Last Saturday I read an article over at RCB (RobiNZ CAD Blog) titled “Why doesn’t Revit have a model browser?”….and it reminded me of my first experience with Revit, and why I need to revisit the program.

That  first experience with Revit came when the Autodesk VAR for the company I worked for at the time (this was 4ish years ago) tried to convince my boss that Revit was the “way to go” for ship interior structures. He gave the company a trial version to check out, and it fell upon me to giver-a-whirl……which I did. I found that it could not create the shapes of the rooms we needed among other things. The specifics elude me, but the program was shot down pretty quick.

Things may have changed in the interim, but I find it unlikely.  Yachts are a meld of transportation, extreme luxury, limited space, and bodacious angularity that does not lend itself well to pre defined structural paradigms. Other people seem to have come to similar conclusions:
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This is a new one to me. I can no longer insert images in Autodesk Inventor! Trying to save a part with an inserted image first caused first a ‘Failure’, immediately followed by a ‘Problem’, which then lead to a crash.

 The image below shows pretty well how things started. I was working on the tankless water heater BIM part seen in the image, and was performing the very last step – adding the logo image.  Which went well as it always does …………………..until I hit save.

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For those of you who have created your own background image for Inventor and need a color scheme to match –or if you just want to fine tune things to fit your style, there is a way to do so.

The stock color schemes that ship with Inventor are, in my opinion, just fine for most people for the majority of uses. But, with a white background such as the one used for the ‘Presentation’ color scheme,  there is a problem with a couple items that use yellow as their color such as the work axes  shown below (click)…

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If you didn’t sleep through the previous post, you were promised some stuff at the very end. This is that stuff. It took longer than it should have as I had to get some drawings to the plumber. Without further ado…

The next part needed in this assembly is another 4” ‘Long Sweep’ elbow that goes somewhere below the circle that represents the closet flange penetration. To place this part, I needed to align the axis of one of its legs to an axis running through the center of the circle parallel to the Z Origin Axis. That axis does not exist, so I needed to create it.

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A quick note about structure before I continue. All of the layout sketches and work features being created are located within the Plumbing Layout.ipt part file which is located within the Plumbing_08-25-10.iam. All of the plumbing parts are located in the same assembly as can be seen in the image of the Browser Bar to the above (click).

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For this series of articles, the Routed System of choice will be your average everyday home plumbing. The DWV (drain, waste, and vent) system to be exact.  

The DWV layout I am using as an example is for is for a little eco cottage design that has all of the mechanicals running through chases and partition walls to keep the thermal envelope as intact as possible — but the technique will work on any design equally well. Also of note is that the design has a FPSF (frost Protected Shallow Foundation) slab……which means there is only one chance to get things right.

The Penetrations

The penetration drawing is a plan view sketch that shows where the various pipes pass through the structure at whatever level is represented. It is created  as the first sketch in a part file located in the overall plumbing assembly. This is a hold-over from ship design days, but it works on houses as well.  

For this particular house, you can see that the stack and vents run up a 2” x 6” partition wall. There is a wet vent at the other end of the wall as well, but is not shown. All of these penetrations run down the center of the wall, and can be drawn on the same plane, which is where I started.

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