Hi, dear friends! I'm new on this forum, and at first, hello everybody, thank you in advance for any help, and I'm sorry for my poor English.
Our company produces fiberglass-reinforced pipes and fittings, and our department particularly is responsible for the development of assembly documentation of pipelines. Our workflow includes: performing measurements at factories and plants (using the total station), exporting measurement's results (point clouds) in the AutoCAD MEP, and then, tracing pipelines, and passing documentation for manufacturing.Currently, we are looking for the alternative to AutoCAD MEP, for several reasons:
So, the question is: could these problems be resolved by switching to Revit MEP from AutoCAD MEP, does it have appropriate instruments for our needs? Changing the main software is a quite expensive decision, so we have to be sure before making it.
Again, any help would really be appreciated.
Our company produces fiberglass-reinforced pipes and fittings, and our department particularly is responsible for the development of assembly documentation of pipelines. Our workflow includes: performing measurements at factories and plants (using the total station), exporting measurement's results (point clouds) in the AutoCAD MEP, and then, tracing pipelines, and passing documentation for manufacturing.Currently, we are looking for the alternative to AutoCAD MEP, for several reasons:
- available routing objects in AutoCAD MEP are non-parametric. Say, we have to place some complex routing object in 3D-space, and we usually use 3D-polyline tool for this needs, and then we place the pipes, fittings etc. on this polyline. The main shortcoming of this approach (and, actually, of AutoCAD MEP) is that polyline cannot be parameterized. I mean we cannot constrain it to WCS and other fixed objects. Furthermore, when these constraints are changed, pipeline characteristics must be updated to correspond to routing objects, and all these functions are not available in AutoCAD MEP;
- auto-annotating of isometric views (plans, elevations..) is also unavailable in MEP. For example, we create the isometric view from the model of a pipeline, and then we should place the positional leaders for all pipes and fitting this pipeline consist of. Creation of positional leaders and filling the text from the scratch is a hard and annoying work, which often conjugated to the huge amount of mistakes, and I suppose it should be done automatically, using the metadata of annotated objects. Unfortunately, this is not supported;
- including fasteners to the bill of materials. Our company supplies mostly flanged pipe, and the type and quantity of fasteners must be specified in production documentation, made by our department. As the MEP does not support auto-creation of fasteners for flanged joints, we are inevitably doomed to count its quantity manually.
So, the question is: could these problems be resolved by switching to Revit MEP from AutoCAD MEP, does it have appropriate instruments for our needs? Changing the main software is a quite expensive decision, so we have to be sure before making it.
Again, any help would really be appreciated.
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