Modeling Air Registers in Revit MEP: Placing Supply Diffusers on Ceiling Plans

Welcome back to the CAD Teacher VDCI video course content for the BIM 321 course, Introduction to Revit MEP. In the previous videos, we went ahead and got our file all set up and ready to go; we added the spaces, brought in the linked file, added the space tags, and adjusted those. Now, what we want to go ahead and do is actually start modeling some things.

The first thing that we're going to start off with the mechanical trade, and to work with this mechanical trade, we're going to go ahead and go to our ceiling plans. If you would please, in your Project Browser, let's go over to the Mechanical discipline, under HVAC, then under Ceiling Plans, and select Ceiling Mech for the first floor. And there we are.

As you can see, we have a grid layout for the T-bar ceilings, or the dropped ceilings, and we have some hard lid ceilings in both the stairwell and in the bathrooms here. So what I want to go ahead and do is start by placing some air registers. Let's go to our Systems tab, under the HVAC panel, and select Air Terminal.

And here we are. Now we have a supply diffuser that is a 24x24 face with a 12x12 connection. So it's saying that the actual face of it is 24x24, and that it's a 12x12 connection.

Now, there are multiple different types of diffusers. This one is not one that we're actually going to use because it's not what we call hosted. Yes, it is hosted to the level one floor plan, but the issue here is that it is not hosted to a specific element.

Learn Revit MEP

• Nationally accredited
• Create your own portfolio
• Free student software
• Learn at your convenience
• Authorized Autodesk training center

Learn More

We want to actually host these items to the ceiling. So, say that the Architect makes a change to the ceiling, raises it or lowers it, our registers will automatically change independently. We're not going to use this one specifically.

Let's go ahead and go to Load Family, please. I'm in my Imperial library, and we're going to find this under the Mechanical location here. Let's go to our MEP.

Let's go to our Air Side Components. Let's go to Air Terminals. And here we are.

So there are a lot of different things here. The one we want to use is the Supply Diffuser, Hosted. Again, it's going to be the Supply Diffuser, Hosted.

So I'm going to go ahead, select that one, and hit Open. And there we are. As you can see, it's a Supply Hosted diffuser.

Everything there is good to go. So I'm going to select Place on Face.

Again, I don't want to place it on a vertical face. This means I would place it on, say, a wall. I actually want to choose Place on Face.

And here we are. As you can see, you can now see that item. I'm going to go ahead in this room and place it about right here for right now.

I'm going to place it off to the side, and then I'm going to use my Align tool later to come back and put it in. I'm also going to pop another one in about right here. Again, I'm hosting them to the actual ceiling itself.

Place one about here. And again, I'm offsetting them specifically because I don't want to cause any issues where I accidentally snap something. Then I'll go back and align these in a little bit. I'm going to place another one there.

I'm going into the offices here. I'm going to place one here, and I'm going to place it in the same location in all the offices. Just work your way around slowly.

Take your time with it. Again, I'm just offsetting it to the side. And that is that.

I'm going to place one in this room also. And there we are. I'm going to hit Escape to indicate that I'm done placing these.

I'm going to zoom extents. Now we need to go back and actually correct these in their proper locations. The first thing I want to do before I start this is, if you zoom in, you can see I have very thick lines here.

I'm going to go ahead and use my thin line. This is something that's very useful when we are actually working in a drawing. We don't really need to see the line weights right now.

So I'm going to select Thin Lines, and then I'm going to use AL for Align. I'm going to pick here and pick here, pick here and pick here. Come over here, pick here and pick here, pick here and pick here.

Again, I'm just going around and aligning the edges to the specific ceiling tile that I want to be centering in. So this will take a little bit of time, but go ahead, go through, and put those in their correct locations. One thing that we can do is, I know that I want all of these registers along this same grid.

All the ceiling grids line up. If I go up here to my Align tool in the options bar, I see where I have Multiple Alignment. I'm going to go ahead and check that.

Now what I can do is I can select this, and you can see that I have that line extending. I'm going to go ahead and pick here, pick here, pick here, pick here, pick here, and there we are. The one issue with this, though, is that it wants to keep aligning to this edge.

To clear out or to then select the one I want to align to again, I have to click off of something. I have to click off of everything. It's going to go away, and then I would have to pick here and then pick here.

I no longer want to align to that, so I'm going to click off in empty space. There we go. Pick there, pick there.

Click off in empty space. Pick here, pick here, pick here, pick here. Again, I'm going out here and clicking off in empty space.

Pick here, pick here, pick here, and pick here. And there we go. I'm going to go ahead and hit Escape to say that I'm done.

Now you notice that we have these arrows around our different diffusers. This is actually showing that it's a supply diffuser. So I want to go ahead and turn those off because those just clutter up my drawing.

So I'm going to go ahead and drag over everything. And there we go. Let's go to our filter here and filter our selection just so that we have just the air terminals.

I'm going to go ahead and hit OK. And there we are. If you look over in your properties palette here, you'll see up arrow, right arrow, left arrow, down arrow.

I'm going to go ahead and uncheck all those. Now I just have the actual diffusers themselves. If you're looking at this and you're like, "Well, that one's kind of off a little bit, " we can adjust these.

So I'm going to adjust my ones here in this large conference room. So I'm going to come back down to here and then kind of center this. Click off in dead space or nothing there.

And there we go. Looks a little bit cleaner. Does that make sense? Press Control+S and save the file.

What I'd like for us to go ahead and do is let's go up to the second floor and do the exact same thing. So here, I'm going to go back to Air Terminal. Again, we're just placing our supply diffusers right now that are hosted.

Let's go ahead right now under our properties panel and uncheck these different mechanical arrows so that we don't have to deal with it later on. Again, since I started this over again, I need to go up to my placement and go to Place on Face.

And there it shows. Go here and here. Go there.

And just kind of work your way around. Come over to this here. Again, I'm not placing it in exactly the spot that I want to.

I'm just placing it close to the actual ceiling tile, and I'm going to go back through and align it later. That just makes for a lot more accurate modeling. So I'm going to go ahead and hit Escape to say I'm done.

I'm going to go ahead and hit AL for Align. Pick this edge here and align that. Align that.

Align that. Click off into the empty space. I'm going to pick on this edge here.

Align this and align this. I'm going to come over here and align all of these to their correct locations. There we go.

And now I'm going to uncheck my Multiple Alignment option and then go back and align them the last way that I need to. Just make sure you're clicking on the correct pieces and just navigate around the drawing, and using thin lines really does help in making sure that we're clicking the correct lines.

Because sometimes some of these families will have two or three lines representing something like the edge of the diffuser or something along those lines. There we go. I'm going to go ahead and hit Escape to say that I'm done.

Let's go ahead and zoom extents. Press Control+S to save the file. And that was placing our supply diffusers.

I'm going to go ahead and stop this video here. In the next video we'll go ahead and come back and place our return diffusers. See you then.