From the course: AutoCAD MEP Essential Training

Setting up a power plan - AutoCAD MEP Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD MEP Essential Training

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Setting up a power plan

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In AutoCAD MEP, when we're trying to display certain items correctly, we think in terms of trades. Then, we think in terms of what types of items in those trades we want to display. So, for a power plan, we want our trade to be electrical, but specifically power. This means that electrical objects such as light fixtures, don't show up. In the good old days, we used to manipulate layers. We still do in a sense but now we can allow AutoCAD MEP to do the layer management for us. The purpose of this video is to see what the difference is between a power plan and a lighting plan. Because AutoCAD MEP is solely dependent upon our display configurations. This is where we're going to spend most of the time in this video. We are going to focus specifically on display sets. To get started, let's open up our MEP electrical drawing. Or, of course, you can open up whatever drawing you're currently working in. I'd like to get started by making sure we're set for electrical power in our display configuration. So I'm going to come down here and click Display Configurations, then come up and make sure electrical power is current. Now that that's current, let's go ahead and go to the Manage tab. On the Manage tab, we're going to go to the Display Manager button right in the middle of our screen. We have Configurations, Sets and Representations by Object. Let's drill into Sets. Notice that electric power plan is highlighted, which means that that's our current display configuration. Let's drill into this display configuration by double clicking right on it. The first dialog we see is Display Representation Control. We have a lot of choices here as we've looked at before. We can configure any item to look exactly the way we wanted based on our Display Representations. But what I really want to see are the Display Options. This tells us if an item is actually turned on or not. So, in electrical power plan notice that device type lighting is turned off. If we look at our MvPart Type category, we'll see that items that are turned on are specific to electric power, switch gears, generators, junction boxes. We don't want to see any air terminals coming from our HVAC. This is where we can configure exactly how we want our display to look. We can create New Displays or we can just use the plethora of displays that AutoCAD MEP provides for us. If we scroll down just a little bit more, we'll see we have a couple other choices. If we turn on Hide Surface Hatching, that means items like rooms or spaces won't have that diagonal cross-hashing in it. Keep that in mind if it starts to really annoy you. I'm going to keep this turned off for now. I'm going to hit Apply, and I'm going to hit OK. Because our work flow is changing to object driven rather than layer and line driven, it is actually harder to grasp how AutoCAD MEP allows the control of visibility of objects in your drawings. But in the long run, it makes it so much easier to not have to worry about this stuff once you have it configured.

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