall, or maybe the same set of concrete stoop/steps at several egress doors, or whatever. Detail it with the assembly drawings, and then tag that assembly everywhere it occurs in a plan view. Think of this as an easy way to detail the same repeating set of conditions. I've used this for tilt-wall panels. A rectangular building had 64 panels, but only fifteen different configurations (meaning those fifteen configurations were repeated several times each). After modeling each panel, I turned each one into an assembly, got them organized into Panel Type A, Panel Type B, Panel Type C, etc..., made a couple of sheets with an inside view of each of the fifteen types (sheets named Tilt-Up Panel Schedule/Details), and then just tagged each panel in the floor plan view.

[ToanDN]

Assemblies are powerful when you need to isolate an object or a group of objects from the context and subsequently, document them with the assembly view generation tool.  With that in mind, what you use them for is entirely up to your creativity.  I can see them can be use as Door/Window legend in lieu of the true Legend since you can tag elements on Assembly views, but not Legend views.

[lumoric]

Assemblies have tons of drawbacks... 

don't use them if you want more instances of same assembly, Revit just creates new ones without even asking if you want all of them to change accordingly, how rude...

you can draw lines in assembly views, but you can't cut, extend or trim them???  you can't change leader start position in text? crazy

[Anonymous]

I wasn't using assemblies much myself until recently. The office I am in now uses them to elevate glass walls (curtain walls). Previously I would create elevations in front of each wall for this purpose (which was a pain and difficult to manage), but this method allows us to turn the whole glass wall into an assembly, so we can then generate a view that can be put on a sheet instead. So if we move it, the view isn't affected. We do have problem with tagging the way we want, but it works. 

[Anonymous]

Hi.. if have to draw and tag repeated panel modules, would you have any suggestion of how to do it in revit? Thanks!