General
Our software and Revit families can be used to export drilling points for surveying equipment like Trimble Robotic Total Station or automated drilling robots like Hilti Jaibot.
To achieve this our Revit families of hangers and supports come with “Drilling Point” nested shared families. When hangers are inserted using MEP Hangers software, these points are placed right at the intersection with the structural element (floor, wall, beam, etc.).
These drilling points can then be populated with values for their X, Y and Z coordinates into specified parameters.
Drilling Points’ parameters
Visibility of the drilling points in your Revit project can be adjusted as needed. To disable or enable drilling points, go to the type properties of the hanger family and change the “Drilling Points Visible” parameter value.
Size of the drilling point mark can be changed in the type properties of the “M_Drilling Point” (or “I_Drilling Point” for imperial families) by the “Mark Radius” parameter.
Using Sort Mark to fill coordinate values
To populate drilling points with the values for X, Y and Z coordinates, our ‘Sort Mark’ tool is provided in a bundle with the MEP Hangers software.
The Sort Mark tool can be found in Revit’s toolbar under the “T4R Document” tab.
There are a few ways you might want to have your coordinates written to a parameter.
X and Y coordinates in a single parameter
The quickest way is to use Sort Mark’s “Calculate Coordinates” command. It will write X and Y coordinates divided by a semicolon to a text parameter. Let’s create a “X Y Coordinates” text project parameter and assign it to the Structural Connections category. Now the “M_Drilling Point” (or “I_Drilling Point” in imperial version) families have parameters for coordinates to be written into.
The workflow is as follows:
- Select all drilling points in the project using Revit’s “Select All Instances” -> “In Entire Project”
- Hit “Calculate Coordinates” and you will be prompted to choose a parameter to write values to – let’s use the “X Y Coordinates”.
- Select the type of coordinates (shared or project) and either the start/middle/end point of the family instance for coordinate calculation. Let’s use the “Start Point (Shared)”
All drilling points have now received X and Y values in their “X Y Coordinate” parameter.
X, Y and Z coordinates in a single parameter
Alternatively, all 3 coordinate values can be written to a single parameter. Let’s create a “X Y Z Coordinates” project parameter.
Now, let’s use the Sort Mark’s “Element Numbering” command. Select the category and then the parameter.
In the Sort Mark window, go to the Filtering tab and set up a filter for drilling points. Otherwise, all Structural Connections category instances in the project will have this value written into as well.
In the Sorting tab, under “Available items”, locate the “Instance: Element position X”, “Instance: Element position Y” and the “Instance: Element position Z” parameters and move them to the “Selected Items” by double clicking on them or by using the “Add -->” button.
In the Sort Mark tab, move all these parameters to the right and set up prefixes and suffixes to separate data. It might be a good idea to save this configuration for future use. To do that, click “Save As”.
Run the configuration by clicking “OK”. All the filtered elements now have their X, Y and Z values written to the “X Y Z Coordinates” parameter.
X, Y and Z coordinates in separate parameters
Usually, a preferred way is to have separate parameters for X, Y and Z coordinates. To do that, first, let’s create some more project parameters - “X Coordinate”, “Y Coordinate” and “Z Coordinate” as text parameters.
You will need to execute the Sort Mark’s “Element Numbering” command 3 times – one for each parameter. Steps are the same as before but you only need to select one parameter for element position in Sorting and Sort Mark tabs. For every coordinate, select the respective position parameter.
Below is an example for the “X Coordinate”.
Set up a filter for drilling points in the Filtering tab, move the “Instance: Element position X” parameter to the right side in the Sorting tab and then again in the Sort Mark tab. Save the configuration for future use and click “OK” to run the command.
Now repeat the same for the “Y Coordinate” and the “Z Coordinate” but use the respective position parameters.
Results
Every drilling point in the project is now populated with X, Y and Z coordinates in 3 ways:
- X and Y coordinates in a single parameter.
- X, Y and Z coordinates in a single parameter with predefined prefixes and suffixes.
- X, Y and Z coordinates in separate parameters.
To use these points in an outside software, create a Revit schedule with preferred values, export the schedule to an Excel file and load it into the other software in Excel or .csv format.
As for the Sort Mark tool, it is capable of much more than just filling in coordinate values. To read more, go to the overview page or read the technical documentation.