Quick Placement of Pipe Fittings

Posted on December 22, 2016 by Synergis Product Support Specialist, Mark Lancaster
This year I had the opportunity to attend and co-speak at Autodesk University (2016).  Hard to believe it has already come and gone especially when it’s your first time attending this event.  It was a great week and some of us are already in the planning stage of what we’re doing next year.   If you haven’t been to AU, I strongly suggest that you attend this coming year…  It’s worth every penny spent.
But my article is not about AU as you can see by the title.  Instead, I wanted to share a routed system tips & tricks that you may not be aware of.  Prior to AU and while reviewing my co-anchor’s (Chris Benner) presentation, I came across a little tip (or trick) that I was not even aware of in routed system.  So let me share Chris’ information directly from our AU handout:
The primary tool used to add fittings to a pipe route, is the “Place” tool.  This is found on the Pipe Runs tab of the ribbon.
This tool takes you to the Content Center where you must navigate your folders until you find the fitting you are looking for, and then select the correct instance from the Family table.  If the fitting you need is already in use, anywhere in your assembly, there is a much quicker way to insert another instance of it.  First, and I cannot stress this enough, never, ever, ever use Copy and Paste in a Tube & Pipe assembly.  Ever.  This can cause serious problems later, such as not being able to delete any extra fittings that you pasted.  Instead, use the tool found next to Place on the same ribbon tab: Place Fitting.
This tool, selected directly from the ribbon, will take you to your file paths, local or network, instead of the Content Center.  It is what you would use to insert a fitting that has been authored, but not published.  However, if you can see the fitting you need on your screen, or even in your model browser, simply highlight the fitting to pre-select it, and then use the Place Fitting tool. This will instantly place an instance of the fitting you selected, in the size you selected, into your currently active model.  To select fittings on the screen that are not part of the currently active assembly, Shift-Right Click on the screen and set your selection priority to Part.  For pipe designs where you tend to use a lot of the same fittings, valves or instruments, this is a nice quick way of adding them to your design, while avoiding the extra mouse clicks of navigating your Content Center
Here is a link to a very short video demonstration of the Place Fitting quick placement.
Quick Placement of Fittings
As you can see a very useful tip when working in routed system.  I want to thank Chris for sharing this and hopefully it will be beneficially to you as well.   If you have any questions about this information please lets us know.  Until next time…