Exploring Pre-made Mechanical Equipment Families in VDCF Video Course

Welcome back to the VDCF video course content for MEP Mechanical. In the previous video we went ahead and loaded in some families that we're going to kind of take a peek at now. Now these families have been downloaded from a manufacturer so they are pre-made content.

We did not make them ourselves but we will get into making a family ourself. Where these are located is going to be in your project browser under families and under mechanical equipment. You have the HC air conditioner indoor unit which this is the unit that would actually go inside the electrical room and then we have a heat pump unit which that will go outside on the roof somewhere.

If you expand this out so let me let me kind of back up here for a second. If I expand out my families this is a listing of all families in my project at that current time. I can go to the category and this is grouped by categories for the most part.

You can see annotation symbols here this is kind of a grip of different items you have your different tags here your title blocks those kind of things but where we want to go and go is go to the mechanical equipment. So I'm going to click on the little plus sign and expand that out and these are all of the mechanical equipment families that are loaded into the project. I'm going to go to this HC air conditioner indoor unit and if I expand that out these are all the types within that single family.

So these are most likely going model numbers for the different types of those of those units that they make. Typically with mechanical equipment it's relating to the size of the unit what it can output and then if I go to like my HC heat pump here they only make one version of that. So what I want to go ahead and do real quickly though is we are going to edit this family and we're not going to change anything but we're going to take a look at it.

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So I'm going to go ahead and do a right click on the family name and I'm sorry renaming it there but I want to go ahead hit edit. What that's going to do is it's going to open up this view. So based on this view you can kind of tell a couple of different things.

First of all there's a lot of detail here. Second of all it is a face hosted element. I can tell by looking up here at the top in my in my properties palette that host is face and it has some other items here.

Omni class number all those kind of things. If I orbit around you can see it's a pretty detailed model it's a good representation of what is there right. So it even has Mitsubishi Heavy Industries which is the logo there and then this is actually another nested family.

So a lot of times manufacturers will do this they'll do families within families within families which is a good practice for some things but sometimes it can go a little bit too deep. But if I go ahead I'm going to go to like the floor plan and look at this. So a lot of times there's that.

I can see I have the different connectors along the back. Let me go back to the 3D here. So you can see I have a few of these items.

So I have these different connectors on the sides of it. These are the different supply lines in for the refrigerant and returns out and then also going to be the condensate connection. So they've obviously modeled this and what the how they've done this if they've modeled this portion in a different in a different area loaded this as a nested family in and then brought it in.

So let's take a look at the parameters here. So family types I'm gonna look at the parameters. So you can see I have a ton of different parameters here.

I have my materials. I have electrical and those items that I can fill out. We have different dimensions.

Now you may notice that this is in millimeters. So this is one of those things that you have to be aware of when you're downloading manufacturer content is sometimes it may not necessarily be in your units for your project. You know traditionally in the United States we're utilizing the imperial system not the metric system.

So it's kind of different. We'll talk about we'll look at how do we make sure that this is correct. Everything here is good.

So just different mechanical loads IFCs some visibility I can set clearances on if I want them if I need them if I want to have the service space on and we'll look at it how it works in the project. And then you'll see all of these different other parameters here that are a lot of different items that are and the ones that are grayed out are populated by these formulas. These formulas can get fairly complicated.

So what it's saying is that if you know if my clearance is less than 15 it's going to default to 15 millimeters. That is the minimum clearance that I can have. So a lot of times the manufacturers will build in tolerances or build in their design into the family which can be good and it can also be bad because I've seen it happen like with like a door.

I want the door to go 12 feet. I'm going to get that door custom made but the family limits me to 10 feet. So that's just one example sometimes.

But these are all governed by the formula so you wouldn't be able to fill out these and from this information if I scroll down to identity data there'll be a lot of stuff here like the article description. This is a parameter that they've populated and created base family version. Let's see who is it made by who is the manufacturer again this is locked into a formula so if you wanted this to say hey I still want this to say Mitsubishi Heavy Industries but I want it to be in all caps you'd have to come in here and edit this if that makes sense.

Revit version so on and so forth some of the urls things like and these parameters do add file size so I have seen some offices they'll go through and they'll clean this out before using it to just remove parameters that they're not going to normally use but we're not going to worry about today. So you can see that I have the different types listed here there we go. I'm going to go close this and then I'm actually going to open up this family and let's go ahead and take a look at the nested family here.

If I go edit family you can see now I'm actually into where the extrusion is and everything so you can see even like this little piece of this text this is an actual extrusion here and so what they've done is they've modeled everything here and then they bring that in to this family they populated the connectors and some other data and information and then went ahead and had that for use. The reason why they do this nested setting parameters so a lot of the parameters of like the size of this element if I go like the reference plan reference plan and everything let's take a look through this sometimes the parameters are in different locations and they may have turned them off let's take a peek here let's see I saw some here on the right so you can see I have that so let's go to a view let's take a look at our vv here annotation yeah they haven't done too much so it seems like they didn't really build this family with a whole lot of flexibility because again their system is their system and this unit has its size and everything it's not really like a door or window where it's in the sense like oh I can have a three foot wide door or two foot ten wide door or a three foot two or four foot wide door this unit comes as this size so they've decided that hey they made the decision we're not going to build in any parameters into this so and that's perfectly fine let's see what parameters we have here so we kind of have the same listing and what they've done is they'll map those over to the other but hit okay so again this is where everything is modeled and this is what is called a nested family I'm going to go ahead because families will tend to open up a lot of windows I'm going to go ahead and close inactive views I still have my project open I have the geometry of this family open and then I have the actual family here so I'm going to go ahead and close this out we don't need to do anything there if it asks you to save just hit no cancel out of it we're not going to worry about it we'll take you just taking a look at this family so we've looked at this family we've taken the time to kind of get acquainted with it's a pretty simple pretty straightforward family nothing crazy luckily this one's not too super crazy with its geometry sometimes having a lot of items like this that you see here on the top this is probably like a air intake or something similar I'm not exactly sure but having a lot of these types of elements they could add to the file size when in reality they don't add anything to our 3D model really all I need is just this box and the clearances associated with it for what I need for my tagging purposes in the design phase this is what I would call probably closer to an LOD 400 or 500 an LOD stands for level of detail traditionally sometimes a lot in the in the design phase you'll only get to maybe an LOD of 200 or 300 where this could just be represented by a generic box but using this family may prove beneficial in the long run because it's already built it's a faster way for us to go ahead and do it and it has all the manufactured data appended I'm going to go ahead and close this and I'm not going to save any changes so go ahead and just hit no I'm going to go ahead and save my project though if you get that okay I'm going to stop this video here when we come back we'll finish this up and get into the families see you then