Go 3D with Free Isometric Piping Shapes for Visio

Attention process engineers!

Calling all techies who work in:

– Oil refineries
– Water treatment facilities
– Any plant that produces a product in liquid form!

For years one of Japan’s top Visio experts, Junichi Yoda, has offered his 3D Isometric Piping shapes to download for free. I’ve long loved these shapes (having studied mechanical engineering myself), and have put off far showcasing them on Visio Guy for far, far too long!

Sample Piping System Included

Yoda includes a sample drawing that you can download and play with, to get a feel for how the shapes should be used:

Shapes for Every Perspective

The stencil contains 74 action-packed shapes. Here’s a look at what you get:

Valves, Reducers and Expanders

S and L Joints

Other Isometric Goodies

You can download these wonderful shapes here:

Download “Visio shapes and stencil for piping isometrics” – Downloaded 31442 times – 8 KB

Edit: 2009.11.11 link updated to Japanese mirror site, as the old Geocities link was broken or gone.

Cool Extras

In addition to the piping shapes, he’s included some nifty isometric cube shapes. The samples below were all made from one master, simply by dragging on the control handles.

Similarly, the isometric cylinder shape can take numerous forms:

He’s also included dimension lines so that you can add scale and measurements to your isometric piping diagrams:

Junichi’s web site includes isometric fonts that you can download for free, along with complete instructions on how to get them to work with the piping shapes:

• How to Install Isometric Fonts
• How to Set Up Isometric Fonts for Isometric Dimensions
• How to Use Dimensions

Edit: 2009.11.11 link updated to Japanese mirror site, as the old Geocities links were broken or gone.

Ease of Use

By gluing joint-shapes to valves, you can easily reposition the shapes, without worrying about re-drawing the piping.

The red handles in the illustration above indicate that the elbow joint is glued at both ends to the valves. When the valves are moved, the joint follows along!

Let’s all give Junichi Yoda a big round of applause, and a heart-felt Thank You for creating this cool set of shapes!

Edit: 2009.01.13 – Stefan, one of our Visio Guy forum members, submitted some fantastic Visio sample drawings that use these isometric piping Visio shapes. Have a look at this newsgroup post.