In the Pipes

Sunnyside Up! (Secrets in Plant 3D 2018.1.1)

Hidden Secrets in Plant 3D 2018.1.1!

Hello everyone!!

I would be remiss to not tell you about two wonderful secrets embedded in our 2018.1.1 release of Plant 3D by the finest team I've had the pleasure of working with.

Is that enough build up for you? Ok, let's get started.

# 1 - "PLANTCOPYLINENUMBER" variable

You know how when you copy a pump set and connected piping, it resets the new piping to an unassigned line number? Well, sort of helpful since you do need a new line number.

But what about when you need to split up a model, and move lines from one to another or other situations where you DO want to keep the line number and all parameters like Insulation, Tracing details and so on?

There is a new variable PLANTCOPYLINENUMBER in 2018.1.1 - The default "off" setting is the behaviour you know (and maybe love...maybe not). Set this to "ON" and turn your world upside down or right side up as you split models, put piping into new drawings and retain line numbers and info to your heart's content.

 

# 2 - "Parametric" Component Designation

(Pro tip: You can also test this out in Data Manager)

Now, I know what you're thinking...actually I have no idea, I don't have superpowers! Anyway - I assume you are thinking "What is this "Parametric" component whatsit?"

Let's review some core Plant 3D fundamentals when it comes to piping parts traveling into the model to help me explain this one.

First, imagine that there is a property "Component Designation" that pertains to piping parts. Now, stop imagining it, because it's real! A piping part that comes from a catalog, travels into a spec and finally into the model will normally have an empty value in this property. This is normal, it means that the part doesn't have special powers and participates in Spec Updates and what have you.

Now, if you create a Custom Part in the 3D Model - this field will normally be assigned a value of "Custom" - this means "I'm a special part that Piping Designers can edit, and it will not be affected by spec updates in any way because it's not from a spec". This includes geometry, properties and so on - Specialty items are a good fit for this. You CAN specify any pipe spec part in the spec editor using this property as "Custom", and this will essentially give you the same editable behaviour in the model. 

Great news - I can change the size of a spec part in the model, and not be affected by spec updates! Seems like a good idea to set the property Component Designation to Custom for say your pipe support hangers and other supports and things where designers need to edit them in the model, right?

Everyone wins!

Well, sort of....say you update other properties in your Pipe Supports spec. Any supports set to "custom" to allow size editing are going to miss out on any non geometric property updates also - say Item-Code changes or Material or whatever.

Enter the new "Parametric" setting (yes, it is case sensitive. Capital "P", lower case "arametric").

Setting a spec part's Component Designation to Parametric will:

• Allow Geometry editing in the model (change the size, and spec update will not reset it) - Yay, Piping Designers!
• Allow property editing in the model as usual, but Spec Update WILL affect these.  - Yay Cad Admins!

Maybe this helps:

Keep Planting!

-damian

Love Isometrics? Hate XML? Join our Iso Style Editor public beta!!

Iso Style Editor Public Beta!

Hi everyone! How could our plant team sleep at night knowing that our awesome customers were having to struggle with giant XML files in order to edit their Isometric outputs?

That's right, they couldn't! So we put together a new tool to help things out - please join our public beta of the Iso Style Editor and let us know your thoughts on it - what you like and what could be better!

If you are already part of the Plant Customer Council beta program, simply sign into the Plant Customer Council at beta.autodesk.com, and you will find the Iso Style Editor Beta and info there.

Not a member yet?    SIGN UP HERE!

 

Thanks everyone, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts, questions and comments in the beta forums!

-damian

Plant Cad Admins - We Need YOU!!

 

Hello again!

Our Plant team is not happy if they're not making your life better!

They threatened to put me in the pig launcher unless I got some of your feedback on what we can do to make your life better administering Plant 3D/P&ID projects, so please check out our short survey below!

 

Take our super short survey here!

Thank you!!

- damian

(on behalf of your friendly neighbourhood Plant team)

Plant 3D + BIM 360 Team + Revit = AWESOME!

Get Revit P&ID Modeler today!

Simplified modeling right from your Plant 3D Collaboration P&IDs

Hi everyone!  It's been about a week since we released our new Plant 3D Preview, so it seems like it's about time for some more good news for all of our awesome Plant customers!

After much anticipation and incredible feedback from customers, we have released Revit P&ID Modeler today!!

What is Revit P&ID Modeler?

In a nutshell, we bring your Plant 3D Collaboration project P&IDs directly to you in Revit to streamline your 3D piping modeling while we keep track and validate it against the P&IDs!

Get it!!

Available for Revit 2018.1 today! - Read more about it on the Revit blog

If you haven't tried the Plant 3D Collaboration projects yet, you can either get the 2018 AutoCAD Plant 3D trial, or join our Plant 3D Preview!

Keep piping!

-damian

It's Summertime, and a new Plant has sprouted!

Get our latest Plant 3D Preview! (Summer 2017)

Hi everyone! Our hardworking Plant software building elite group of code ninjas here at Autodesk have emerged from the shadows for only a moment to bring you our latest preview release packed with powerful new functionality harnessing the power of the Cloud!

While the team has been kept super busy, we have been listening to your feedback, reviewing your Ideastation requests, and doing our best to make improvements to help make your lives as designers, drafters and admins better.... and of course, we need your feedback to help make our Plant solutions even better!

Join the latest Plant 3D Preview!

If you are already part of the Plant Customer Council beta program, simply sign into the Plant Customer Council at beta.autodesk.com, and you will find the new preview and info there.

Not a member yet?    SIGN UP HERE!

Need more incentive? How about this....

Thanks everyone, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts, questions and comments in the beta forums!

-damian

Autodesk Answer day - (APAC Series)

Hello Plant Users,

Did you know that Autodesk Answer Day is coming up on July 13th, 2017, as the first installment of the Autodesk Answer Days (Asia Pacific Series) ? This time we’ll be answering questions on Four of our most popular Products : AutoCAD, AutoCAD Mechanical, Inventor, Revit.

Head over to the Autodesk Answer Day homepage (Asia Pacific Series) for more information. We hope to see you there for this live Q&A online event hosted right here in the Autodesk Community!

BIM for Plant Leveraging the Cloud

As we announce our 2018 plant products it is hard not to reflect on the past year. It has been quite exciting for the team responsible for Autodesk’s Plant and Building MEP products. One of our major initiatives has been “BIM for Plant Leveraging the Cloud”. For those of you who may not be familiar with the term BIM, it stands for Building Information Modeling which is something that has been sweeping the building industry for over 10 years and, in recent years, has become a major driving force in the growth of Infrastructure. The other major trend over the past 5 or so years has been the drive to cloud based solutions that are inherently collaborative and scalable. The cloud provides solutions that are also much easier to use (requiring minimal or zero install) and connected to a multitude of services. Through services like BIM 360 Team & Docs, BIM 360 Field & Glue as well as the Forge platform, Autodesk has started to show the true value of the cloud to improve productivity and collaboration.

One of the things we have heard over and over from our Plant industry customers is that they want to be able to participate in the investments that Autodesk is making in the cloud and in BIM. So, this year we are starting to realize that by enabling our plant customers to take advantage of those investments. At the same time, we are making some welcome improvements to our core plant products.

Plant Collaboration Leveraging the Cloud:

For many years we have had collaboration capabilities in Plant using Autodesk Vault. That solution is, in essence, a LAN/WAN (Wide Area Network) solution and by all accounts is still the easiest to set up and maintain in the industry for a LAN/WAN solution. What we are releasing this year is a completely new collaboration capability using Autodesk BIM 360 Team, which takes set up time down to effectively zero. All you need to do to share your project is use the built-in PlantProjectCollaboration command to upload your Plant 3D/P&ID project to a BIM 360 Team folder, and invite your team. That’s it. Plant will automatically manage check-in/check-out, project synch, etc. by default. We have been testing this feature with select customers for almost a year and the feedback has been resoundingly positive. If you are working across multiple office or working with multiple partners of a Plant 3D or P&ID project then you owe it to yourself to give it a try.

 

 

Isometric drawing generation in the cloud:

As our plant customers already know, we have been developing our own isometric drawing generation tool for a few years and over the past year we have made some fantastic advances in the performance and quality of the ISO drawings. These have been available through Plant 3D 2017.1 and in Plant 3D 2018. We have also moved the ISO engine into the cloud and turned it into a service. This enables users to generate as many ISOs as they want without tying up their computers. Because we process and save the ISOs in the cloud to BIM 360 Team, it is very fast and drawings are automatically available to everyone who has access to the BIM 360 Team Project. This feature is in the final stages of development and being tested by customers who are part of the Plant 3D beta testing program. We hope to have it available for all our users soon.

PCF Export from Revit:

Over the past few years we have had a large number of customers who are using Revit for some Plant projects. Mostly around Water treatment but also around other building adjacent plants like Food/Beverage, Pharmaceuticals and Semi-Conductors. One of the requests we have received from these customers is the ability to export a PCF file that they can use for pipe stress analysis and for ISO drawing generation. In Revit 2018 they now have the ability to export PCF files. 

There are a lot of other projects that we are working on to support BIM for Plant Leveraging the Cloud which we will tell you about as they become ready for release.

Plant 3D and P&ID:

AutoCAD P&ID was the first dedicated plant product that Autodesk developed specifically for the plant market. After that we developed AutoCAD Plant 3D which has always came with all the P&ID features already built into it. As Autodesk has continued to simplify our portfolio and stream line how customers use our solutions, it has started to make less sense for us to maintain both products when the features of one are already completely in the other. So we have decided to drop the price of Plant 3D so it is more in line with other AutoCAD verticals and so more economical for both P&ID and Plant 3D customers. We will also stop the sale of standalone P&ID moving forward. We continue to believe very strongly in our P&ID features and will continue to develop and support them. We believe our customers will be better served by a single AutoCAD based product that has all our plant features.  You can find more information about this change here. Note: Plant 3D is part of the AEC Collections so you will have access to both Plant 3D and P&ID features if you have the collection.

Oh, and One more thing:

As Steve Jobs would famously say before he wrapped up his product release presentations – we can’t wrap up a blog post about the 2018 product release without telling you about all the other great things we have done in our plant products:

AutoCAD Plant 3D 2018

Instrumentation Support in Plant 3D (Top Voted IDEAstation Idea)

• Plant 3D 2018 ships with a starter Instrumentation Catalog and Spec, along with the ability to create new Instrument components in the Spec Editor.
• Well, if we’re going to have an Instrumentation spec, it would be an awful lot easier to use it if we had an Instrumentation palette to grab them from! Done.

 

 

ISO Drawing Generation

• We’re not open 24 hours, but it’s true we never rest when it comes to improving ISO generation! Get the latest improvements and refinements to AutoCAD Isometrics.

Project Backup

• Easily Backup your entire project: any type, anytime – archives, snapshots, turnover or use it to move a project from Vault to Cloud Collaboration!

 

 

Simple Project Xrefs

• Right click on any drawing in Project Manager and Xref it into the current drawing

Search

• Search in Data Manager was lonely, so we added search in Project Manager – find any file fast.

Spec Driven Powered P&ID

• Create your P&IDs with validation against the same pipe specs you use in Plant 3D.
• Pipe specs not finished yet? We’ve got you covered – keep drafting until they’re ready.
• Spec Updates, just like in 3D? Yep.

P&ID Improvements for Everyone

• We’ve made Off Page Connectors connect Instrument Lines, as well as OPCs within the same drawing.
• We’re working on extending P&ID Content and Templates to better support building schematic design diagrams as the tool of choice.

Welcome

• We’ve made the Create and Get Started tabs a little friendlier and more helpful.

Squish & Zoom

• We’ve also worked really hard to fix a number of bugs and make some enhancements to make working with Orthos and 3D models even better!

  

Emile Kfouri

Director: Systems Engineering Product Group

Autodesk, Inc.

AutoCAD Plant 3D 2018 – Simplified Design, Modeling and Collaboration

This past year has been exciting for the AutoCAD Plant 3D development team.

We have added features that further simplify the design process by helping customers easily produce P&IDs, integrate them into a 3D plant design model, and collaborative effectively – all within Plant 3D.  This release also paves the way to help customer’s move to the Autodesk Cloud and to BIM solutions. Read the blog on BIM for Plant leveraging the Cloud

 

What’s New in Plant 3D 2018

 

Cloud Based Collaboration

This year, we are introducing a new collaboration capability that leverages Autodesk BIM 360 Team – collaboration made simple: Using a built-in command, simply upload your plant project to a BIM 360 folder and invite your team.

 

 

Easy and Effective Production of P&IDs

We continue to add new P&ID features and improve on existing ones to help create, modify and validate P&IDs quickly and accurately. This year we added features that further increase the speed and accuracy of P&ID production including:

 

Spec-Driven P&ID’s

Check whether piping components in the P&ID are correctly mapped into the Piping Specification by linking the P&ID to piping specifications.  Components not in the piping spec will be flagged out-of-spec and can be easily identified using the P&ID Painter feature.

 

P&ID Painter

Paint P&ID allows you to change the color representations in the P&ID according to property values.  In this case, out-of-spec piping components are highlighted red.

 

Simplified Workflows

With a simplified design creation, our users also asked for simplified workflows. This year, we have simplified various tasks and added more in context right-click command.

Project Manager is one example of where we have simplified the workflow process:  We added Piping Specs to the project manager to make it better and easier to manage piping specs.  Now you can modify specs in your own workspace and then upload them to the project. 

 

We’ve also allowed you to attach Xrefs to a drawing directly from the project manager – now you don’t have to browse to find the drawing first!

 

Plant 3D Modeling

Finally, we have made several improvements to existing popular 3D modeling features including instrumentation and isometrics.

 

Instrumentation Support

We have added an instrumentation catalog and a tool palette.

 

Isometrics

Improved handling and representation of sloped lines

 

 

Learn More

• Get the full details of all the new features in Plant 3D, please view the product center on Autodesk.com.
• View the What’s New Plant 3D 2018 video playlist on You Tube
• Subscribe to Plant 3D here

Ready to Experience Plant 3D?

Visit the Autodesk eStore to subscribe:
Plant 3D

Not Yet Using Plant 3D?
Try Plant 3D free for 30 days

Plant 3D 2018 is available in the following languages: English, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Simplified Chinese.  All languages are available at the time of the release date of 4/13.

Update from Autodesk Plant Headquarters

“The report of my death has been grossly exaggerated.”  - Mark Twain

Even though the quote was made over 120 years ago it is still relevant today because it speaks to how rumors spin out of control. Sometimes rumors are based on misunderstood information and sometimes they are based on a lack of information. Personally the ones I find the most aggravating are the ones that are pure fabrication. What rumors do quite effectively is generate FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).

In the face of FUD, words are a poor cure because sometimes people don’t want to believe information that does not support their frame of reference. So usually the only way to ease their fears is to show them not tell them. So I thought I would share with you what the Systems Engineering team at Autodesk has been up to over the past year or so. For those of you who are not familiar with the Systems Engineering team, it is the product group responsible for Autodesk’s plant and building MEP related customers. These are two disciplines that are not usually grouped together in software companies or in the AEC market in general. However, it makes a lot of sense to group them together because there are a lot of commonalities between the two constituencies. More about that in a little bit.

So back to “seeing is believing”. Let me show you just a few of the things we have been up to over the past year.

 

Spec Driven P&ID

Even though we have had Spec Driven Plant design for many years, our P&ID tool did not have that capability. We had planned to release it with Plant 2017 but the quality was simply not there. So we decided to pull it out till we got the quality where we wanted it. We completed it in time for the 2017.1 release and did not want to hold it back till the next major release. I think you will find it very intuitive to use if you are already familiar with spec driven design in Plant 3D.

 

 

Vault and Worksharing

We have made major improvements to our Vault and Wide Area Network workflows for team collaboration/worksharing. When we started 2016 the feature set in Plant 3D/P&ID did not work very well when the project got very large, the team got very large or the team was distributed across multiple offices or geos. Working very closely with a handful of customers we found and fixed a large number of obstacles to those workflows and also figured out a repeatable set of best practices. So if you have tried Vault or worksharing across multiple offices and struggled to get it to work. I recommend you give it another try with our much improved 2017.1 update.

Some useful Vault resources:

• General Vault Documentation
• Vault Project - Plant 2016 Database Replication (PDF)
• Autodesk Vault Replication Setup (PDF)

 

Plant 3D Cloud Collaboration

One of the places that Plant 3D has had room for improvement is around collaboration across multiple offices. The Vault/WAN workflow does a much better job since the fixes that we have made. The place where it still falls short is when you need people outside of your WAN to work or access the project data. They need to be granted access to your network which can cause a security issue. Additionally, even though the setup for collaboration using the existing Vault solution is probably the easiest of any in the Plant market, it still requires some effort.

We have been working on a much more flexible solution that leverages the Autodesk Cloud (BIM 360 Team) and requires no installation and virtually no configuration. We call it Project Calgary Collaboration and it has been undergoing customer testing for 9 months. We have opened it up to public testing and I invite all of you to give it a try and provide us with your feedback – You can access it from here. There is also a blog post here that will provide a bit more information.

We are also working on leveraging tools between plant and building markets. For example enabling Revit customers to use the Plant 3D Isometric drawing generation and finding ways to support the large number of our Water/Waste Water customers who are using Revit for their projects. More on that soon.

For something that is supposed to be dead it sure seems to be still kicking.

 

We're Listening

As always, if you have any suggestions for us please use the IdeaStation for them so your peers can vote and comment on them.  If you have any questions please use the Forums to find the answers quickly. 

 

Emile Kfouri

Director: Systems Engineering Product Group

Autodesk, Inc.

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