autocad® mep 2012 and autodesk® navisworks® tips · pdf fileautocad® mep 2012...

AutoCAD® MEP 2012 and Autodesk® Navisworks® Tips and Tricks for the Daily User

Chris Lanahan - Southland Industries - Sr. Design Modeler / Detailer Derek Renn - Kelar Pacific - AEC Technical Manager Darren Young - Southland Industries - Systems Integration Manager

MP3243 In this class, you will learn tips and tricks to get through setting up and using AutoCAD MEP 2012

and Autodesk Navisworks Manage on a daily basis. We will describe basic and mid-level helpful workarounds for sloped and flat piping and plumbing in MEP. We will cover catalog and palette tips and helpful resources and how to manage workspaces to your advantage. We will also share some lessons learned on large projects. While the main focus is going to be on piping systems a lot of this lesson could be used for duct routing as well.

MP3243

Learning Objectives

At the end of this class, you will be able to:

• Create and support a productive Template.

• Draw and Modify Slope Waste piping in AutoCAD MEP

• Create Bill of Materials and Cut sheets for fabrication.

• Create or add piping systems and routing definitions easily. • Modify layer keys and label curves to have the pipe annotate automatically to your specifications.

• Create and modify palette content to better aide in piping design.

• Create and implement a standard Navis Manage Profile for Daily Use and coordination.

About the Speaker

Chris is the Sr. Design Modeler / Detailer at Southland Industries in Southern California. Working for a design build contractor, Chris has found a niche in BIM and learning how to put all the puzzle pieces together to facilitate the processes of the industries growing coordination needs. Starting out as a plumbing contractor with a desire to "design" instead of install piping systems, he is a self-taught piping and plumbing designer going from board drafting to cad and now to “BIM”. With a skill for learning and teaching software it has taken through many versions of the Autodesk software.

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AutoCAD® MEP 2012 and Autodesk® Navisworks® Manage Tips and Tricks for the Daily User

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Create and support a productive Template:

What does it take to sit at your workstation and do your work in an efficient and productive manner? As with any job, it is the tools that you use to make things it easier and more user friendly. A really smart, well thought out template is the best way to start productivity. There is a huge amount of setup and info that a template can hold.

Let’s look at what we can setup in your template:

1. Piping System Definitions and Routing Preferences. 2. Dimension and Text styles and Units settings. 3. Preset Layers and Line-types settings, plot-styles and layouts. 4. Style manager settings, label curve and schedules. 5. Catalogs and Workspace settings.

While I don’t want to make this a class on “CUIX” or custom lisp routines, these are both good tools to have knowledge of. Learning how to tweak and change the settings is really helpful. I will get into a few good setup items that will make designing easier. The style manager is the easiest and most powerful way to customize without making CUIX changes directly.

You’re AutoCAD Profile:

This is the basis of all of your customized setting. You can have multiple profiles, but the more you have the more confusing it gets. I would suggest using one profile and multiple workspaces. Once you get all your customization complete (that’s funny) you can save your profile. You can get to the profile by typing “options” at the command line or right mouse click on the command line and selecting options. You can start a new profile or simply modify an existing one, but either way the best thing to do is to take charge of AutoCAD and make the program do what you want to.


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Style Manager:

This is probably one of my favorite places to customize for piping. There are a ton of settings and set-up you can do to be more productive inside of the style manager. Let’s take a look at the basics parts of the style manager and break down the general areas we will cover. You can find the style manager on the manage tab of the ribbon.

This is where the automatic annotation for piping callouts comes from.

This is the place all the general info for schedule, tags and labels are stored.

This is the default location for all of your schedule table templates.

This is the place we will be doing a lot of setup and customization along with the system definitions. This is a key part of making things easier when piping is properly setup in routing.

This is the location for all of your piping systems. This is where you can preset all of the piping systems you will design with.

This is a real power house for customizing piping systems. It is really a layer manager for the piping systems.


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Dimension and Text styles and Units settings:

You should have all of these options setup in your template so they are always available for use without having to go back and change your setup.

Preset Layers and Line-types settings, plot-styles and layouts:

All of your layer and line-type settings should be included in your template. An example would be an “xref” layer that is locked so you could take advantage of the layer lock fade control settings. You can have your xref be faded now in the background and locked for safety of keeping it in place. Another good preset is a pipe insulation layer. Having a preset insulation layer in your template will allow you to force piping insulation to its own manageable layer through the display manager. But the layer must be in the template first to be able to utilize it.

Piping System Definitions and Routing Preferences:

This is the most important part of a good piping system. It is without a doubt the heart and soul of all your systems. Again we will look at this deeper in later segments.

Catalogs and Workspace settings:

This is the second most important part of a good piping system. It is where you will do presets for piping and choose how and what you see in any given workspace.

Draw and Modify Slope Waste piping in AutoCAD MEP:

When trying and I stress a lot of “trying” to master sloped piping in MEP, I have discovered the one really important thing to have is Patience. In trying to design and detail piping in MEP I have found that you can always expect is the unexpected. What I mean by this is that the “sticky move” is not always your friend and in AutoCAD MEP trying to be helpful sometimes it hurts more than helps. Trying to just drag a simple 90 degree bend can be a huge pain.

Trying to add a simple 90 deg. bend to this island vent waste system can cause problems. Just grabbing the add grip on the pipe and adding a fitting can “move” other fittings around into unwanted spots. As you can see, MEP has “adjusted” the location of the combination and san-tee in the snapshots above. In the last snapshot, one simple break of the branch pipe can stop this from happening. While you cannot easily add the pipes together, I find it better to just delete both ends of pipe and let it auto-fill between the fittings by the pipe add grip to re-populate the pipe in between them.


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Sloped piping is a challenge to say the least and more like an art-form. There are many designers that struggle with sloped piping systems because you can really get messed up quickly trying to drag things around as you would flat piping systems. What would be really good is a pin command in AutoCAD that would let you “pin” down a main line of the system so it cannot move on you (wish list item for sure).

Some of the key settings for slope piping are:

TIP: One thing that is critical to you while drawing in MEP is to always have your solution tips ON and

showing during your piping session. This is the only way to know you are both accurate and the schedule and material lists are correct. Image 1: Solution tips On, System is connected. Image 2: Solution tips Off, Riser moved up 2”. Image 3: Solution tips On, 2” gap revealed.

Piping System Definitions: This is the piping system you are designing with. This is controlled by layer key styles. Examples would be DCW, DHW, VENT, SS systems

Routing Preferences: This is what will decide what type of fittings; pipe and joints are used while drawing piping systems. Examples would be Cast Iron, Copper Pro-Press, Copper Brazed, Threaded Steel, Butt-Welded steel, etc.

This is the starting elevation of the piping system you are about to draw

This is where you set the slope of your piping system. (1/48 is ¼” per foot of slope getting shallower as you draw, -1/48 would be ¼” per foot getting deeper as you draw the piping. This setting can be fractional or angle (decimal) format. IE: 1/48 is equal to 2% slope angle.

Label styles are what annotate the pipe as you draw it or when you need it to annotate on demand.

Image 1 Image 2 Image 3


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Lets look at some of the problems that might arise from the screenshots above:

• If you decided to stretch the main line using grip editing the riser would remain in place.

• MEP part numbering would have a problem with this disconnect.

• The gap would be 1” short of pipe in a bill of materials (BOM) schedule.

• If you changed an elevation of the main line the riser pipe would remain unchanged.

In drawing pipe and fittings there are editing commands in the “MEP” world that work better than the standard AutoCAD commands. A good example would be using the pipe edit grips to slide a branch line 12” to the left rather using the stretch command.

TIP: Primarily as a rule, It is always better when drawing piping systems to use the MEP osnap’s instead of the generic AutoCAD osnap’s. Leave the generic osnap’s turned off, if you need to use them use your shift + right mouse button will bring up all the osnap overrides.

There are four views shown below of some pipe and a combination fitting. The pipe is sloped at ¼” per foot fall as well as the fitting. What if you wanted to roll the “comby” on a 45° angle. There is a far better way to do this than the standard “rotate3d” command, the MEP grips will let you easily change direction of the fitting and flip from side to side. How to roll the fitting 45° it is the question and desired angle. As long as the fitting does not have a coupling or pipe branch attached you will see a diamond rotate grip when you select the fitting. If you have your dynamic input (F6) on you will get an option to roll the fitting to any input angle. There are two forms of input, absolute and relative and use the tab key you can cycle thru them.


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Create Bill of Materials and Cut sheets for

fabrication:

It is possible in AutoCAD MEP to design in 3d to create a BOM with a full material list ready for prefab, in these screenshots I have drawn a small waste system, using the MEP part numbering tools and a schedule with a few specific property sets attached to it. We can also add part numbers to it and create a spool or prefab drawing for fabrication and installation. This is a fairly easy thing to do, with a few tweaks to the schedule and some creative use-age of tags and blocks. Let’s take a look at this process.

This is a step by step method to get a bill of materials and a cut sheet with part numbering as well.

1. Create the desired system to be scheduled. Remember that if you select too much at a time the drawing will get busy fast. It is best to break systems up into smaller spools.

2. On the Annotate Ribbon go to the scheduling/tags panel and select the pull-down menu, choose the text part numbering tag. This will bring up the numbering dialog box. Check the radio button for individual objects and pick the select objects button. This will put you into a selection mode, you can just window all of the pipe and fittings and hit the enter key. When the dialog box comes back choose “ok”. This will start the auto numbering of all pipe and fittings. When finished with the numbering choose one of the numbers and the leader and right mouse click choose “select similar”. This will highlight all the numbering you just inserted. Then hit the delete key or “e” end enter, deleting all the numbers you just added to the drawing (I know this sounds funny, but let me explain). We do not need these numbers as we will be numbering later in paper space through the viewport. We only need the property set involved from the part numbering routine. Once the numbering routine is run and all parts have a part numbering property set associated with them.


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3. We will now add a generic schedule to the drawing in model space. Go to the Annotate ribbon and the scheduling/schedules panel and select the pull-down menu. For this I will choose the pipe quantity schedule to use since it is a small schedule with little to get info rid of. We will be adding our own column and info preferences to the schedule thru property sets available to us. Select the schedule and right mouse click on it. In the dialog box choose the “edit schedule table style”. This takes us to the dialog box for editing the schedule. You can add and delete and columns in your schedule. We will add two more columns in this schedule shown here to get a couple more columns we need. One of them is a pipe object property column and the other is a formula column for sorting. It wasn’t really fair for the fab shop to have to sort through a pipe than a fitting all mixed together, so I wanted the pipe to sort first, small pipe size to large and then by fitting type. I don’t need these columns for any but the sort order of the columns, so I will hide the columns by selecting the hide check box when I am inserting the formula. Once we get the schedule in order all there is to add is the part numbering in the paper space view. This is done using a standard part number tag. Without getting too involved in the setup, I am providing a screenshot of the tag I am using for the part numbering. The real beauty of using this tag is that you can use this tag for the pipe and fittings through paper space right in your page layout. This will allow you to place all the part numbers in a logical order instead of just dumping all the tags into a huge clump in the middle of the sheet. It may take a few minutes longer but it comes out much cleaner this way


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Create or add piping systems and routing definitions easily:

When you are doing pipe routing in MEP the entire piping system is basically relying on three things; System definitions, Layer keys and routing preferences.

In the next section we will add a new system definition and a routing preference in the style manager and explain the how-to’s of these two settings.

System Definitions:

Go to the style manager on the manage tab and select the arrow under the style manager. This is the pull-down for the two settings we are going to be doing the system editing in. Select the piping system definitions and a dialog box will come up in the piping systems area of the style manager. In this section on the left pane we will right mouse click on the standard piping system and copy and paste a new system into the piping systems. In the right pane we will add the abbreviation of “SS” and in the layer field we will add a discipline designator for PL and a minor 1 for the “SS” field as well. We will also tell the system to use the layer key shown for

layer name, color and line-type. This will do a few things, first when the pipe is annotated it will read both the size and the “SS” for the system callout on the plan view and also as you draw piping on this system it will automatically create it on a PL-SANR layer. In the routing preference we will do the same copy of the standard routing and edit for our use. We will now open the layer keys in the style manager.

Layer Keys:

This is a screen shot of the layer keys in the style manager. The Layer keys are sort of like the layer manager for MEP objects pipe and fittings, and it is used for controlling the way piping looks, its annotation, color and layer name. We need to add the layer info for this system into the layer keys.


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Routing Preferences:

We will now create a waste piping routing definition. When the routing dialog box is open you have to select the default pipe and fittings to be used by this routing preference for each system drawn. Start out in the same way as the system definition and copy the standard routing pref. and rename it to Sanitary Waste. The screen shot below shows the fittings I have chosen from the menu pull-down for each type of part in my waste system. For each of the parts needed we are able to select the desired fitting wanted. This also includes what type of pipe you will use. Once we get the routing system defined we will copy /paste it and change a few fittings to be used for the vent system. The only changes I will make for the vent system is the no-hub combination and the short sweep will be exchanged for a san tee and a quarter bend. Using the “pipeadd” command we will draw some waste piping with the new system definition and routing preferences. You can see by the screen shots that I have selected the system and routing pref., pipe size, elevation and slope prior to drawing any piping in the properties dialog box. And the overlay image is the properties palette of the pipe I just created.

Looking at the properties of the piping, you can see how the system definition, layer keys and routing preferences all come together. You can also see that the system definition and routing preferences worked on the new piping and that we did get the correct fittings for our system.

Modify layer keys & label curves make pipe annotate automatically to your specifications:

When I first started in MEP I was not satisfied with the standard auto annotation of the piping. It didn’t give the info I needed or proper layer settings. I needed to fix that, so I dove into the label curves and had a go at it. Let’s look at how a label curve works. What it is doing is grabbing property set definitions from the pipe object you select and the layer override from the system definition we added. Remember the “SS” we added in the system definition? That is what it was for. Look at the style manager for the documentation/label curve styles. Do the same things as before and copy/paste the standard label curve


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and we will rename it to “PIPE-SIZE-ANNO”. There are not too many settings we need to adjust in the label curve style; just a few tweaks and we are ready to annotate some piping.

This is what I get now if I add the new label curve to a piece of pipe. If you notice that the layer matches the system and each time you draw piping on a new system and annotate it, the anno layer for that system will automatically be created. This helps when trying to isolate a system or only plot certain systems to a plan sheet. It is very important to create

Create and modify palette content to maintain standardization in piping design:

In trying to make it as easy as possible for a user to design a piping system in MEP, it seems pretty easy to just draw piping from the standard piping palette. But, there were a lot variables in doing this for the user to decide on and in some cases use incorrectly. Some of the questions that came up were; what routing preference and system definition do I use? What elevation do I use? What layer name should I use? What color should the piping be? We are constantly trying to standardize things to make life easier and all these questions left too many open ends for people to tweak and change. What I think a layer will be called likely will not be the same as what you would call it. Maybe I like cyan pipe for cold water and you like blue. This was a huge concern when you have 15 engineers and 25 detailers all trying to play in the same sandbox together. While this is not a huge problem, it would always come back and haunt me later when someone would say that their drawings were not plotting correctly and always under crucial deadlines. In diving into the root of the problem, most of these were from color and layer overrides or not following company standards since we use a .ctb to plot drawings. The common task and goal here is to take a model from the design/engineering phase of the project and use the same model all the way through fabrication. Sounds easy enough, right?

Presets are a key to the setup we use for our company. Although some of the presets are just temporary, most of the project in the engineering phase are “schematic and the elevations are not the most important factor. Just getting the engineers to commit to 3D was a huge task. By creating presets

This is the new label curve we just created.

Use object props. and abbr. settings. This is where the size will come

The text style for the new label curve

This will mask smaller pipe sizes around the label

This tells the label to use the layer overrides we made.


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on a palette and showing them the ease of changing pipe sizes on the fly and auto annotation of pipe, we were able to make the smooth change to design conceptually in 3D in the engineering department. Let’s look at the piping palettes side by side. Out of the box MEP gives a preset in many different methods of creating pipe systems. Our palette adds more control over the company standards and though the piping systems had preset properties already, MEP lets you change them on the fly when needed. What I did was to add control for a specific piping system variables though the palette for our piping systems. When a user wants to draw waste pipe horizontally, they can choose the icon from the customized palette and all they have to do is select a pipe size from the palette and edit the elevation if needed and they are drawing to the company standards with little thought about setup at all. In our company standard shortcuts for the “pipeadd” command we have set up all the backend settings for each system to make it really easy to just think about piping and let the program presets manage the standard settings for you. On the standard MEP palette you get a couple of different choices in different categories, but in ours you can see all the variables are preset for the user ahead of time. We can preset all of the following for the user ahead of time; layer keys, system definitions, routing preferences, pipe size, elevation, slope angle (if needed), and even the pipe label curve style. Now this is productive and easy to start designing a piping system.


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Create and implement a standard Navis Manage Profile for Daily Use and coordination:

In using Navis Manage on a daily basis there was a lot learning and training to do and plenty of lessons learned in the process. Once Navis manage is in place, coordination and collision detection are started on a project, the demand for Navis is pretty much non-stop. At our company we practically live and breathe Navis now. One thing is for sure Navis Manage works smoother with consistency. There must be standardization and consistency to maintain a steady workflow. There is nothing more frustrating than to work the entire day sorting out collisions in a model and have someone lose all the work by overwriting your clash report. We needed to implement a standard template for the users and enforce it to get a steady flow and most importantly productivity.

A really helpful thing to have in the Navis model your use is some form of 3D grid in the model. It is really important when you are in the coordination process that the users know exactly where they are at in the model without having to zoom in and out all of the time to find out their bearings and grid locations. We have found it best to have a 3D grid about 1’-0” above the floor and about the same above the highest steel in the model.

Here are a couple of grid samples we have seen in our coordination models:

Keyboard shortcuts

There are many keyboard shortcuts that you can use in Navis Manage, here are a few:

Ctrl+D Toggles Collision mode (in the apropriate navigation mode)

Ctrl+F Displays the Quick Find dialog

Ctrl+G Toggles Gravity mode

Ctrl+H Toggles Hidden mode for selected items

Ctrl+M Displays the Merge dialog

Ctrl+R Toggles Required mode for selected items

Ctrl+T Toggles Third person mode

Ctrl+F1 Opens the Help system

Ctrl+F2 Opens the Clash Detective window

Ctrl+F3 Toggles the TimeLiner window

Ctrl+F4 Toggles the Presenter window

Ctrl+F5 Toggles the Animator window

Ctrl+F6 Toggles the Scripter window

Ctrl+F7 Toggles the Tilt window

Ctrl+F8 Toggles the Sectioning toolbar (classic UI)

Ctrl+F9 Toggles the Plan View window

Ctrl+F10 Toggles the Section View window

Ctrl+F11 Toggles the Viewpoints control bar

Ctrl+F12 Toggles the Selection Tree control bar

Ctrl+0 Turns on Turntable mode

Ctrl+1 Turns on Select mode

Ctrl+2 Turns on Walk mode

Ctrl+3 Turns on Look around mode

Ctrl+4 Turns on Zoom mode

Ctrl+5 Turns on Zoom Box mode

Ctrl+6 Turns on Pan mode

Ctrl+7 Turns on Orbit mode

Ctrl+8 Turns on Examine mode

Ctrl+9 Turns on Fly mode

PgUp Zooms to view all objects in the Scene view

PgDn Zooms to magnify all selected objects

Home Enables view selected mode

F11 Toggles full screen mode

F12 Opens the Options editor


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There are many ways to select objects in Navis Manage and one of the best ways we have found is to use selection sets to group objects. This is done by selecting a group of objects and choosing the save selection panel on the home tab ribbon. The items can be selected either using a pick off method or through the selection tree at a file or object level. It really does not matter how the objects are selected, once you get them all selected you can make a selection set and call up that group of objects at any time you need them. This is how we are now doing our collision coordination. It is fast and very simple to get a bunch of objects together and it also is searchable for use if needed.

Another really good tip when trying to create selection sets in Navis Manage is to utilize the shift key while you are selecting an object. This will aide in your selection of similar objects in a scene. As you select an object holding down the shift key, it will cycle thru that object as a single object. As you keep selecting the same object holding the shift key down it cycles through all objects that alike. Navis will cycle you through the objects at different hierarchy levels per pick. Object level, entire scene level, file or drawing level, system or object type, then back to object again. This is really helpful if you are trying to selection all of the walls that are similar, or all duct in a scene for a selection set. Once you have selected the desired objects you can on the home tab/ save selection panel to create a selection set of the items.

A helpful tool we use in our models is transparency overrides in the model. This helps us to see objects like framing and structural objects without being blocked from seeing the piping and ductwork we are trying to manage. You can make any object in Manage transparent by right mouse clicking on the object and choosing the override item/ override transparency option to bring up the slider for making items see through. This can be done also anywhere and at any level of the selection tree. Just as you can change the transparency of objects in Navis, you can also change the color of objects and coordinate trades as I show below. This easily helps others in coordination know what discipline you are trying to focus on. This is really helpful in a crowded model with all trades brought in.

NWNAVIGATOR is another user friendly feature of Navis Manage that has become indispensible to us. It gives the user the ability to use a Navis like interface right inside of AutoCAD. At the command prompt if you type nwnavigator, this will bring up the window in AutoCAD that will let you visually see your model just as you would in Navis manage.

A really helpful tool they have added into manage is the batch utility for making Navis files automatically for coordination. We spend hours at a time in coordination meeting and have to rely on always having the latest and most current files at the time of the meeting. By using the batch utility and using the windows task scheduler we are making files on our projects in the evening automatically, so when the detailers come in to work or we go to a coordination meeting the files are as current as possible. We have batch routines in places that copy dwg files into a specified folder, the batch utility opens the file in Navis and creates the NWC/NWD file automatically for use in the morning.

Navis Settings

Global Options Setting

Display unit: set to Inches. This will read as decimal inches. Fractions do not work with negative fractions less than an inch. Snap setting: turn on for vertex, edge and line vertex. File reader settings: Convert xref’s and merge xref layers turned off.


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File option setting

Backface culling should be set to off. This will stop the objects from disappearing as you get really close or inside of it.

Clash Detective Set-up

During the Coordination phase, Navis Clash Detective should be run with following Set-ups: (This is the typical setup for our company and you can adjust accordingly for yourself.)

• Batch Tab The Batch tab

enables you to

manage your clash

tests and results. It

shows the entire

clash tests currently

set up, listed in a

table format. You

can use the scroll

bars at the right and

at the bottom of the

tab to move through

the clash tests.

Naming and Color conventions will better aide in the coordination process.

Trade identification might be as follows:

� MH = Mech. HVAC Duct

� MP = Mech. Pipe

� PL = Plumbing

� FP = Fire Protection

� EL = Electrical/Lighting

� PT = Pneumatic Tube

� AW = Architectural Wall/Studs

� RC = Reflected Ceiling

� ST = Structural Steel/Concrete

� SS = Supplemental Steel

o The Rules tab enables you to define and customize ignore rules to be applied to clash tests. It lists all currently available rules. These can be used to make Clash Detective

ignore certain model geometry during a clash test. Each of the default rules can be

edited and new rules may be added as necessary.

o The following Clash Rules will be checked that will ignore clashes if: � Items in same layer: any items found clashing that are in the same layer are not

reported in the results.


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� Items in same group/block/cell: any items found clashing that are in the same

group (or inserted block) are not reported in the results.

� Items in same file: any items found clashing that are in the same file (either

externally referenced or appended) are not reported in the results.

� Items in same composite object: any items found clashing that are part of the

same composite object (an item composed of multiple parts of geometry) are not

reported in the results.

� Items in previously found pair of composite objects: any items found clashing

that are part of composite objects (items composed of multiple parts of geometry)

that have previously been reported in the test are not reported in the results.

A Batch Test could be set-up for all

jobs with the following batch files

� Trade (XX) vs. AW: batch for each

trade vs. 3D walls and stud as

provided per job.

• Architectural model to have

studs and top track on

separate layer to be able to

isolate the top track to

eliminate all false collision for

vertical pipe penetrations.

• If possible, top and bottom

track to be modeled showing

two edge pieces and no back

(part that attaches to deck) to

eliminate false clashes for

penetration, but identify

sleeves/pipes that are out of

wall.

� Trade(XX) vs. ST: Batch for each trade vs. structural steel, supplemental steel or slab or

footings

� Trade (XX) vs. RC: Batch for each trade vs. reflected ceiling plan if available or a separate

file.

� MEP vs. MEP: All trades vs. each other in one batch for internal and external coordination

tracking.

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