By Andy Davis
The pipe routing in AutoCAD Plant 3D has improved significantly over the past couple of releases, but it sometimes still has its 'moments' where it appears impossible to route a pipe along what appears to be a simple route. If this route is running just a few degrees out of square, requiring a rolled, cutback elbow both Line to Pipe and manual routing may initially fail to find a route. However, if you can manually construct a centre line, one trick I found recently, which is not immediately obvious, is to turn off the routing compass completely. If you then turn Ortho Off, enable Cutback Elbows and manually route the line using Route Pipe from the ribbon you will be able to follow along your centre line snapping to each endpoint. I have found this method to work where Line to Pipe has failed.
Date: 21 March 2013