Worth 1,000,000 Words

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words....I guess that means that a model must be worth 1,000,000 when we're talking about Revit.

A while back, after I became the Product Manager for Revit MEP, I set out to build a MEP Model to facilitate a number of end goals:

• Becoming more skilled on the Revit Platform, because I am relatively new to Revit in general.
• Becoming more skilled with Revit MEP as a tool, because I need have a strong understanding of the application.
• Identify areas for improvement.  I wanted to see what opportunities I uncovered as part of the modeling and design process.
• Develop a model to showcase some of the features of Revit MEP.

Well, after countless hours of work, I figured I'd release the model out into the "wild" for you all to investigate.  This will be my holiday gift to everyone.

Download it here -> Urban House MEP

Nothing's perfect in the model, but it does contain pretty much all major building services, outside of lighting, as I haven't added that yet. 

A couple of things to check out:

• Use of View Templates and View Filters - I spent a huge amount of time setting up all of these, but once I did it's very easy to create a new view and achieve the desired appearance.  Using the Transfer Project Settings functionality I can move these to other projects, or better yet I could have done this work in my Project Template before I even started the Project.
• Schedules - I added a few different schedules that use our Embedded Schedule and Conditional Formatting functionality.  I haven't populated enough Parameters to produce Production Level schedules, but you might find some of the grouping and calculations I've used interesting.
• Analytical Model - I've set up the model for Heating & Cooling Load Calculations, including defining the Energy Analysis Parameters.
• Use of Modeling Views - In order to maintain the correct appearance on Sheet views, I created Modeling views, which allowed me to use the Wireframe Model Graphics Style, while still maintaining the Sheet views, which used Hidden Lines and contained all of my Tags.
• Sheets - I made some basics sheets for a few disciplines.  Nothing special here, except for maybe the Title Block....
• Sloped Piping - I'm no Public Services Engineer, so I'm sure my design violates everything holy to that trade, but nonetheless there's some sloped piping in there for my drain systems.  I had to get intimately acquainted with the Trim, Connect Into, and Align tools to successfully model those systems.  I've got a partially completed post on those tools for modeling.  Expect that in the future.

Comments

[jlondenberg]

Did you intend to make the project file downloadable? Where is the link?

[Chris]

So where is this MEP model you created? Am I missing a link somewhere?

[Cristian Neira]

where do I download the model?

[ML Purdy]

So, how long did it take you to accomplish all of the tasks mentioned in your blog?

[Kyle Bernhardt]

I honestly was not timing how long everything took. It certainly did take a while, since it was my first time going though the whole process.

I would suspect it would take half the time were I to start with a good template and better understanding of modeling like I have now.

Kyle