Mechanical Equipment Visibility Toggles

Due to the fact that mechanical equipment in Revit can be as vague a category to include hot water heaters (plumbing), air handling units (HVAC), and fire pumps (fire protection), we need to utilize filters to turn off items that are shown on incorrect discipline drawings. Additionally, some equipment needs to be on in HVAC hydronic drawings and not HVAC Air and vice-versa.

Up to this time, many filters with project specific criteria had been created to address this issue. Sometimes even the "hide in view" command was used. This could become cumbersome, confusing and unreliable. Now we have a new and hopefully better way to accomplish this separation. There are now six project parameters that are specific to mechanical equipment. These parameters are visibility toggles for the various trades' equipment, helping to provide another level of control and isolation. They are type parameters which mean that the control will be by type of equipment and not by the instance.

Below is a dialog of the type properties of a Cabinet Unit Heater:

Under the visibility portion of the dialog, you will see the six new toggles that will help us control the object visibility across the whole project. By default, until set otherwise, all toggles are "soft" checked on. This means that the object is visible in any view with mechanical equipment enabled.

In the case of this Cabinet Unit Heater, we know that the only views in the mechanical trades that we will want this visible in is the Mechanical Piping (hydronic).

To make this happen we would uncheck the Equipment Fire Protection, Equipment HVAC Air, Equipment Plumbing, Equipment HVAC Air and Hydronic and Equipment HVAC Air/Hydronic and Plumbing. We will dark check the equipment HVAC Hydronic. Now, based on view templates and the filter configurations within, this equipment type will ONLY be visible on the Mechanical Piping views.

Note that if the object needs to be visible in the multiple trade drawings, like in the case of chilled beams or air handling units with coils and drains, the toggle that includes all types of views needed can be checked to ensure that all required views show the object.

Remember that if no action is taken by the user, the equipment will default to visible in every view that mechanical equipment is on, as it has been to date. [if !supportLineBreakNewLine] [endif] [if !supportLineBreakNewLine] [endif] [if !supportLineBreakNewLine] [endif] [if !supportLineBreakNewLine] [endif]