From the course: Revit for Interior Architecture

Placing lights in ceilings - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit for Interior Architecture

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Placing lights in ceilings

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- [Instructor] Currently we have a room with a couple of tables in the corner, a desk as well as a ceiling, but there aren't any light fixtures in this space. So let's go through the process of placing lamps on the tables as well as adding lights to the ceiling. Underneath the project browser, go to your Level one floor plan. Then spin the wheel of the mouse to zoom into that floor plan view. Now the first thing we need to do is find where our table lamps are located at so that we can place a lamp on each one of these corner tables. Now there's two different spots that we can easily get to those. One spot would be underneath the architecture tab and selecting on component. The problem with selecting on component though is that you'll get everything that's considered a component family. That includes tables, trees, parking spaces, anything that might be a component family will show up on that list. But if all you have is Revit Architecture, this would be the location where you would find those kinds of light fixtures that you can place into your scene. If you have a different kind of Revit though, one that has the architecture, the structure, and the mechanical systems, then you can go to the Systems tab. And from the Systems tab, there's an option here for lighting fixture. If you select on lighting fixture from that Systems tab, you'll then notice that the only thing that shows up here on your type selector list are light fixtures. Now what I'd like to place inside of this scene will be one of these table lamps. Let's choose the 60W dash 120 volt. Now before we actually try to place this lamp into the scene, I want to point out something. Right now there's nothing on the ribbon saying that there's a property which allows us to set this table lamp down directly on the table surface. If it was possible, we would see that as one of the options on the ribbon. But underneath properties, we can see that this light would get placed on level one with an Offset of zero feet zero inches which means if we try to place this lamp now inside of the scene, what would happen is that the lamp would be underneath the table because it would be sitting on the ground. So to place the lamp here on the table, what we need to do is give it an offset value that's high enough that it can sit on the table. For this table which happens to be 30 inches tall, we'll set an offset of 30 inches and then click to place the lamp. So it's always important when you're placing things, particularly in plane views, that you have the correct offset value set so that that light fixture won't end up being underneath the object you're trying to place it on. Now that we have those table lamps in both of those locations, now let's go to a ceiling plan and try to place some lights in a ceiling plan. Under the project browser, double click on level one. This is the reflective ceiling plan view and once again I'm going to come up here to the lighting fixtures. Underneath properties here on the type selector list, if we scroll down toward the bottom, we can see that we have two different kinds of Troffer light families. One which is a two by four parabolic and the other which is a two by two parabolic. Now there's actually something else different about them and I'll show that to you as we're placing the lights. The first thing I'd like to do is place this two by four two lamp 120 volt light here inside of our model. If we move our cursor over here into the space, you'll see that in fact we do have this light fixture. But if we try to move outside of the walls, all we get is this little circle with a line going through it. Also if we look at the ribbon, we'll see that there's no additional options up here either. So for the elevation which right now says eight foot for this light, what we would actually get if we place this light is the light is ceiling hosted. So it's constantly looking for a ceiling here inside of the view. And this light fixture will take on the elevation of the ceiling inside of the space. Now I do know that the ceiling is an eight foot ceiling so if we would drop this light fixture in, it would be at the eight foot elevation. But if the ceiling was up at nine foot, the light fixture would go ahead and attach itself up there at the nine foot elevation. To place it into the scene, just click, hit the escape key a couple of times on the keyboard, select on the light fixture. And if you hit the space bar, it will rotate itself around. From here you can use the copy command, click the intersection of there, come over to here, and you can continue that process to place that light fixture as many times as you need here inside of the space. As long as there's a ceiling that it can find, it will host itself to that ceiling in that location. Now let's try to place the other kind of light. Once again, I'm going to select on lighting fixture, and now we'll do the two by two parabolic. And it'll just be the two lamp 120. One of the things you'll notice is that at times you're getting this little circle with the line and other times you're not as you move your cursor around. Well here we're actually getting those options that I was looking for with the other two light fixtures. Place on Face, if we had place on face available to us with the other kind of light that we had for the table lamp, then we could've just immediately placed that table lamp onto the surface of the table. Place on Vertical Face would allow you to place the lights along the sides of the walls. Place on Work Plane, you can specify what your work plane is which would allow you to place that light fixture along any surface, even slope surfaces. But a work plane could also be your level. So it would allow you to place a light fixture just on a level. But for this project, let's place it on a face. In this case it'd be the face of the ceiling. I'm going to place a light fixture here and another light fixture down here. One other thing to know, if you're trying to place light fixtures on architectural ceilings that have been linked into your model, so not directly on the ceiling themselves but a linked model that you've brought into your working environment. These ceiling-based light fixtures will not attach themselves to the ceilings of the linked file. They won't be able to recognize that that linked file contains ceilings. So what you'll need to do is use light fixtures like these which can be place along the face of that linked file to place those light fixtures directly into your project.

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