Piping

Drawing pipe

Drawing pipe is meant to feel instant — click, click, click, done. Everything that decorates the pipe (labels, fittings, hangers, bracing) is optional while you draw and can be filled in afterwards.

What	Where you'll find it
Pipe tool	P, or the pipe button in DRAW
Pipe size	The Pipe dropdown on the toolbar's second row
Add-ons while drawing	The PIPE ADD-ONS toolbar group
Everything else about a pipe	Right-click the pipe
Fittings	The FITTINGS group, or F
Valves & devices	The DEVICES group, or V

Drawing a run

Press P and set the size in the Pipe dropdown on the second toolbar row.
Click the start, then click each corner. Each segment commits as you go.
Backspace undoes the last segment without leaving the command.
Enter finishes the run. Esc cancels it.

Instead of clicking a distance you can type it — feet first, so 12-6 means 12'-6". The arrow keys nudge the point.

Staying level, and changing level

Elev Lock plus the Elev box holds the run at one height even when you snap to something higher or lower. Ortho and Shift lock the elevation while drawing too.
To change height mid-route, draw a vertical segment — the Studio makes it a riser nipple where that is what it is.
Riser nipples connect under the branch at the exact plan crossing, and on a sloped pipe they meet the interpolated height at that point rather than the pipe's end.

Nudging the run off the head line

While drawing pipe, Ctrl+Shift + mouse wheel offsets the run in half-inch clicks, with the current offset shown above the cursor. The run stays straight under ortho. Esc clears the offset; a second Esc cancels the run.

Picking up the heads

Draw a branch past a row of pendents and the reachable heads glow. Press Enter to finish and they connect — arm-over, drop, sprig or a direct outlet, whichever the geometry calls for.

If you would rather do it deliberately, right-click the pipe:

Connect to Nearby Sprinklers… — asks for a maximum plan distance from pipe to head (7'-6" to start with, and it remembers your answer) and previews which heads will connect while you type the number.
Connect Pipe to Selected Sprinklers — you choose the heads first.
Disconnect Heads — removes each outlet and tracks the arm-over, drop or sprig hanging off it out to its end, fittings included. If a path ends at a sprinkler the whole path goes; if a head merely sits on piping that carries on past it, that path is left alone and flagged rather than guessed at. The pipe itself is left plain, never deleted or split, and the heads stay where they are. One undo.

Connect Sprinklers to Pipes

Auto → Connect Sprinklers to Pipes does the whole drawing at once. The style dropdown in the AUTO toolbar group picks how: Straight Down, Arm Over, Return Bend, or one of the flex-drop styles. Drops honour your Default Object Properties and match materials sensibly. There is a Rooster option for uprights — a reducing tee with a plug, on the bottom when the head is side-fed and on the side when it is sprig-fed.

Fittings

Elbow, tee, cross, coupling, bushing, plug, cap, reducer and flange, from the Fitting dropdown in the FITTINGS group or with F. End preps follow the pipe: grooved, threaded or flanged. Flanged ductile-iron fittings generate automatically on flanged pipe, and the 4"–12" centre-to-face figure is an editable AWWA C110 estimate rather than a fixed number.

Fittings also generate themselves:

Turn on the Fittings pill in PIPE ADD-ONS to have them appear while you draw. It is off by default because bare pipe draws faster.
Select a pipe and press F to generate that pipe's missing fittings.
Z Resolve Connections sorts out everything that is touching but not joined. Auto → Resolve in Rectangle limits it to an area.

Valves and devices

V, or the DEVICES group: gate, check, butterfly and backflow valves, plus pressure gauges (with a live psi readout), flow switches, hydrants, hose valves and FDCs. A valve seats on a pipe or on a coupling. Its end connection is one master setting that drives the body, its couplings and its end prep together.

Alt + wheel clocks a gauge, flow switch or valve around the pipe axis in 45° steps — one undo for the whole rotation.

In progress: the flanged-valve end-prep behaviour was reworked recently and is still awaiting a real-job check. If a flanged valve renders or fabricates oddly, that is worth an F12.

Editing a run

Drag a pipe's endpoint grip to move an end; drag the body to move the whole thing. Both show a live preview.
Right-click → Edit Run lights up the same-size run and lets you change size, schedule and system across all of it at once.
Right-click → Select Full Branch Run selects it; Select Host Pipe goes the other way from a head or a device.
Right-click an endpoint → continue routing from there.
Deleting a run is one undo, not one per segment.
Turn on Maintain Connections (M) and moving a fitting stretches the pipes attached to it.

Labels and colour

The Labels pill in PIPE ADD-ONS draws size and length labels as you go — off by default.
Add them later from a pipe's right-click Pipe Labels menu (diameter, cut length, segment, total).
Auto → Clean Up Labels re-places every label so they stop overlapping.
Tools → Color Pipes by… recolours the drawing by system, size, and so on — the quickest way to see what you actually drew.

Two fabrication rules worth knowing

Takeouts are looked up from the catalog exactly. A size that is not in the catalog gets no takeout at all — a full-length, field-trimmable cut — plus a warning in the fabrication report. The Studio will never quietly substitute the nearest size.
If takeouts would exceed the pipe's own length, the span is flagged with “spool cannot be fabricated as drawn” rather than silently collapsing the cut to zero.