Equipment overview

- [Instructor] Welcome to Chapter Four, and we're going to take a look at equipment. So, let's start by navigating over to our Project Manager, and we're going to open, and from our desktop, exercise files, we're going to open Chapter Four, and choose our project XML. So, we're going to scroll down into our Plant 3D drawings, and we're open equipment 04_01_Equipment. So, double click on that to open.

So, the Plant 3D equipment module, allows you to create your equipment in a number of different ways. We can use the parametric equipment builder that comes with program, or create your own AutoCAD 3D shapes, or import equipment from other programs, such as inventor. While the program does come with some equipment shapes already loaded, the goal really is to create your own, as you need them, and save them to central location, to be used over again as templates. So, let's take a look at the different equipment options that we have. If we look up on our ribbon menu, here, we can see the equipment panel, and it's fairly small and fairly simple to use.

If you want to create parametric equipment from the Plant 3D program, we just simply come up to the create button, and we can open this dialogue box, and you'll see here, we have a number of different options that are pre-configured. And, essentially what we're doing is just taking standard AutoCAD shapes and stringing them together to create an impression of the equipment that we want to place in our model. We also have another couple of options, here. We have the modify equipment button, once we've placed equipment, we can use this to go back and change some of the parameters.

Attach equipment, this allows us to take customized AutoCAD solids and attach them to a piece of equipment, so it basically creates a block or a group. We can confer equipment, which it takes standard AutoCAD 3D shapes that you may have customized or been given by a vendor, and we can convert those into smart Plant 3D equipment models. We can remove any kind of attachments that we've made using regular AutoCAD, and we can bring equipment in from inventors. If you have a vendor, who's created equipment using inventor, any of the smart nozzles, piping connections, all of this can come through into your drawing.

So once you create a piece of equipment, we're going to start to use it, as a library, and you continue to work on your projects. The time spent creating equipment becomes less and less. Make sure that you store templates in a location that's easy to navigate to and accessible to all the people who are working on your projects.