Pesky Electrical Settings in Revit 2018

MIKE MASSEY: OK, we will get started. Good morning, everybody.

AUDIENCE: Good morning.

MIKE MASSEY: Are we awake? I saw this time slot and I said, what did I do to get this time slot? Well thank you for coming on Thursday morning at 8 o'clock. Good AU so far? Good. Good, good, good.

How many first timers do we have here? Several. How many 10 years or more? Several. Very good. OK. Good, good, good.

How many have sat through one of my classes before? Well, thank you for coming back. If you haven't sat through one of my classes, I do tend to go pretty fast. I try to show you as much as I can in the time allotted that we have.

But the good news is, I do spend a lot of time on my handouts. So the handout's out there. And I do all the step by step instructions on my handout. So you can go back and look at that.

I also have a zip file out there that's got some files on it that you can get. I'll talk about those when we get to them. But we'll get going.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Mike Massey. I work with a company called Applied Software. We're an Autodesk reseller based out of Atlanta, Georgia.

I work remotely from my house in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Anybody from Tennessee? OK. I think I saw one hand.

Just a little bit about me. I graduated from Texas A&M. I've got a degree in architecture. I practiced architecture for about 15 years prior to going into the reseller business of teaching and training. Did all kinds of projects from houses to hospitals.

In the last 15 years, I've been teaching and training with different resellers, primarily on Revit, a little bit of AutoCAD but not as much anymore. It's pretty much just Revit. When I first started, I was asked if I would be able to learn the MEP program. And being an architect, I said, sure I can. I can do that.

So I did. I learned it. And I pretty much became the MEP guy for the companies that I worked with. So I've been focusing primarily on MEP for the last 15 years, teaching engineers and subcontractors. A lot of subcontractors lately. But that's a little bit about me.

I've got the certification. Anybody take the certification test this week? What did you all think of it?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE MASSEY: Was is good? I took it a couple months ago, the Revit electrical one and I didn't understand some of the questions that they had. They had architecture questions in there, or they had mechanical questions in there. Didn't quite understand why they didn't filter those out a little bit better. But anyway, if you haven't done that I think today's the last day to take that. There may be a waiting list. I'm not sure.

And I'm very grateful that I won top speaker award last year. So thank you all very much for the ones that attended my class. That's probably my biggest highlight that I like up there.

Let's see. That's enough about me. Let's get into this.

So class summary. I'm supposed to show this. Main thing I want you to read out of this is my thought about Revit for electrical is not that it can do a 3D model, it's that it produces a coordinated model with the assurance that everything is circuited and everything's connected and documented correctly. I think that's where you get the power behind Revit with electrical.

Yes, it does 3D. But honestly, I could care less about the 3Dness. I want to make sure my documents are correct in there. So that's the main takeaway there.

As far as the objectives, we're going to look at-- I think I got 20 different exercises that we're going to go through and talk about. I've got some extras if we do have time. But we'll talk about electrical schedules, circuit paths, electrical panel schedules, and load classifications, and demand factors for sure.

PRESENTER: Everyone must have a seat. Please, please, no standing.

MIKE MASSEY: No standing. Oh.

PRESENTER: [INAUDIBLE] must have a seat.

MIKE MASSEY: There's a couple up here. All right, we're nice and cozy now, aren't we? All right. So there's my objectives.

As far as the agenda, like I said, I've got this broken out into different topics. We'll be working with lights, Equipment families, creating circuits, working with panel schedules. I sent out an email to everybody asking for your questions. And I thank everybody that responded to that.

I had quite a few responses on that. I wasn't able to get everybody's question in my program. But I do have several in here that we'll talk about, some questions from you.

And like I said, if we do have time I've got some additional topics. If we don't get to them, they're in the handout, so you can see them there. But just in case, we need more time.

Like I said, the handout's there. It's on the app. You can download the handout. It's 42 pages, or something like that, or 45 pages, I think it is.

Like I said, I've got the step by step instructions there. So you can download that. All right, let's get going. This is the tips and tricks class. I guess you can label it like that.

These are just primarily-- working in the reseller business for the last 15 years, I've had a lot of questions in trying to implement Revit for electrical designers and contractors. I had a lot of people come to me and say, well, how do you do this, or we can't get it to do this? And so this is just a synopsis of all the questions that I've received over the last 50 years of how to do things in Revit.

And as you know, Revit can't do everything. Sometimes you have to figure out a workaround to make it do what you want it to do. And so I think that a lot of this is workarounds because the program can't do exactly what we want it to do. So we'll talk about those.

And some of those things, it's just a wish list item that we hope to have in the program at some point in time. I tell my customers when they're learning Revit, because they always ask me, well, can it do this, can I do this, or it would be nice if it could do this. And I tell them, well, don't focus on what it can't do, look at all that it is doing. It is doing a lot compared to what a drafting program like AutoCAD is doing. So try to keep your focus on the benefits instead of, I guess, what it can't do in there.

But we'll start here with working with lights. And I get this question a lot. How do you convert a ceiling hosted family to a face based hosed family? As engineers and contractors, we typically link in the building model. So we have no live ceilings in our model.

And Autodesk has done a pretty good job as far as converting the out of the box equipment or light fixtures to be face based as opposed to a ceiling based. But there's still some in there. Especially if you go to the architectural folder that's inside the lighting fixture folder, you'll find some fixtures in there that are ceiling based. And you cannot really use those unless you have a ceiling to be attached to.

I ran across this accidentally. I've never seen this documented before. But I just accidentally found it one day. I found that if you actually link in a project that has a ceiling hosted light fixture, and you perform a Copy/Monitor feature on it, when you copy that into your project it converts it to a face base. Who knew? So it works.

So let me show you how this works. Another, I guess, thing about-- and I teach this. Let me just get this out of the way. I typically record all my presentations because I've been burned so many times with problems with my software, with my computer, or whatever.

So I do have recordings, but I will talk through this and pause it. And I do have the program open in the background that we can jump over if we have questions. But just know that that's what I do.

So let's look at this. So here we are in Revit. And if I want to start just by bringing in an architectural model. I'm going to link in this architectural model. And it's a very complex model, as you can tell.

But it's got a ceiling on it. And I want to attach my light fixture on there. I could use one of the light fixtures that I've got in the project. But I'm going to go ahead and load another one.

So I'm going to go out to the Out-of-the-box library and go to the Lighting. And I'm going to go to the Architectural and find this pendant light fixture and bring it in. And this is a ceiling hosted.

So when I try to put this into my ceiling it's not going to work because I don't have a live ceiling. It's a linked in ceiling. So if I wanted to put this into my project, what would I do? I would have to come up and actually use the Ceiling command and draw me a ceiling to attach this light fixture to.

Like I said, Autodesk has done a pretty good job. Most all the light fixtures that are in the MEP folder inside of the electrical fixtures have been switched to be face based. But as you can see here, if I put a lighted ceiling in there it snaps right to it. So it's no problem.

So I want to be able to convert this to be a face based. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to go back and start a new project from scratch. I'll just use the Out-of-the-box Template.

And in this new project I'm just going to create me a ceiling. So I'm going to go up and draw me a ceiling in this project. I'll just use the Rectangle command and draw me a ceiling in there. I don't care what height it is, or anything like that. Let me just put it in there.

And then I'll go up and place that light fixture again. So again, I'll start the light fixture coming in. I'm going to browse out and find that pendant light fixture again, the same one that was ceiling hosted. Again, it's under the Architectural folder. And go down and find that light fixture and place it in there.

Once I've got that in there, I'm simply going to save this blank file, this new project that I've started. I'm going to go ahead and give it a name and save it out there so that I can link it into my other project. So I'll save it. And now we're done with this. So we go ahead and close this and get out of it, and go back to my original project that I was in.

And now I'm going to perform just a Link, a Revit Link command, and link in that blank file with a ceiling in it. I'll go ahead and do a manual insert in there so I can place it where I want to put it. And now I'm going to go up and use the Copy/Monitor features on this.

I'll go up and start Copy/Monitor, and tell it that we're going to select a link, and pick my link that I've just brought it. And then I'm going to go into the Coordination-- I don't even have to do that. I'll just go to copy and just copy the light fixture.

When I do, I'll get a message saying that it's going to rename it because I already got it in my project. It's going to put a one at the end of the name. But now I think I'll go back in and try to insert the one that I copied in, the one with the one on it. Guess what? It's now face based.

And so I didn't have to do anything to it, didn't have to start any family, or anything like that. So now I can just put this in there on my linked in ceiling that I couldn't put it on earlier. Simple as that.

Like I said, I ran across that one day accidentally. But it's a pretty neat trick, I guess, to convert those light fixtures over back and forth. Any questions about that? All right.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE MASSEY: It will still be there. It made a new family in my project.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

MIKE MASSEY: Yeah. It's still service based.

AUDIENCE: Can you open that family now [INAUDIBLE] in the other file and save as [INAUDIBLE]?

MIKE MASSEY: You could, yes.

AUDIENCE: And it will remain [INAUDIBLE]?

MIKE MASSEY: Yes, yes. All right. Here's another one. Placing lights without a ceiling. What if we don't have a ceiling?

And I guess there's two reasons you may want to do this. One is maybe you're ahead of the architectural team and they just haven't put the ceiling in the model yet, but you want to go ahead put your lights in there. Or I've got a lot of engineers and contractors that they want control over their lights. They don't want to attach them to the architectural ceiling.

They don't want the architect moving that ceiling and moving their lights without them knowing about it. So I have a lot of people that do this no matter what. No matter if there's ceilings or not, go ahead and put a reference plane in there and attach their light fixtures to reference planes.

But there's a trick in here. So let me talk about the trick. Because if you ever have done this you may have seen that your light fixtures are upside down. So let me show you how this works.

So back in this project, I'm going to jump up to the second story. And the second floor doesn't have a ceiling yet. So I'm going to come in there and basically use a reference plane to act as my ceiling in there.

So let me switch over to one of the elevation views to draw my reference plane in there. So I'll switch to the south elevation. And I'll just go up and use the reference plane coming in and draw me a reference plane about where the ceiling needs to be. You can adjust that if you want it to be exactly 8 feet, or whatever you want it to be at. Just change the number in there.

You do need to name these reference planes. If you want to use this as something to be attached to, you're going to have to pick it off the list. So you're going to have to give it a name, so you can pick it on there. So I'll just name it second floor ceiling.

And then once I've got that in there, I'm going to go back to my ceiling plan and simply just start installing light fixtures. Now these light fixtures are face based. They're not looking for a ceiling. But since they're face based I can use that reference plane as the face. And I just pick it off the list as far as which one I want to use, and simply start inserting my light fixtures.

We can put them in there. I'll just snap them in there, no problem. But if I want to go back and put that other fixture in there, that one that we just converted over, I could put that one in there as well because now it's face based. And we're using the reference plane as the face.

But if I go back to my section, or my elevation, and look at this, my pendant light fixture looks OK but my fluorescent light fixtures are upside down. Anybody ever seen this? It's a plane.

There's a flip arrow. You can go through and flip them, just hit that flip arrow and flip them. But I don't want to have to do that to all my lights.

But why is it upside down? Well, I think it's the way that these light fixtures are created, the way the family's created. But these reference planes that we put in there, they do have a top and a bottom.

And again, I haven't seen this documented, but if you draw that reference plane from left to right it's going to put that light fixture upside down. So if you're going to use this process, try to always draw your reference plane right to left. I know we don't think that way. But if you draw it right to left then it's going to put your lights right side up.

So let me just go back through it again. So I've got my reference plane in there. I drew it this time right to left. Give it a name, don't forget to give it a name because you will have to pick it off the list.

Then we can go back to our ceiling plan, place the light fixtures in there again. Same light fixtures. I'll use some fluorescent fixtures and also that pendant fixture again. Pick it off the list, as far as my reference plane that we want to put it on, and place my lights in there.

The trick is simply just remembering to draw that reference plane in the right direction. Then you shouldn't have a problem. Same thing with if you've got any air terminals, they're going to be the same way. So if you put air terminals in there, they're going to be flipped upside down as well. But now you can see, the light fixtures are right side up in there and they're not upside down. Pretty cool?

One of those pesky things you can't figure out why it does it. Simple fix. Just got to know how to do it.

Spaces not calculating the foot candles. This is pretty cool that we can put spaces in there and it does an average estimated illumination as far as the foot candle calculation in there. But occasionally, we have spaces in there that we picked on that says zero foot candle. So I want to talk a little bit about that.

The primary reason that we don't have foot candles in a space is because this light fixture is outside of the space. Let's walk through this, and I'll show you a couple tricks in here that you can do. Let me just start again by putting some light fixtures back in here again.

And this time, I think, I'll just put four fixtures in here. So I'll just snap these four fixtures in there. And then I'll go back, and we're going to actually put a space in here next. So I'll go back to the Analyze tab and start the Space command, and just simply pop a space in there.

Now the space, when you put it in there, I think it has a default elevation of 8 feet in there. So if I want to look at this, if I pick on that and go over and look at my foot candle over there, it says zero foot candles. So why is it got zero? It's because my lights are higher than my space. I think my ceiling is at 10 foot, or 12 foot, or something like that.

So I can jump over and-- let them go to a section here so we can cut a section through this space and look at this. When I draw my section through here and look at it, we can see that my space is only at 8 feet and my ceiling's up higher than that. So there it is right there.

We can pick on it and we can actually just drag that space up to make it taller. As long as it goes through the ceiling it will be OK. And now we go over and look at our Properties, and we've got a foot candle load in there. So now it's working.

As we work on projects, a lot of times we have multiple ceiling heights. And we're not familiar with the ceiling heights altogether, so we don't know where they change. And so I want to make sure that all my lights are within the space no matter what. I don't want to have to worry about changing that space height if I need to.

A simple trick that you can do is just open up the light fixture. And inside the Light Fixture family, all light fixtures will have this. Over in the Properties, you'll see at the very bottom a checkbox for the room calculation point. And if I simply check that checkbox, it's going to turn on a node.

And this node is draggable. And I can move this node anywhere I want to. And as long as this node falls into the space, it will be calculated into the foot candle calculation.

So I'm going to switch over to a side view of this light fixture and move it up maybe two or three feet up. And move it into the center of the fixture there. So I'll switch over to the other elevation and move it to the center.

And you can set this as high as you want to in there. I'm going to do it probably about three feet for me. Again, that gives me a three-foot wiggle room in there.

So as long as my lights are within three feet of that ceiling then they will be calculated. When I load this back into my project, even though the space is still at 8 feet and my lights are to 10 feet, that calculation point is down into the space. And now I still have a foot candle calculation in there because of that room calculation point.

So again, it's a simple fix. Just turn on that calculation point. I think you do have a lot of lights. They're always turned off by default.

I don't know why it's turned off by default. So you do have to turn them on. But you can open up your light fixtures and turn those on and adjust that calculation point.

Creating key schedules for lighting loads. I did a class last year on schedules, and I talked about key schedules quite a bit in my schedules class. I think key schedules are an overlooked area that we can use in our projects, especially in your templates as far as your Revit template projects.

If you do typical type of work, for example, if you do a lot of hospitals, or if you do a lot of educational facilities, or whatever your niche is, the key schedules could be your new best friend. Because you can go ahead and set up some things in your template for typical room types that will help you in there. So here I'm going to come in here and use a key schedule to set up some typical rooms. In this case, it's going to be a health care facility, and some typical rooms, like an exam room, or a clinical room, or a toilet, or a storage room, and put my desired foot candle loads in this key schedule.

And then I can bring that into my light fixture schedule that has my actual illumination in there based on the lights that I've got in there and compare what I actually wanted to what I actually had, to see if I've got enough lights in there. And so again, I want to create a key schedule to do this. Let me walk you through this.

So again, back in this project, I've got a lot of rooms, a lot of spaces in here. I'm going to go up, and I've got a space schedule already started. So in this space schedule, I've got, basically, I've got the level, the number, the name, and the area already in here. I'm going to go ahead and add the average estimated illumination in there, which is my foot candles, and add that column in there. So we can see, there's my foot candles that I've got in all my spaces.

So now I'm going to go up and start my key schedule. So my key schedule, I'm going to go up and just use the normal Schedule command, and just simply go down and pick on Spaces as my category. Then I'm going to change it and tell it that we want to do a schedule key instead of a normal schedule.

And notice-- let me pause that just for a second right there because this is a little bit important, if I can back this up. Well, I'll come back to that. I can show you right here.

This is what I was trying to show you a while ago. Over here in the-- it's not there yet. I'll show you in just a second. It's going to be in the Properties.

But there's a parameter that was there that I need to know the name of because that's what I'm going to add to my other schedule. Let me start this up again. So I'm going to add a couple parameters in there.

The first one I'm going to add is just a parameter called desired foot candles. And I'm going to change it to be a Electrical type, a Luminance type parameter, and add that in there. I'm going to go ahead and change the name of the one that was in there that said, key space, to be a space type because that made more sense to me as far as the space type.

When you start this, you're going to have a bunch of blank-- there's not going to be anything in it. I'm going to add some blank rows and just start filling in my typical space types that I have on my project. So I'm going to do maybe an exam room, maybe a clinical room, maybe storage, a public space, toilet rooms. Whatever your typical rooms are, you can you make this list as long as you want to and add as many room types as you want to in there.

Then I'm going to go over and put what my desired foot candles are for that type of space. So I'm going to go in and just put some values in there, as far as these are my desired levels for these type of spaces. And once I have this master list, I can use this over and over again. So if I do this in my Revit template, it's always going to be there. And I can start my projects and just start using this.

Once that's done, I'm going to go back to my original space schedule that we had earlier and I'm going to add that schedule key to this schedule. I'm going to go up and find those two parameters, the one called space style, and the other one was called desired foot candles. I'm going to add both of those to my schedule.

I'm going to move them around a little bit. I'm going to move this space style up next to the name so that I can see the name right next to the space style, so I can change this easy as far as knowing with the name of this space is. And this is the only tedious part. You could probably get Dynamo to do some of this for you. Oh, I'm sorry. Let me go ahead and do this first.

I'm going to go ahead and create my calculated value in here. My calculated value is going to basically take the actual foot candle load and subtract that from my desired foot candle. So I can get a delta foot candle load in there. So I can see how much I'm off from my desired level in there.

A simple function in there, as far as a math equation, taking the two and subtracting them out. And now we're going to have a column in there that's going to give me the delta of the difference in there. Like I said, the only tedious part of this is now I've got to go in there and then assign each one of these spaces to be one of those space types. You've got a dropdown that you can use. And just use the dropdown and assign it to be one of your desired space types.

Like I said, you can probably get Dynamo, or something like that to fill that in. I'm just going to fast forward here. And magically, they're all going to be filled in for us. So we need to sit there and watch me fill in all those space types in there.

But as we do that, it's doing the math over there and we've got the delta difference over there for the foot candles. So we know exactly how much we're off, if we have enough light or not enough light. Just to make it a little bit clearer, we can always go back into the scheduled properties. And if we go to the Formatting tab, we can actually do some type of conditional format on that delta foot candle column.

And so I'm going to do a conditional format in there. And I'm going to say, if it's not between maybe minus 50 foot candles and 50 foot candles, if it's not between that, to highlight the cell and make it yellow. And so this is going to make it obvious as far as which rooms, which spaces do not have enough light, or they have too much light. As long as it's within that range, whatever range I put in there, it's going to highlight that.

Of course, you can also do it another way. There's lots of ways do everything in Revit. Just wanted to point this out too. You could do a color plan.

So if you've got a color plan with a legend on the side, you can edit that colorful legend. And you can change it to show foot candles in there by changing, creating a new one in there, and change it to show the average estimated illumination in there.

When I first do this, it's going to make-- every room's got a different level so it's going to have all these different colors in there. But I'm going to go back and do it by range, and just add me some ranges in there so I can see which rooms fall within which range as far as put candles in there. So again, just hit the plus sign. You can add as many ranges as you want to in there.

I did 20-foot candle increments. And now I've got a plan in there that's colored that's giving me a graphical representation of the foot candles that are in there. Again, something pretty simple to do. You're getting information out of your model now.

Any questions about that? How many are doing key schedules, or schedule keys? I always say key schedule. I think it's schedule keys. Very good, very good. All right. So let's move on.

Working with Equipment families. First one I'm want to talk about is a simple task that you can do to your Equipment families. Adding a name to the 3D views.

This comes into play a couple of ways. If you ever do Navisworks, or anything like that, it's very beneficial to have your names on the equipment so you can see what equipment it is in there. It's not hard to do. You simply just have to modify the family and add the name to it.

So let me show you how to do this. So if I go back and start-- I'll just pick. This as an out-of-the-box panel that I put in there. I'm just going to go up and open up this family and edit this family.

And these panels are a little bit screwy, I guess, because they're face based. So first thing I'm going to do is I want to set the face that I want to work on. That's the face of the panel.

I'm going to use the Set command to change my work plane to be that face. And then I'm just going to put a piece of model text, not normal text, but model text on that face in there. So that's going to represent the text that I'm going to have in there.

It comes in pretty big, so I'm going in adjust it. I'm going to make it center justified. And I'll drop it down. Instead of 6 inches deep, I'm going to make it maybe a half inch deep.

Make it a little skinnier in there. And get it nice and centered in there. So there's my model text. I'll go ahead and drop it down too. Instead of 6 inches, I'm going to make it 3 inches tall so it fits a little nicer on that panel there.

Now a couple things that I typically like to do. I want to be able to control this text. I want to be able to see this text or be able to turn it off. So I'm going to go to the Manage tab at the top and actually create me a new subcategory.

And I'll just click the New button and create me a subcategory. I'm going to call it Equipment Name, and just add that subcategory. And then I'm going to go back and pick on the text, the model text, and assign it to be on that category. It's going to be able to have a checkbox inside my Visibility Graphics, that I can turn this off if I want to.

And the other thing that I'm going to do, I'm going to go ahead and change the material of this text it's using. I'm just going to duplicate the default material in there. Give it a new name. I'll call it Model Text.

And go up, and I'll make it a nice pretty color. I'll make it red so it pops out so we can see it. I'm going to change the color of that text in there.

The last thing I'm going to do, I want this text to be intelligent. I want it to automatically fill in the name. So instead of me typing in the name I'm going to go over and assign the parameter for the model text, assign it to be the panel name. And this is going to automatically fill in the panel name for me so I don't have to type it in.

So when I load this back into my project and replace my original panel with the other panel, and simply come in there. We can now see the model text. Now when I name these panels, if I pick on it and go over and start naming these panels, as soon as I change the panel name, the text is going to automatically update. So again, a simple add to your equipment families that just make them a little bit better so that you can see the names of them so you know exactly which panel they are, especially in Glue or Navisworks, or something like that. Pretty cool?

The next question that I get a lot is, what about clearances? None of the Out-of-the-box families has anything for clearances in the family. So how do we create a clearance zone around our equipment? Because you know as well as I do, if we don't do this, somebody is going to take that space with a pipe, or a duct work, or something and we're going to have problems out there. So I typically like to build this clearance zone into my families.

So how do you go about creating a clearance zone? It's pretty simple. Pretty much, you just have to build the geometry, build it into the family.

So if I go back and open up one of these panels again-- and these are a little bit screwy because they are face based. To look at this in Plan view, you actually need to go to an elevation. You got to get your head wrapped around that.

But I'm in the Elevation view, but I see this panel now in Plan view. So in this, I'm going to go ahead and draw me a reference plane. This reference plane is going to represent the depth of my clearance in Plan view, how far out do we need this clearance.

And then I'm going to put me a dimension on there that we can control this with a parameter. So I'll just put a dimension on that, change this dimension to be a label, and create me a parameter, and simply just call it Clearance. This is going to put some parametrics in there so I can change this.

I made it Instant. You could have made it Type. Either way. It'd probably be better to make it Type. But I made this one Instant.

Next, I'm going to go ahead and create my geometry for the clearance. So I'm just going to use the Extrude command and just snap to my grid intersection-- my reference plane to go ahead and lock this extrusion to those reference planes, and create that geometry there. So if I go back now and look at this, it's stuck in there. I want to make sure the height of this is the right height.

So I'm just going to use the Align tool and align this up to the top of the panel. And to get it to be aligned to the bottom, it depends on what you want to do. I want my clearance to go all the way down to the floor, not to the bottom of the panel. I want it to go to the floor.

And so I'm going to create me a reference plane in there and put me a dimension in there to control how low this is going to go. And so I'm going to call this reference plane just simply Clearance Height, and give it a name so we can control that. I'm going to actually going to control this with a formula to automatically fill in this clearance height for me.

So I'll go ahead and align the geometry to that reference plane and lock it so it is going to move with it. And then I'll go in and add my formula. So my formula is simply going to take the-- first of all, I guess I'll change the depth of it to be the three feet.

And then my formula is simply going to be the default elevation of this panel, which is four feet, the very top parameter in there. Changes the default elevation, plus height divided by two. Because right now, it's going to the center line of that panel.

I need to add half of the panel to it. So just add that formula in there. Now it's going to the floor, exactly where I want it to go.

Last two things I'll do is similar to what we did earlier. I want to be able to control this and turn it on and off, and be able to see that. So again, I'll make a new subcategory in here. And I'll call this simply Clearance as far as the subcategory.

And I'll go ahead and change the graph and set this category to be hidden lines instead of a solid line. I'm going to change the line type of this. Go back and assign that geometry to be on that subcategory that I just created. So now I can control that with a simple checkbox.

And the last thing I'll do is change the material of it's. I'll again, duplicate the default material and create a new material called Clearance. I'll make it a nice peachy, orange color, is what I like to make mine. You can make it any color you want to.

But then I'm going to change the transparency of this material to be about 60%, so we can see through this. So I'll change the transparency. Now we have a transparent box in there.

So now when I load this back into my project and replace it with my other previous ones in there, now we can see that Clearance is in there. So there they are. If we want to adjust it, since we did make it parametric, I can pick on this panel, go down and change that dimension to be three feet, four feet, whatever you want it to be as far as the depth of that clearance zone.

And if we want to turn them off, since we did have the subcategory, we can now go into Visibility Graphics. Go down to the Electrical Equipment category, find that Clearance subcategory, and just simply uncheck it. And now they're turned off. So now you got complete control of whether you see that clearance box or not. But again, something easy to build. Yes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE MASSEY: It's a little bit different because those are system families. They're not component families. I don't know of a good way. Does anybody know of a good way of creating some clearance zones?

AUDIENCE: Use an [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE MASSEY: So draw it after you draw the cable tray? Yeah. I don't know of a way to automatically do it. But that's a good way of doing it after the fact, go back in there and add that. It'd be something nice to add.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE MASSEY: Yeah. Any other questions? Yes.

AUDIENCE: If you look at this [INAUDIBLE].

MIKE MASSEY: If you look at this, I'm sorry.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE MASSEY: Yes, as long as the subcategory is turned on, you will see it in Plan view as well, was the question. Since I changed it to be dotted lines as far as the subcategory, which it would represent as dotted lines or hidden lines.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] family or family components perspective, and if you want to show [INAUDIBLE] in Plan views, you should [INAUDIBLE].

MIKE MASSEY: In Plan view? Yeah. So what Bob's talking about is right now in Plan view, we would see the 3D geometry of this clearance box. If we went into the family and told it not to show the 3D geometry in Plan view, just by a simple visibility checkbox, then we could draw just line work. And there are 2D lines to represent in Plan view, make it faster. Yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE MASSEY: A parametric symbol that you can change the size of it? That's a good point, too. Yes.

AUDIENCE: Also, [INAUDIBLE] So when you change it to a parametric.

MIKE MASSEY: Yeah, I guess you could use model lines. But you wouldn't--

AUDIENCE: Plan view.

MIKE MASSEY: In Plan view, yes. Detail lines are going to be thin or smaller, I guess.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE MASSEY: Because the model lines are trying to show in every view, where the detail lines are only going to show it in Plan view.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE MASSEY: Yes. While you're in a Plan view. Yeah, while you're in a Plan view you can do that. OK. People building clearances into your equipment?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE MASSEY: Good.

AUDIENCE: Mike, what happens to this family when you adjust the elevation? Where is the clearance?

MIKE MASSEY: It depends on how you adjust it. On this one, I would change the default elevation to raise it up or down in the family. So that's what I'm using in my formulas, that default elevation, which was four feet to the center of the panel. So then my formula would be four feet plus half the height of the panel. So if I change that default elevation it would change to always be the floor.