Explore the detailed process of placing air terminals in a Revit model, with specific instructions on hosting options, alignment, and modifying parameters. Dive into this comprehensive guide and learn to effectively manage your workflow while ensuring precision and accuracy in your model.
Key Insights
- When dealing with hosted elements in Revit, it's essential to check what you're hosting to. The options include placing on a vertical face, face, or work plane. These options don't necessarily have to be hosted to the actual Revit or linked model; they can also be created on a reference plane.
- Placement of air terminals requires careful attention to detail, especially in aligning them correctly. Using the align tool in Revit can help achieve the most accurate placements. It's also possible to use multiple align to place several elements in line with one another at once.
- Modifying parameters in the Revit model is another crucial aspect of the process. For instance, to control airflow direction, you can use instance parameters associated with the diffusers. Before placing an air terminal, you can uncheck certain parameters if you don't want to show specific elements like airflow arrows in the project.
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So I'm going to go up here to my Systems tab. I'm going to go to Air Terminal. Now, it may not pick the one that we're looking for.
We're going to look for it in this area. I'm going to go to my Supply Diffuser, Rectangular Face Round Neck Hosted. That's what I'm looking for. I want to find what we had previously—it was a 24 × 24 face with an 8-inch connection.
I'm going to go ahead and hit OK. One thing you're going to want to check when you're dealing with hosted elements: you want to see what you're hosting to. There are three different hosting options up here at the top—you have Place on Vertical Face, Place on Face, or Place on Work Plane.
You don't necessarily have to host to the actual Revit model or the linked model—you could actually create a reference plane if you wanted to and host to that. But in this instance, we're going to go ahead and use Place on Face. Make sure Place on Face is selected. And here you go.
So I can go ahead and start placing this in. Now trying to get this in here perfectly is really tough. There aren’t really any snaps to go ahead and get to that. So what I'm going to end up doing is I'm just going to place it off to the side for right now—I just want to place it on the face.
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That's all I'm worried about. So I pick, and then I'm going to go ahead and pick here. I'm going to do the same thing.
And then we'll use the Align tool to come back and get these in the right location. So let me go ahead and Escape. I'm going to go to my Modify tab up here, I'm going to go to my Align tool, which is here or AL.
And then I'm going to go ahead and select the edge that I want to align to, which is going to be the ceiling grid that's been provided by the Architect. In the linked Revit model, I can pick there, click there, pick here again, click there. And now I'm going to align it the other direction.
I’ve found over time that this is the most accurate way to get these in the correct place. It's really kind of tough until you start getting a few placed. It's really tough to get them correctly placed right off the bat.
It's just one of those things. So here’s what you're going to do—let's take a peek at this. You can see I'm hosted to the linked Revit model. Elevation from level is 9 feet. You might notice that up here, I don't have the black arrows that I have down here.
What you can go ahead and do—this is just to kind of show if the diffuser is intended to be set up a specific way—is say, hey, I only want the air blowing out of maybe three sides. This is an instance parameter associated with these. So you'll see here I have Up Arrow, Right Arrow, Left Arrow, Down Arrow. I'm just going to uncheck all of those.
They go away. Same thing here—I'm going to uncheck all of those. And they go away.
Great. So you’ve placed your first air terminals. Let’s place a couple more.
So I'm going to go over to my Systems tab, Air Terminal. Again, making sure I'm placed on face. Now before I place this, you’ll notice I still have those black arrows.
Well, in this project, I don't want to show those airflow arrows at all. Before I place it, I'm going to go ahead and uncheck those parameters while I'm placing and before I place. So I can go ahead and do that. Now I'm going to go ahead and go here.
Now notice that since I have one placed, it’ll start to align to that one. So I'm going to go ahead and just kind of pick. I can go ahead—I'm going to be aligning it later. Hit Escape to cancel out. I'm going to hit AL for Align—pick there, pick there, pick there, pick there. And there we go.
We’ve completed one room. Let's move on to the next room. And really what people tend to do is they go through and do all their supplies, then come back and do all their returns, then come back and do all their exhaust.
You kind of move on a system-by-system basis. It kind of helps keep things straight in your head. So I'm going to go to my Air Terminal and let's place a few more. Make sure I'm placed on face.
Notice this time, since I changed this parameter the last time I placed one, it's already done. So I can go ahead—it’s going to want to align to that. But again, it doesn’t align perfectly.
So I'm just going to go and pick. I'm just going to kind of get them in here. I know I want four, and I'm going to do a couple of rooms now. We’re going to speed this up a little bit.
So I'm going to go here. Let’s go. Let’s compare it to the other side.
So it looks like this still only has two. We’re going to possibly add an extra one here because this is a slightly larger room. We’re changing this layout just a little bit.
There we go. And again, I'm not going to worry about everything being in the correct place currently. So I'm going to go ahead—pick here, pick here, pick here, pick here.
I'm not worrying about them being in the right place—we’ll move them into place. It's part of the task. One thing that I like to stress to people when they get into Revit and everything is that just placing it—you’re not done.
You’ve got to get it in the right spot. That’s part of Revit. I'm going to go here and here and here.
Let’s go here and here and here. Great. Now I’ve placed all these rooms. When I want to get all of these aligned—
I'm going to go here to my Modify tab. I'm going to go here to Align. Now one thing I'm going to do is I'm going to use Multiple Alignment here.
So the nice thing is, I can do Multiple Align. And what this allows me to do is I can pick this one edge, and notice that it is consistent all the way through the rooms—I can just go down the line and pick all of those diffusers to get them in line with one another.
Perfect. Click off. Make sure you click off because when you’re doing the multiple, it wants to continue to keep that reference.
You’ve got to click off, and then I'm going to choose a new reference—pick here, pick here and here—and make sure that those are good. Then I click off, pick here, here and here, click off.
I'm going to pick here, here and here. So those ones tend to line up. What I'm also going to go ahead and do is I'm going to align to this bottom edge.
If I click here, I can go all the way down this line—pick, pick, pick, pick—and just work my way down. Now, if you accidentally click off or something like that—let’s actually click off—you just repick the same spot. It's not a big deal.
Easy to take care of. Work my way all the way down, and we already have that. So I'm going to click off to reset my align.
Then I'm just going to work my way through. I'm just aligning all of these terminals. It may take some time.
It may seem like it's kind of repetitive. But when you’re hosting, you want to make sure that you’re picking the correct host. That’s why we want to do these this way.
So I just work my way down all these classrooms—pick, pick, pick. And I'm just going to keep working now until I get them all in place. And there we go.
Let’s go ahead and make sure we save our file. And there we are. We’ve placed those air terminals.
Great job. What I want to go ahead and do now is I'm going to go ahead and do the same on the other side. So take some time—go ahead and do this.
And I'm going to move a little quicker here. If you need to pause the video, go ahead and pause it. So—Place on Face.
And I'm just going to kind of match what I have going on here. So I'm going to go here and here, there and there. And here, just keep working your way down.
And again, I'm just going to run through—here and here. And you’ll notice that they kind of snap to one another. I'm not too worried about the snapping.
I'm going to go use my Align tool. Again, notice that I still have Multiple Alignment selected. OK, I'm just going to work my way down.
I picked X on the wrong edge. That’s OK. It’s OK.
It's not going to break anything. It's not going to hurt anything. I'm going to click off to reset my align.
Pick there—go there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there. And we just got to work our way back down. Now aligning them left to right.
Reset. Boom, boom, reset. Pick, pick, reset.
Pick, pick, reset. Pick, pick, reset. And just work my way down.
It seems like it might be kind of repetitive. Make sure you’re getting the right alignment. I accidentally misclicked there and got the wrong alignment face.
Boom, boom, boom, boom. And there we go. We’ve placed a whole bunch of supply.
Let’s go ahead and save. I'm going to pause this video here, and we’ll see you in the next one.