Enhance your understanding of adjusting ducts and working with hosted elements in 3D modeling software. This article offers a thorough walkthrough of how to manipulate, align, and host elements in a complex 3D model, with emphasis on the techniques to avoid clashes and maintain the integrity of the model.
Key Insights
- The article underscores the importance of adjusting ducts properly to avoid clashes, explaining the process of pulling back elements from underneath other components, deleting and redrawing flex ducts when necessary, and performing a balancing act to achieve the correct arrangement of parts.
- It discusses how to work with hosted elements, with an emphasis on the importance of re-hosting copied elements to the correct ceiling or surface. The article also highlights that while this can be a tedious process, it is faster than placing registers individually all over again.
- The content provides valuable tips regarding 3D modeling practices, such as the usefulness of switching to wireframe view for better flexibility when working with mechanical elements, and the importance of patience when working with software like Revit, which sometimes needs time to calculate and process changes.
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So you can see we have a few different things here. Now why you're starting to see some of the dashed lines is because these guys are underneath. So I know that I need to adjust some of these because I have some clashes here.
So I'm just going to grab these and pull them back out from underneath the duct. And we'll let the flex kind of do that. I'm going to pull this back also so that it's not running into my big drop here.
Let's see here, we have a couple of other clashes I think that were going on here. So I'm going to go ahead and drag some of these back. And we can always tighten this up.
I could drag this entire VAV back if I wanted to, bring it back so that then I can get these guys coming from this side. Now if you want to make this so it's not so tight, and you drag this like this, the flex duct won't stay with it; you'll have to adjust the flex also. And sometimes it's easier just to delete the flex and then redraw the flex.
Sometimes the connectors are somewhat unstable. I'm going to bring this down here. Bring this guy down.
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And we're kind of getting long on the flex on this one here. But we may want to go ahead and redo that. So I'm going to go ahead, draw duct, come here, bring it over, and then draw flex again.
Sometimes you just need to do these little changes. So it's not letting me select that. Hidden line works great for documentation purposes.
But sometimes when working with mechanical, I really like to switch it to wireframe because I feel it gives me more flexibility. So come down to here. Again, I'm going to remake these flexes just because they're getting a little long.
Draw duct, I know that's a clash right there. But what I'm going to end up doing is I'm going to pull this guy farther down. So that then I can get this guy out here.
There we go. Flex, boom, come down. We're going to do the little piece off here.
Bring that back, bring this guy down again. Bring it back a little more. Again, it's just a balancing act, draw flex duct.
And there we go. I'm also going to make sure I bring this guy back so that I don't have any issues there. Awesome.
We've populated our second floor. Now one caveat to this, it's kind of a reason why sometimes people do not use hosted elements. If I select one of these diffusers, you'll notice that it's not linked directly to the actual Revit model; the elevation from the linked Revit model is technically the host, but it's really not reading it per se.
What you can go ahead and do is I could select these air terminals in this room, and I can go pick new. And then what I can do is I can go ahead and pick on that ceiling again. And now when I select this, notice the scheduled Level 2 elevation from level is nine feet.
I'm actually also going to turn off, under VV, my roofs category, because that's what I'm seeing above. Make sure to hit OK, apply.
I just hid the surface patterns for the roof. And then I can do the same thing here. You kind of have to do this on a per-room basis, though.
So it kind of gets the center there, pick—perfect, because you're picking the ceiling you're hosting to, right? So I want to host these four to this ceiling; I don't want to host these eight to this ceiling. So you have to kind of go room by room.
There you go, it should give you a little snap to go through and do it. I'm just going to go ahead here, pick new. And I'm just re-hosting these to the proper ceiling.
Since I copied them off of the other ceilings, I need to re-host them. Pick. There we go.
Pick new, and I just work my way around. It gets a little tedious, but go ahead and work through it. But it is faster than placing all of the registers individually all over again.
Sometimes you may not necessarily get the snap. Unfortunately, I would just get it as close as you can and then go back and align it later. So I'm going to go ahead and align, align, align. I want to align up and down also.
Bottom here, I think I got this one pretty close, but don't want to trust it. Keep going around here. I'm going to grab these.
Pick new. Again, it didn't want to snap for some reason. Go through and align those later.
Pick these air terminals. Pick new. And Revit is just kind of trying to calculate where I'm putting stuff.
That one wanted to snap. So Revit is sometimes picky with the snaps. Pick new.
There we are. The last one here. Pick new.
So that's just one of the caveats of hosted elements—that sometimes when you copy it around, it's not always going to host automatically. On this one, I need to go ahead and align. Did not want to snap.
There we go. And we pretty much populated our second-floor system. We're tied in properly.
Everything there is good. We've made some adjustments. We can go ahead and actually create a few more here because we need some.
So I'm going to go ahead and create a couple here. We'll do a supply diffuser here, supply diffuser here, and we'll move the return a little bit. This one's a little farther away.
Then I'll align these. There we go. I'm also going to go ahead and create similar, put a return diffuser in here.
I'm going to go ahead and create this system real quick. So I'm going to take this little—I believe it's a 10-inch duct—and we're going to go ahead and tap off.
Where do we want to tap off? We want to get all the way down to that. So this guy's coming out and down. So what we'll do, we'll come over; we'll kind of do some unusual routing this time.
There we go. I want to go ahead and create. Now this is a 45.
What I can go ahead and do actually is kind of angle this and then do that. But I need to split this so that I can make the connections. So I just split that, make the connection.
It's giving me no auto route, probably because it's too short. So let's lengthen that a little bit. Bring this guy out here.
There it goes. Delete. And there it is.
Boom. Now that we have our VAV, now I can adjust this guy back however I want. I'm going to go ahead and just take it over a little bit.
We'll take it about right there. I'm going to go ahead, grab my eight inch, tap off there, tap off there. And then I'm actually going to run this guy from that point, 45 and over.
Come over. There we go. And then draw a flex.
Sometimes Revit takes a moment to process. So just be patient with it. And there we go.
We've created our second-floor system much faster than we created the first-floor system, right? I'm going to go ahead and stop this video here. When we come back, we'll move on to the next steps. See you then.