Revit Fabrication Magic

DREW JARVIS: So thanks for taking your time to get up early this morning, come--

AUDIENCE: Woo!

DREW JARVIS: Yeah-- visit with me for this Revit Fabrication Magic. So silly name, but you got to try and stand out with the title to get it to be accepted. Don't know what the magic means, but we're going to take a look at Revit and the fabrication parts inside of it. I'm going to be hiding behind here because I need to use my computer, and anytime I walk out here, I get blinded by that light. But hopefully, you can all see me.

So we're going to be taking a look today at the fabrication tools inside of Revit. So they've been in there for a few releases now, but there were some challenges that, I believe, they've overcome, and so it's become more usable. You actually find that there's some surprisingly good things about it as far as placing fabrication items directly into Revit goes. So we're going to take a look at that.

I'm going to be primarily focusing on-- or totally focusing on ductwork for my examples, but as far as Revit's concerned, it's just a shape that gets extruded along a path. It's a duck or a pipe. It's pretty typical.

So we've got a few objectives before I tell you who I am. We're going to look at how we can convert design ductwork to fabrication. So you might find it, from the design contractors or consultants, that you're getting more and more Revit models these days. It's been-- everything has been delivered in BIM, and that seems to quite often involve Revit.

So the design model might come to you, and the model there is going to be a lower level of development than you will need to be able to fabricate from it. So that's where we need to then figure out how can we convert this, and I'm going to show you how you can crash Revit by just simply taking some ducts and converting it, and it won't work. So that's-- you can't just, unfortunately, go straight in and try that. So we'll take a look at how to convert that.

So I'm going to identify some bottlenecks, a few things that don't work too well. There's really three main ones that I'll go over. How we can edit the fabrication ducts, and that's going to be for in Revit or in any of the other products.

So there's multiple products, so I'm going to be dealing just with CAMduct for the CNC at the end of it. But there's also a CADmep and SMEP. They all kind of integrate together. And then we'll open up CAMduct-- is that right-- yeah, CAMduct-- and we'll look at how we can bring the information from Revit into there and then use that to create CNC to graph tables and things.

So my name's Drew Jarvis, and I'm an application specialist with SolidCAD based in Port Moody, which is in lower mainland Vancouver in BC. My accent is obviously very Canadian, but I moved to Canada in maybe 2004. And so prior to that, I was working in an HVAC drafting office, so designers-- I was kind of the CAD manager type person there just because I was able to learn LISP and things like that. So that was-- I'm always drafting and doing CAD, so I know a bit about HVAC.

When I moved to Canada, I kind of ended up in the reseller channel, so supporting customers. And from there, I had to learn different pieces of software, so I knew about building systems, AutoCAD building systems, when I first came over. But then I had to learn the Revit-- I think it was called Building Systems or Services or something when it first came out. It then got rebranded as MEP, and now it's just Revit.

Yeah, so I've seen it since its first release, and it's again got better and better. What else is on there? Oh, looks like about it.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?

DREW JARVIS: Yeah. I don't think they'll hear me if I shout. I think it's just noise coming through the walls, as well.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, [INAUDIBLE].

DREW JARVIS: Unfortunately.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] through the walls.

DREW JARVIS: Yeah, there's actually no-- there's no noise out there. It's quite noisy. We're going to try--

FEMALE SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE].

DREW JARVIS: Yeah, let me just turn up a little bit. Is that better? Is it coming through more there? I shouldn't mess with these buttons really, should I?

Pretty sure I'm turned on. I've got a little green light on the bottom. [MUCH LOUDER] I'll talk down into my chest like that. Is that-- that's better?

[LAUGHING]

All right. I see, that is better. I can hear it straightaway. OK. That's going to be uncomfortable after an hour.

So getting started, one of the first things we'll-- silly, but we need to install the right software. And if you want to be able to take that work and export it to CAMduct, things like this, finding even the right software for it is a bit of a challenge. You can go and Google the extension you need, but you won't find it. It's hidden away inside of the Manage portal.

So just thought I'd show you the two places that I find software from. So if you know about these, then it's all good, but if you Google Creative Virtual Autodesk, there's a little website that comes up. Gives you access to every single product that Autodesk creates for the last five years.

So you can download any software there. So that doesn't-- that means you don't need to log into a Manage account with a password and things like that. It's just straightforward downloads to anybody.

You've also then got your Manage account, though. So there, you can download software, and this is where you'll find the extension that we're going to need to take information from one product to the other. So I'm going to show you where both of those are.

Today, we're going to be dealing with Revit. We're going to be dealing with Revit extensions for fabrication, and also then the CAMduct product. So I'll just switch over into-- how does this work?

Does that come up? No. Duplicate. There we go.

So if I just go into just Chrome here-- so I said, if you Google Creative Virtual Autodesk, however you say that, this thing comes up at the top here. If you click on this, this is the Ask Autodesk thing, but I can never find it unless I type those three words in for some reason. And so then you've got your download links here. You can go and find any different type of Autodesk products inside of here. So there's fabrication, CAMduct, and the different releases.

So sometimes, there's four versions. Sometimes, I've seen five. Just kind of depends on what the licensing is, how many prior usage versions you allow, that type of thing, seems to be. Anyway, so you can find those things there.

There's also, then, you're going to need that extension, so manageautodesk.com. This will be where you use your Autodesk ID to log in and see what software you have, where your serial numbers are, things like this. But it can be a bit of a long list sometimes, especially if you work in the reseller channel like me, and you've got 401 products. And that's because, for some reason, there's so many multiples.

If I go and type Revit into here, I've then got all these different Revits. And I think that one-- there we go. That's-- don't look at those numbers.

But we've got addons down here, and so our new update and addons. Then it's 116 addons for Revit. So I can then look for Fabrication, and there's those extensions for Fabrication. So you'll need that one if you want to transfer the information from Revit to CAMduct.

So that out of the way, let's go back into here and continue there. Again, just pop through those. All right, so we're going to take a look at how we can convert design to fabrication.

So definitely some requirements. We need an accurate design model. The more accuracy inside of there, the better our result's going to be. That's going to be a challenge because designers are not installers, and so they don't necessarily know everything about what goes on in a construction site.

But also, the product that they're using might not have the right parts for them, so they're going to use an elbow that Revit gives to them because that's the elbow that's there. They're not going to go out and make a new one that's got all different settings inside of it when they can just use the one that's there because it looks like it works for them. So there's going to be some-- maybe some challenges there. More so probably with pipe work as well.

What you can do, though, is you can set up mappings. So if you have different types of families that are being used by the designer, there's a thing called a button map, where you can then tell it what it converts to in the Fabrication software. So I'll try and show that.

We then have these Fabrication configurations, and so if you were to not be using Revit, you have two by default-- a metric and an imperial. Once you install Revit onto your computer, you get two additional ones, which is a Revit one, so now you've got four to pick from. And basically, that's just a box that holds different services, so the Fabrication service is then things like HVAC Supply, HVAC Return. And inside of those services, it defines the default types of parts-- lengths for ductwork, how long those lengths are going to be, different things like this, different types of default fittings that are going to be used. And as I mentioned, there is some part mapping to go between the design and the fabrication items.

So to create a Revit design model, you probably just receive one from somewhere. But if that's not the case, then if you want to just kind of play with this a bit, you're going to start up a mechanical template in Revit. You're going to want to load some contents. You might need to go to a manufacturer if you want some specific things and download and load that into your project file. And then typically, you'll place some air terminals, you'll place some equipment, and then you start to place some main ductwork and then attach those out to those air terminals.

But rather than doing all that, I will have a download file that you can download and use, and it's tested so that it does work because there's nothing more frustrating than the first time you try and convert it, and it breaks Revit for unknown reasons. It doesn't really tell us why it happens, but make sure you send that message off to Autodesk. Not the custom one, but just the one that comes up on the screen so that they can learn a bit about why it's crashing.

So I don't think the files are up on the class yet, unfortunately. I uploaded them on the weekend, which was a good few days after the last day I was meant to upload them. They will be available for download pretty soon. Just going to take a few days for them to be visible up there, I guess. So my bad on that one, but there will be files available in a few days.

So don't think I was meant to open anything up yet. So we're going to take a look here. What is the Fabrication? Well, it's distinct elements inside of there. So these are item parts from the Fabrication software.

Basically, I think, 2011, Autodesk purchased a company, which was Map Software, I think. Probably UK based, just because it seems like there's a lot of DW-144 stuff in there. And so that software was used in lots of construction projects over in-- over there. And so Autodesk bought it over as addon, if you like, for AutoCAD. It was based on that platform, and I think one of their targets was to integrate it into Revit. And so after three or four releases, or versions or whatever we call a year, they got the Revit version of it going.

So it's the same Fabrication pieces inside of Revit that we see inside of the AutoCAD one, so that's why I say there there's tools similar to CADmep, so that's the AutoCAD based variant. But it's not a design focused item. If you pick the ductwork inside of Revit, the Fabrication pieces, they're not going to have your flow data and things like this inside of there. That's-- you got design elements, and you've got fabrication items completely separate in the same model.

And yeah, they have their own placement tools. So we're going to take a look at some of those very straightforward tools. A little palette that comes up on the side shows you all your pieces. If you've used CADmep, exactly the same things that you're going to see inside of that software. And yeah, so they're defined by those Fabrication services.

So if we wanted to convert from design to fabrication, first of all, if you just select some ducts, go out to the ribbon, and tell it to convert, it's going to tell you it doesn't have a configuration set, and it also doesn't have a service set. So you want to make sure you get those things set up first.

Then you can select your design elements. Go up into the ribbon. You're going to see that there's a Design to Fabrication tool there, and then you need to verify the results as long as Revit didn't crash.

I would also maybe put in, hit Save before you do any of this. So if you convert a bit of it, and it is successful, hit Save. And then do some more and then hit Save. Because until you kind of figure out the things that make it crash, then yeah, you get some issues. Positive talking here.

So I'm going to do a demo. I'm purposely going to crash Revit because that's always fun, and then I'll show you one that's a bit more successful. So if I pop into Revit here, what I've done-- is it on the screen? Yeah-- is I've opened up the sample project.

So if you go to File-- that's not on there. So anyway, it's in C, Program Files. I'll just show you where it is, so C, Program Files, Autodesk, Revit 2018, Samples. So every year, they have this folder, and inside of here, there's a Mechanical, there's an Architectural, there's a Structural example files, example families, and example projects.

So that's what I opened. I just-- in my view, I turned off everything apart from air terminals, ducts, mechanical equipment. And then in the filters, I just told it not to show anything other than the supply here. So I've just kind of turned off some systems.

Now, over on the side here, I've got this thing set up. I'm going to show how to do that later. But if you see parts inside of the MEP Fabrication parts window-- thing, pallet, whatever that thing's called-- then you know you have something loaded. Some configuration has been loaded, and the service has been assigned.

So yeah, the first thing I ever did with this software was I just went, here we go, there's a bunch of design stuff. Select that. Go up here. Hit Design to Fabrication, and it just confirmed the service I want to use. And three, two, one-- there we go.

And so then we get an unrecoverable error, and so it's just-- unfortunately, you can't control what you receive. So this is exactly the same as me receiving a file from a consultant that's done a design. I don't know what standards they have in their template, what custom families they're using, things like this. So this might happen, so yeah, it's unfortunate, but yeah, there's some work to be done to try and avoid these types of things.

So I hit OK. I get a message on the screen. I say, oh, OK, this is what I was doing, and I hit send. I'm not actually going to type anything.

So let's try that a bit more successfully, if I can find the right file. Where is it? Nope.

One moment. I did not have that file open, or if I did, it was in the Revit that I just crashed. Let's try Design to Fabrication. There we go.

So inside of this model-- it's the same model. I've just-- I've changed some of the visibility things, so it's transparent for some reason. I don't why I did that. I like it. And I just kind of cleaned it up a little bit.

So I've made sure that I've got end caps on the end of everywhere. I've got simple junctions inside of here. And essentially, if I just take part of this, and I come up to my Design to Fabrication, note it's gray over here. It gives me a message that says I don't have a service loaded.

I'm just going to hit Cancel. I could hit Load, but I'm just going to show you. This button down here is where you specify the configuration you're going to use. I mentioned there's four them-- two that are kind of the Fabrication product ones, two that are Revit. I'm going to go with this metric one here just because I have a metric Revit project open here.

Let's see if I can get that to find it, so then I've got all my different services down here. So I've got to mention that services are going to be defining the things like the type of metal that's going to be used and default parts and things like that. So I'm going to go with this general supply here. Add that. Click OK.

So now, in my dropdown here for service, I've got whatever I've loaded, so I could have multiple ones. That's important to remember because when you start placing the fabrication items, it's going to use the standard from whatever's set in that dropdown. But for now, I'm just using my conversion tool, so I'm going to pick those.

I'm going to hit Design to Fabrication, and there we go. That didn't crash. Woohoo. And so I've got a conversion, now.

So what's happened is I don't have my design ducts there now. I've got these items, so this generic straight. You can see it's got size information, so there's properties inside here. I can take a look at the different parameters for it.

So it's got connection information. So the fact that it's using this slide-on flange-- that's from the service. That service defined what type of connections were going to be in there, so that's in there. But if you want to override it for particular parts, then we can do that.

And it put a cap on the end. It didn't put a cap on the end to here, so we need to do a bit of verification. Just go around the model and check if we're missing some pieces, and that type of stuff.

So I tend to do a bit of a piecemeal approach. And you'll start to kind of learn which things are going to work successfully and which ones aren't, and it's just unfortunate that it's a crash. It's not just an error. It's not like you can undo. It seems to be that Revit just wants to give up and close down when you get that error, so I recommend just being careful.

So I would then hit Save. Go ahead and find some more and convert that as well. So I've given you this model so that you don't have those frustrations. You'll be able to just convert the whole thing if you want, and then you can then use some of the other tools, like optimizing lengths and things and exporting it out to CAMduct. So hopefully, you've got some test files that you can successfully play with.

But yeah, that's the very basic, massively high level thing. You select some stuff. You hit Design to Fabrication, and woohoo, it comes out. But there's much more to it than that. So that's Good and Bad.

So I mentioned that there's a thing called button mapping earlier. Now, if we have a custom family, then the software is not going to know about that family. It's not going to know what to convert it to, so there's a bunch of settings that aren't available in Revit. They're available inside of the fabrication software. It doesn't matter if you've got CAMduct or SMEP or CADmep, you're going to be able to access the fabrication services in the background, and you'll be able to modify those settings.

So I'm going to show an example where there's going to be a duct with a duct accessory, just a fire damper in this case, that are design elements. And when I do a conversion, it will convert the ducts, but because it doesn't know what that damper is, it's not going to convert that item. So then we'll go in, we'll change some settings in the background, and we'll do that conversion again, and we should then get a fabrication item.

So there's going to be some work involved, and unfortunately, as you receive different design models, they're going to have different family names and different things like that. So you-- this might be something that you kind of need to do for individual clients that you're receiving files from unless you're going to edit the design model first. So different ways you could approach that, I guess.

The PDF handout has no videos inside of it, unfortunately. But they only let me upload PDFs, so what I'm going to do is put a link into it because I checked it last night. I clicked on the video. It doesn't do anything. It's just an image. So I'm going to put a link in here to the actual video, so you can download that as well because inside of here, I can hit play, and there's a--

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

- Straight out of the box, Revit does a pretty good--

[END PLAYBACK]

There we go. There's me, chatting away. But let's try it live because it's always more fun to crash live. So there's my example. Let's get rid of that. Let's go into Plan just to show that I'm just making stuff just with an out-of-the-box type of thing here.

I've got Project 1. It was based on the mechanical template. I'll go ahead and place a piece of duct.

I'll put a duct accessory on it. In this case, I've named my duct accessory FDR, which not much on presidents, but I didn't realize about that. There we go. So that wasn't intentional, the fire damper deal. So there's my piece of duct and my damper.

So if I go ahead and load up my service in this file. So I'll pick that one. I'll come down and find, again, just that simple general supply, and then pick my objects. If I go to Design to Fabrication, click OK-- thought I had done it there. I forgot to undo my changes.

So what I have there is some fabrication ductwork, so if I pick this thing, this is generic straight. It's a fabrication item. But in the middle here, I've still got just a Revit family, so this isn't what I'm looking for in a conversion.

So what I can do is go over to a product like CAMduct, as I mentioned, and take a look at the database. So unfortunately, you don't have any access or visibility to these settings inside of it, so they still want you to be a Fabrication customer as well as having Revit installed as well. So I'm just going to go over to metric content because I need to be editing the right one. I'm going to go and create a blank job, and this just opens up some things so that I'm inside of the service.

So my File menu here, I can go to my database setup, and this gives me access to all of the settings that are in the background of that configuration. All those services and things like that-- I can edit them here. So I'm going to take off Services.

I can go down and find my generic supply-- general supply, sorry. Inside of here, this is my first page that starts to show me about it, so you can see the specification for the metal, the ducts that are going to be used there, and then we've got information inside of here. So lots of stuff going on, but what we're looking for is this page here, which is the button mappings.

So these button mappings basically take a name of a family on the side here and map that to a fabrication item on the other column. So we can add to this, and the easy thing that we need to do is just to know what the name of the family is inside of Revit, and then we can use that inside of here. So that's why I simplified it to three letters.

Now, I'm just going to put a little break inside of here. So this doesn't actually do any mapping, but what it does is it just lets me see, this is the stuff that I added. So below there is just going to be my Revit mapping, so it's then easy for me to delete them later. That's the main reason.

Now, inside of here, then, I want to type in the family name, so whatever that might be. And then down here, we can pick our item, so I'm going to go with that fire damper there. So pretty straightforward, as long as we know the name of it.

One thing I have noticed in this release, it doesn't-- I can't remember the number of characters, but it doesn't like family names that are too long, let's say 25 characters. Right around there. So if it's anything longer than that, it just stops letting you type it. So then it doesn't work. So go back to Revit, rename that family something a little bit shorter, and then come set up the mapping.

So that's it. I've added that to my configuration. That's going to be available to all the different software. I guess I should undo my convert there. But if I just go ahead and do that conversion again, it's still not going to work, so I've still got my FDR inside of there.

Now, the reason it hasn't worked is because I haven't reloaded my settings into Revit, so I've changed it in the database. All of my fabrication software looks at it live, but Revit loads it. So we need to just reload the configuration, click OK, once this is-- there we go-- available, and then do one more of these converts.

It didn't work, did it? Bum! That's why live demos are awesome. What did I do wrong? I don't know.

MALE SPEAKER: Demo supply-- looks like you did the right one.

DREW JARVIS: It works in the video. So whatever I missed there, because I've got 80 people staring at me, that-- whatever that setting was I missed, if you do that, it'll work. I apologize for that one. So any questions on those button mappings, other than why it didn't work?

AUDIENCE: Hi, is it possible to import some sort of Excel file to kind of automate that?

DREW JARVIS: Right. Yeah, so the question is, is it possible to automate that process, perhaps by using an Excel file that has the mappings? Not-- so there are settings in the background that you can access, yeah, but yeah, not really.

It might be dangerous to do that. Yeah, probably these files in the background are simply just text files or XML files or something like that. But no, I don't-- not that I know of.

MALE SPEAKER: You can copy-paste.

DREW JARVIS: OK, so just--

MALE SPEAKER: You can do the mapping through an Excel file, or whatever, copy that, and then paste it into that dialog. But you still have to get that dialog.

DREW JARVIS: Yeah, so it's still via the dialog, yeah. Thank you. So some of the straightforward limitations for a new user-- three of them that definitely cause problems-- if you put fittings back to back, the design isn't going to be converted to fabrication parts. So elbows are connected to elbows, or transition straight off an elbow. Anything that is a duct fitting inside of Revit, if it's attached to anything other than a duct, it's going to freak out.

Doesn't do sloped elements, which-- I'll just leave that there. And then it doesn't like eccentric connections either, so if you have an eccentric connection, you do a conversion, you're just going to get a gap. And so then, you've got to go put a piece in manually to fill that gap, so it's easy to fix.

The main one that really causes big problems is those back to back fittings, if you have those. Typically, a Revit designer is not going to place back to back fittings, but if you had somebody on the fabrication side that was placing design elements and then trying to convert it, then you might get those back to back fittings. So I'd recommend bypassing the design elements completely if you're just doing the fabrication side.

So again, there is a video, but I like-- I like the danger of doing this thing live. What we've got here is a simple model that's just got a few ducts and fittings inside of it. So again, this will be uploaded for you to test.

So we've got two fittings here. You can see just two duct fittings back to back. Again, two fittings here, and then an eccentric-- whatever it's called.

So what I'll do is hit the Tab key here. There we go. And so by hitting Tab, I can see the elements that are connected to each other. So as far as Revit's concerned, that's a very adequate set of objects that will connected-- data's going to flow through them.

But if I go in here-- and again, got so many files. There we go. Pick one of these and do that conversion again-- what we end up with is unexpected. So it does convert it, but not in a good way.

So it's now giving us this slide down here. It's decided that it's going to put an elbow around there, but it's not going to actually connect it properly. And then it just-- I didn't bother with this at all.

So yeah, that's not really an acceptable result. It didn't crash, though, so we're kind of on the next rung up the ladder. We don't have to reload Revit yet.

So what I would say is you want to address these types of things by converting the things that will convert. So we know that these are going to be OK. That's probably it. Maybe that one. I don't know.

Anyway, so you pick the things that you think are going to work. I can't remember if I should have picked that one up. Nope, shouldn't have picked that one. But at least now, we have some placeholders, if you like, that are in the right location. They are the right size, and it should be fairly easy to put in other pieces around these now.

So that's where you would then start to make use of some of the manual placement of elements. So you see these fabrication pieces that can be grip edited? That isn't actually a fabrication piece, so we wouldn't want that.

But if I hit the Tab key, it somehow knows it's connected. It's kind of weird. Similar thing up here. So we kind of got our little placeholders in space now.

And then we might try some of the tools available, see if they work or not. So we could root and fill, which would allow us to click from here to another point and see if it did it. Yay, cool, it was the right size, so it fitted perfectly. That won't always be the case that was perhaps a little bit of-- I made sure I had the right size design elements when I did that.

But what we could do is just start to place things manually. So I could get a square over here. As I come into here, you see it just sizes it correctly, so it's one size there. As I come onto the end there, it sized it up nicely.

I probably should've made sure that they were in line with each other. And similarly down here, I could get my taper. Check that on there. Figure out what size this one is. This is 4 by 3, so then I'll take this.

Perhaps-- whoops, perhaps don't do that. Perhaps double-click on it, set it to 4 by 3 for the out and set its [INAUDIBLE] offset to-- and I guarantee you, whichever one of these I pick, we've got a 50/50 shot. I'm going to get the wrong one. I'll go right.

Yeah, there we go. If I'd gone left, it would have done the same thing. Adjust here. I've never hit the right one. And then drag that back.

So basically, I'm showing you this because you need to be aware that certain things aren't going to work. That's just the fact. It doesn't do back to back fittings. It's going to freak out and give you weird results.

But also don't be totally put off by that. We've got the basic main run there, and we can use some of the tools inside of the fabrication placement to connect up the pieces. So it's not as bad as it, at first, seemed. It just requires a little bit more effort than just clicking one button and saying, hey, we're done. So that's the three limitations to definitely be aware of as a new user to this.

We'll also then take a look at-- oh, any questions on those limitations? So I'm sure they'll release a new version of the software at some point, so check to see if those-- that's what I tend to do. If I identify these things, when a new version of the software comes out, I just go and test those things immediately.

So example in design for Revit, I always go and check if the takeoff has the same size the, little tap into the main duct-- if it still has a pressure drop of 0, which it seems to still have every year. So I always hope they're going to make it work. Question?

AUDIENCE: Are you running 2018 or 2018.2?

DREW JARVIS: '18 I think, just because when I started to set it all up that's what I had, and I didn't want to break things by upgrading. So yeah, 2018. But yeah, if you download the newest versions of Revit, the 18.1, 18.2, make sure you download the updated Fabrication extension as well, so there's two available. And in fact, if you download the up-to-date Fabrication extension and install it onto just 2018, it doesn't work. So when you try and do the export, it just says, nah, don't know what you're talking about.

Yeah, so I guess I should actually play the slide. Looks way more professional. There we go.

So we're going to take a look at three additional tools here. There's-- one of them's optimized lengths. So a designer will just place a piece of duct from point A to point B, and it can be 74 meters long. It could be-- whatever.

So it's not going to be an appropriate size for fabrication, so what we have is a simple tool that just takes a big long piece of duct that we pick, and it optimizes the length. So it just cuts it into lots and lots of little pieces of duct. It bases the length of that on the configuration settings, so I think the default was 2,400 perhaps. If that's not the length you're looking for, then you can go into those configuration settings, similar place that I did the button mappings, and you can set up a different length, whatever length you're looking for inside of there. So you do, again, need both things installed in order to get access to those.

The auto-route from point to point is a really nice tool, allowing you to just kind of click on the end of one, click on the end of another, and it gives you different solutions. So if it finds, I can fit my two bends here, or I can fit radius bends inside of here, or I could go this route, or I could go this route, it's going to give you numerous solutions that you can click through until you find the one closest to or exactly what you're looking for. And then you hit the little green tick, and it accepts that one. Then we have edit part, so if you double-click on a part, or you go to its properties, the Properties palette, you're going to be able to edit it and adjust things like the length and the sizes, other things like that.

So let's switch back into here one more time. Maybe I'll just do it in here for now. Yeah, so if I have a big long piece of duct like this one, if I select it, you'll see up here that I can optimize length. The Optimize Length just then cuts it into multiple pieces.

You don't have the control over which end's going to get the little short one, but you can grip edit it afterwards. You can move things around. So it's-- at least it gets it down to the appropriate lengths that you want. So nothing too amazing there, but just to show you that's what that Optimize Length does.

Edit Part just gives you access to this dialog box where we can change settings about it. So if we were having a bit more of a complex element, then you get just more information inside of there. So we can get to it from here. We can get to it by double-clicking on it.

And I'm pretty sure there's a third way. We can go down into the properties here and edit part there as well. So got a couple of tabs with just some different parameters on it.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?

DREW JARVIS: Sorry?

AUDIENCE: Will this work on the normal [INAUDIBLE] also? [INAUDIBLE]?

DREW JARVIS: Oh. I'd have to check. Let me get back to you on that. Yeah.

MALE SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE].

DREW JARVIS: It does? Yeah, OK, I didn't want to confirm without knowing.

MALE SPEAKER: Pretty much [INAUDIBLE]. [INAUDIBLE].

DREW JARVIS: Right, yeah.

MALE SPEAKER: Sorry, say again, how does-- if you optimize the part, how does it know what length to optimize for?

DREW JARVIS: So that's for-- so how does it know what length to use for the optimization is based on the configuration, or the service within the configuration. So you need to be able to access that database. So go into CAMduct or go into CADmep or something like that. Access the database, find the service, and then there'll be a list there.

Typically, there'll be ranges, so ducts between this size or pipes between this size will be this long, and pipes between this other size will be this long. And so you can just click on the number and change it. Maybe I'll just play the video on this one, because I don't think I have that file open.

Oh, I just did that stuff, didn't I? Did I? Yes, I did. Next page. All right, sorry.

So we're going to take a little look now at just creating fabrication elements inside of Revit. So if you've used CADmep before, then you're going to find that it's a similar type of process. We've got something like the design line, but also then, just placing things one part at a time. We can do that as well.

So the fabrication parts are fully integrated into Revit, now. They have been for a couple of releases. The tool to place them-- really, the tool is the palette that comes up, but there's a toggle button to show that pallet on the Systems tab. So you go click on that one.

As I've done numerous times here, we then need to go and select a configuration, define a service that we're going to be having as current, and then we can just really start to click and place parts on the screen. And yeah, those elements that go into there, they do have parameters associated with them. You've seen the width and height and length and things like that. Also, the materials, weights, these types of things-- that can all be scheduled inside of Revit. So if you're making your fabrication model to that detail level in Revit, then you can get some good takeoffs of that information as well.

So I'm going to go over to Revit again and just show you some-- let's find one more file here. Not the conversion. Manual booting-- there we go.

So for these Revit files, unfortunately, another limitation of the files I can upload for the handout and things like that is 25 megabytes is the limit, and so that's one file. So I did put one up that was a placeholder, but again, I'm going to provide some links so that you can download any of these other files if you want them. So just because having something to start with that's nice and clean and works is good, just so you trust it works, at least in a perfect environment.

So I've got some ductwork here, and what I want to do is lay out some additional ductwork over here. So I've got this WSHB, this heat pump over here, and some air terminals. But what I want to do is start looking at some of these tools here, so I've made sure my settings are set up. This is going to be supply ductwork, so I want to make sure my service-- I pick the right one, again, to get the right settings.

So when I hit straight, comes in and gives me this object. If I just click on the screen, it's going to be on the floor unless I define a different height to it. Whatever the size is-- 400 by 400-- and it's going to have a length, which you can see here is set to Auto. Auto reads from the mapping inside of the service there-- not mapping, but that optimized length value. That's what we get here as the default, so if you don't want it to be that long, then you can change it from Auto to Value, and Value then-- can then type in how long you want it to be.

But for now, what I'm going to do is just come up here. If I click on this object, notice the three connectors here. These are standard Revit family connectors, so it's happy to connect to that Revit family there. I can drop that in, and it will have modified its size, its elevation inside of the model, and everything to match that connector.

So I don't have to worry about defining exactly where it's going to be because there's a connector there. I can make use of that. So I'll drop a couple of those in there. Take a cap end. Drop that on there.

So I find it's a pretty easy thing to use. You're just selecting a part, and it's intelligent enough to know where it needs to connect to. That cap end also matched its size to the piece of duct. It didn't end up putting it in just some standard size.

If I wanted to come off to the side here-- I'm going to try and show something interesting. Let's see-- maybe I'll do something silly here. Let's go and copy this one.

So I got my regular commands. I'm going to edit this one to be 275 square. And then what I'm going to show you here is, using regular Revit modify tools, this Extend Into-- if I do that, you'll see that it is intelligent enough to know that there's a part required between these two. So it's pretty cool that you can use things like Trim to Corner, Extend Single, Entity, things like that. There's some nice little drafting tools inside of here I find.