Generic annotation not showing in mechanical equipment

[spakkala]

Does anyone know why the generic annotation does not show up in mechanical equipment? I took the electrical thermostat and changed it to a mechanical family, and loaded into my project, but the circle with the "T" inside does not show. It shows when it is an electrical family though. Confused on this one.

[hmunsell]

can you upload the family for us to look at. The linework for the symbol could have been created on a Subcategory that is turned off in your model.

[spakkala]

Here it is. I even tried making my own with a generic annotation and the same thing. The annotation would not show up in plan view.

[hmunsell]

first thing i noticed is the family is still classified as Mechanical Equipment. OOps... sorry my bad, had it in my head you were going the other way...... 🙂

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[hmunsell]

Interesting, if you place it using the "Place on Workplane" it seems to show as desired (But its not at the correct elevation). if you leave the family as Electrical category it displays correctly in a mechanical view. why do you want to change it to Mechanical Equipment?

[spakkala]

The mechanical discipline shows the thermostats where I work. So we typically just turn off the electrical devices in our mechanical views. Figured it would be easy enough to use the electrical thermostat and change it to a mechanical equipment and voila! But I see I am not the only one confused on this.

[hmunsell]

someone else can maybe verify, but i think this is an undocumented feature difference between Elec and Mech content :-),

Annotation symbols are only visible in views parallelly to there creation view. Normally when i see somthing like this happening it is because the family is made on the wrong orientation.  In cases like that, you would see the symbol in a section, but not in plan because of the orientation of the family.  But in this case, everything looks correct, I even compared it to typical electrical fixtures and there made the same way. only difference is the "Discipline" category there assigned to. 

Electrical content is typically symbolic based and viewable in Plan Views. it may be programed into Revit to allow Electrical content to function at that way but not Mechanical content.

[spakkala]

Interesting. Thanks for your help! I'll keep doing some digging.

[dmiller_SCE · Accepted solution]

An easy solution is to nest the generic annotation family into a mechanical equipment family and set the family to shared and work plane based.  Place the family in the front view of the T-stat family. Load the Family into the project, and you will get the desired result. You are experiencing normal behavior and one of the hard-coded differences between family categories as outlined by @hmunsell. I  have attached your family using the method I outlined above. Note that you will not see the annotation in the family's front view, but if you hover your mouse towards the center, you will see two invisible lines. That is the T stat annotation. 

[m_clough]

to extend this conversation:

the Mechanical Equipment - Wall Hosted type facilitates this behavior, but it can only host to walls.  It's really a bit of a shame that the walls have to exist in the project and not a link, otherwise this would be a great option