Discover how to delve into pre-made content in the MEP Mechanical course from VDCI, including understanding how to locate, edit, and analyze families within a project. Learn how to navigate pre-built units from manufacturers and how to adapt them for your specific needs.
Key Insights
- The course provides a comprehensive guide on locating and editing pre-made families in the project browser. These families, usually downloaded from manufacturers, can be found under mechanical equipment and may include units like air conditioners and heat pumps.
- Emphasis is placed on understanding the details and parameters of these units. These may include materials, electrical details, dimensions, mechanical loads, and more. It's crucial to check the units of measurement as they may differ from the project's standard units.
- The course emphasizes the importance of understanding nested families, how manufacturers build in design tolerances into families, and how to adjust them if necessary. It also discusses how to manage file sizes and the relevance of Level of Detail (LOD) in the design phase.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
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 ourselves. 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 is the unit that would actually go inside the electrical room, and then we have a heat pump unit, which will go outside on the roof somewhere.
If you expand this out—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 these are grouped by categories for the most part.
You can see Annotation Symbols here. This is kind of a group of different items. You have your different tags here, your title blocks, those kinds of things. But where we want to go is 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 to be model numbers for the different types 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 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 edit this family. We're not going to change anything, but we are 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. I'm sorry, renaming it there, but I want to go ahead and hit Edit. What that's going to do is open up this view. 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 properties palette that Host is Face, and it has some other items here.
OmniClass number, all those kinds 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 this is actually a nested family.
A lot of times manufacturers will do this—they’ll create 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 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.
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 the condensate connection. So they've obviously modeled this, and how they've done this is they've modeled this portion 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 going to look at the parameters. 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 you have to be aware of when you're downloading manufacturer content—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 to 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 how it works in the project. Then you'll see all of these different other parameters here that are a lot of different items. 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 my clearance is less than 15, it's going to default to 15 millimeters. That is the minimum clearance that I can have. A lot of times, manufacturers will build in tolerances or build in their design into the family, which can be good—and it can also be bad. I've seen it happen, like with 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. From this information, if I scroll down to Identity Data, there will 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 it is made by, who the manufacturer is. 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 and things like that. These parameters do add file size, so I have seen some offices go through and clean this out before using it, to remove parameters that they're not going to normally use. But we're not going to worry about that today. So you can see that I have the different types listed here. There we go. I'm going to close this, and then I'm actually going to open up this family. 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. You can see even this little piece of text—this is an actual extrusion here. So what they've done is modeled everything here, and then brought that into this family. They populated the connectors and some other data and information, and then went ahead and prepared that for use. The reason why they do this nested setting is so a lot of the parameters—like the size of this element—can be managed. If I go to the 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. I saw some here on the right, so you can see I have that. 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 you could have a three-foot-wide door, a two-foot-ten-wide door, a three-foot-two, or a four-foot-wide door. This unit comes in this size, so they've decided not to build in any parameters—and that's perfectly fine. Let's see what parameters we have here. We kind of have the same listing, and what they've done is map those over to the other. But hit OK. So again, this is where everything is modeled, and this is what is called a nested family. I'm going to go ahead and close inactive views because families will tend to open up a lot of windows. 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 or cancel out of it. We're not going to worry about it. We were just taking a look at this family. We've looked at this family. We've taken the time to get acquainted with it. It's a pretty simple, 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 an air intake or something similar, I'm not exactly sure—but having a lot of these types of elements 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. LOD stands for Level of Detail. Traditionally, a lot of times 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 manufacturer 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.