What’s new in MEP for Revit 2021

With the 2021 release of Revit, MEP users will find a number of improvements.

Revit highlights for MEP include:

Several enhancements targeted specifically to electrical workflows
Worksharing for MEP elements has been improved
The MEP Fabrication Extension add-on is now better integrated with Revit
There is a new units format for hydronic piping

Let’s get into a bit of the details.

Electrical enhancements

We’re excited to announce a number of new electrical enhancements in Revit 2021. For electrical workflows, we’ve provided a way for circuit numbers to be tailored to custom conventions through Circuit Naming Schemes. This is a part of ongoing work aimed at making the electrical functionality in Revit more adaptable outside the US.

Electrical circuit naming

Electrical enhancements through Revit Ideas

We’ve also made a number of improvements to Switchboards and Panelboards, addressing a number of challenges raised through Revit Ideas.

Single phase panelboard

Switchboard circuit phase selection

Switchboard circuit quantity

Lastly, we’ve added enhancements to how Panel Schedules are organized in the Project Browser for greater project navigation.

Panel schedules under sheets in project browser

MEP worksharing

The key change with worksharing is that when modifying interconnected MEP elements, only the selected element is checked out. Previously, when modifying an element that causes other elements to move or otherwise update, those changed elements were checked out as a result. For example, moving a pipe could result in attached valves, fittings, and adjacent pipe to be checked out.

This caused problems when using collaboration worksharing capabilities in a couple of ways, namely, users received notification that they couldn’t open the model because other users had elements checked out. This led to circular references where User A was told they couldn’t sync because User B needed to sync first, and vice versa.

An additional result of these worksharing improvements is that, when deleting an in-line element, such as a valve, the broken segment will no longer automatically heal. This auto-heal behavior historically caused unexpected results in worksharing scenarios.

These improvements will provide a more consistent experience across worksharing behavior for all elements, as well as avoid the problems caused by the previous behavior.

MEP Fabrication Extension Integration

There is an initiative across the Revit development teams to improve the user experience for tools developed using our add-on frameworks. For this release, we’ve streamlined the functionality of the Revit Extension for MEP Fabrication by locating the commands on context sensitive ribbons, as well as in locations commonly utilized for various import and export commands.