Hard Duct Down to Diffuser

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone, 

I am back again with another graphical problem, one that I am pretty sure is a bug, but wanted to see if anyone else had had the same problem. For clarification, I am on the latest release of Revit 2016 MEP. 

I have a diffuser underneath a duct, a few feet down, and there is hard duct coming out of the diffuser and connecting to the duct on the bottom. Pretty standard and extremely common condition. Below are three pictures, 1 the section view, 2 the plan view, and 3 the printed view of the plan view. As you can see, the diffuser has hidden and broken lines on the inside of the duct over it, but not on the outside, despite the fact that it is under that duct. Problem 1: Revit will not break/outside gap the lines in the model or in print view for things connected below. That diffuser should have a gap between the edge of the duct and itself, like the pictures later on. This is a huge problem, and it's consistency in application says that this was intentional, which is unacceptable for a program that wants engineers to use it. The printing view brings up another problem: Problem 2: What you see IS NOT what you get. Look at pictures 2 and 3, they are not the same. The cross lines from the diffuser are not broken at all, and the tap shows up clear as day, despite not showing up in plan view. The fact that I have to print something every 5 minutes to make sure items are showing up correctly is not good. 

Moving on, here are two more pictures. This time I hid the tap under the duct manually, through the use of "Hide in View > Elements". Picture 1 is the plan view, picture 2 is what happens if I print. It appears to me in the first picture (in Revit) that this could be a temporary solution for no line breaks on a duct, but then I print it and there is nothing broken. Absolutely nothing. Problem 3: What you see IS NOT what you get. It is dangerously the opposite. I have wasted time thinking that I have a good looking plan but when I go to print, this is what happens. Imagine an entire plan filled with diffusers under ducts that look like that, no broken lines, no nothing. It's a crappy looking plan and it reflects poorly on our firm.

Next, we have the deletion of the tap and therefore disconnection of the vertical duct from the branch. The duct is connected to the diffuser, but is not connected to the horizontal branch duct. It appears much better, but you can still see that the duct crossing lines appear on the print but not the view. I would be fine with this, except if all I'm doing is just making something look good for printing, what am I using Revit for? This presents me with two options. 1) Have a connected, accurate model, or 2) Have accurately printing sheets.  

I really, really, really hope that I'm missing a setting or something that will fix all of this. If someone would be able to prove me wrong, I would love it. But several of us here have poured through every dark corner of every tab and found that this is consistently happening. It happens in our own templates, it happens in the default out of the box Revit template, it happens with Revit diffusers, our diffusers. It happens when a duct goes under another duct and turns up to connect as well. The behavior is definitely deliberate and I just don't understand why. 

Update: My colleague just found out that in 2017, the tap no longer shows up underneath the duct, which is a good thing, but the other problems still persist.

[kadmonkee]

trying to recreate your scenario

My settings are as follows

Level Of Detail = Medium + Hidden Lines in all views

the <Beyond> Line Pattern is set to Hidden so using Draw MEP Hidden Lines should display 

Note the view names

1 Floor Plan 

1 Ceiling Plan

2 Sections

the result varies based on view type 

as far as printing goes not sure what you use to create PDFs so your settings will vary.

not sure if this helps but another place to look is in your System Types for Graphic overrides

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply. 

Those are the same settings I'm using. Maybe a different lineweight on the ductwork, but what you have is just about what I'm looking at. I've checked graphic overrides and object styles and filters and everything else to no avail. What you are seeing is what I'm experiencing.

My first issue is that when I use vector printing, the line type MEP Hidden doesn't appear the same way it is in the view, so despite the fact that it looks one way in the view, it doesn't appear that way for the print. You can see on the comparison pictures I posted that when I print, there is no inside gap despite there appearing one on the view inside Revit.

When I use raster printing, it looks a lot closer to what I'm looking for, but it isn't scalable, so zooming in produces some pretty pixelated items. 

My second issue is that if the diffuser is connected underneath the duct by a hard duct the lines are not broken/gapped on the outside of the duct. As you can see, as long as the duct is connected there is no line gap. (I've tested this with flex duct, flex duct actually behaves properly, breaking the lines on the outside.) But hard duct connections are very common and shouldn't be causing a pretty fundamental graphical difference like this. 

[Anonymous]

I'm going to bump this up again. I still would like to hear why this is happening.

[RobDraw · Accepted solution]

Revit has a hard time with the graphics for this, and similar situations. I like my hidden lines to have a much thinner lineweight and that doesn't get applied, despite having it set correctly, to any duct dropping down from a main. I can even see the graphics change, i.e. lines disappear and reappear, depending on zoom level.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply. I will probably accept it as the answer, but I don't like it. 

To me, things like this are what is causing Revit to not be used as much as it probably could be, especially in engineering applications. We can't put out crappy looking plans like this, and if there's no way to change it, then we can't use Revit. The plans are still what gets delivered, and if Revit doesn't make those appear correctly, or at least let us change it to make them appear correctly, then we can't use it to generate plans. I mean, just look at what you said, you like those lines to appear thinner, but you can't change that either. Why can't we change this stuff? That's really what I'm trying to drive at here. This problem I have is a microcosm of the Revit for engineers problem and why so many engineers won't use Revit or are having to drastically change what they do just to use Revit.

I am afraid, with all the attention paid to contractors now with 2018 and Fabrication and what not, that Autodesk is going to market Revit to the Contractors, they've already won the Architects, and just force engineers to use it by default by selling it to either end of their workflow. 

[RobDraw]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Thanks for the reply. I will probably accept it as the answer, but I don't like it. 

To me, things like this are what is causing Revit to not be used as much as it probably could be, especially in engineering applications. We can't put out crappy looking plans like this, and if there's no way to change it, then we can't use Revit. The plans are still what gets delivered, and if Revit doesn't make those appear correctly, or at least let us change it to make them appear correctly, then we can't use it to generate plans. I mean, just look at what you said, you like those lines to appear thinner, but you can't change that either. Why can't we change this stuff? That's really what I'm trying to drive at here. This problem I have is a microcosm of the Revit for engineers problem and why so many engineers won't use Revit or are having to drastically change what they do just to use Revit.

I am afraid, with all the attention paid to contractors now with 2018 and Fabrication and what not, that Autodesk is going to market Revit to the Contractors, they've already won the Architects, and just force engineers to use it by default by selling it to either end of their workflow. 

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Wow, a bit over the top, I would say.

I think we all know that Revit graphics falls a little short of the line. Engineers are not the only ones. Architects have to cheat with linework all the time. In this case, all I have to do is override by element where the MEP hidden line settings don't get applied.

[Anonymous]

I'm fine with cheating, I do that all the time. Overriding things is necessary and I'm glad that Autodesk includes as many workarounds as they do. But in this case, you would have to cheat with 2 masking regions per diffuser. That's excessive. My problem isn't that everything isn't perfect out of the box, obviously that's unrealistic. My problem arises in those areas where adjustments are either impossible or unrealistically time consuming.

I know my topics and responses may seem "a bit over the top", but Autodesk knows they have a good product based on their sales numbers. The forums are for helping people out and for pushing on Autodesk to improve. If this is the program of the future, then it needs to be able to be that program. I will always be thankful that Autodesk includes stuff for workarounds, and will simultaneously call on Autodesk to fix things that need to be fixed. 

[RobDraw]

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@Anonymous wrote:

But in this case, you would have to cheat with 2 masking regions per diffuser.

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I don't think that is necessary.

Can you post a screen shot of your hidden line gap settings?

I also don't understand why in one of your examples the print does not appear the same as the view.

Can you post a sample project that exhibits that behavior?

All that I do in that situation is override the lineweight for the objects that don't get thinner.

[Anonymous]

Here are the settings. Also, the view vs. printing issue happens in our own modified template files and the out-of-the-box settings as well.