So You Want to Model All Services in One Model?

..but you don’t have an all services template to start with. How do you go about setting this up?

Firstly start with any one of your company MEP templates. Be it mechanical, electrical or hydraulics it doesn’t matter.

Next step is to bring the families across. You can either load all the required families via the Insert tab on the ribbon and then Load Family or you link and bind a blank project of the remaining templates into your new project. The reason I say link and bind is just to make sure that you get absolutely everything. Only load the families that are required though. Don’t load every single family you have into the model. You need duct, cable tray, conduit and pipe, plus a few generic air terminals, light fittings and valves, that should be enough for any combined services template.

Once you have all the families loaded, transfer the project standards from each of the remaining templates that you just bound in. Even though you have loaded the families in, you will not get settings through such as project parameters, pipe/duct/cable tray sizing and routing methods, systems, schedules, view filters and view templates. Transferring the project standards will bring this remaining information across.

Once you’ve done this, get each discipline to test their service briefly to make sure everything works as intended. At this point, you should save your file as your new single MEP template.

Now, when it comes to working in the combined discipline template, each discipline should be on their own workset. Name the worksets something sensible and easy to split between disciplines.

i.e.

Ceiling level electrical services
Electrical basement
Links
Hydraulic ground floor
Water hydraulics
Workset 1

This is a list of actual worksets I encountered when reviewing a model. This is the wrong way to go about it, there isn’t even consistency between the one discipline.

AA – Arch Links
CIV – Civil Links
EL – Lighting
EL – Power
HY – Drainage
HY – Water
ME – Chilled Water
ME – Ducting
STR – Structure Links
XX – Shared Levels and Grids

is the right way to go about it. The discipline abbreviation code to begin the workset name makes it easy to find what you want to work with, the remainder of the name is as simple as you can make it.

Don’t go overboard with worksets, as they start to become too much to handle. One per discipline or sub discipline is usually enough, just keep in mind how many people will be needing to work on the project and how big the models might become.

Set all the discipline worksets so that they’re not visible in all views by default and set the common worksets such as those for linked files and grids to on in all views, this just makes things a little easier when creating new views, you turn on your discipline workset rather than figuring out what needs to be turned on and off each time.

Set up the project browser using a few parameters to assist you with sorting your files. Consider sorting your files by discipline as a minimum, however you can sort a step further if you want to sort into sub disciplines or building areas.

From here on out it’s just good model management and good modelling practices.

  • Keep on top of people moving stuff that they’re not supposed to. If you’re an electrical modeller that wants to move some hydraulic pipework because your inground conduits are going to clash or vice versa, go and speak to the relevant team before shifting their elements.
  • Make sure correct worksets are being used. Don’t model on any of the common worksets and don’t model on another discipline’s workset.
  • Audit the model once every 1 – 2 weeks and make a new central file at the same time. This also means each modeller will need to recreate their local file as well.
  • Delete all the views that aren’t required, with multiple modellers in the same model, you end up with so many working views and sections that it slows the models down. I find a good time to clean out the views is after a major issue.
  • If you don’t want to lose a section or a view that you’ve been using, add a working view category to your project browser and apply usernames to the views, that way when redundant views are removed, you wont lose anything you’ve been working on.
  • If you’re creating a section detail that hasn’t been referenced to a drawing sheet yet, make it clear that you don’t want the section deleted. Setup a tempory section marker that makes it obvious that the section is being used.

Finally, 100 is a nice round number to remember. The aim would be to keep the model under 100mb, but it’s not just about file size. Try limit the number of views and sheets to 100 as well. i.e. 100 of each, not 50 of each. This is all just about keeping the model speedy and usable and also limiting possible errors as the project progresses. It’s not a definitive rule, just a bit of a guide based on working on large projects.

 

3 thoughts on “So You Want to Model All Services in One Model?

  1. avatar Brian Ottley says:

    Model all services in one model??. Have you moved over here to the dark side?

    Regards

    Brian

  2. avatar Ryan Lenihan says:

    Haha, yes and no Brian. I think there is a lot of education required amongst our group. Even on small jobs I’ve experienced a bit of a struggle amongst users. There are however more requests every day for all services models, mostly though from the perspective of “it will be easier for me to setup” without a lot of consideration for how the project will operate.

    I still think that a decision should be made on a project by project basis depending on size, but also where the work will be getting done. i.e. all in one office or not.

  3. avatar Brian Ottley says:

    All jobs I work on at the moment are single services models, even if the project is broken into several models. I think it is just the way the industry is moving.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.