Discover the techniques for setting up lights in a Revit MEP - from placing wall washers to highlight artwork, to arranging wall sconces in hallways. Learn how to ensure the lights are centered in their respective ceiling tiles, adjust placement options, and work with various types of light fixtures.
Key Insights
- The article details how to set up lights in a Revit MEP, starting with wall washers in a conference room. The author demonstrates how to center the lights in ceiling tiles and adjust the placement options to achieve the desired effect.
- The second part of the tutorial focuses on arranging wall sconces in a hallway. It covers the placement of these fixtures on a vertical face, adjusting their elevation, and aligning them properly.
- The tutorial also includes tips on working with different types of light fixtures under the systems tab, and how to save modifications in the model.
Welcome back to the CAD Teacher VDCI video course content for the BIM 321 course, Introduction to Revit MEP. In the previous videos, we went ahead and got all of our lights dialed in here on the ceiling, and I want to go ahead and let's add maybe a few more specialty lights. So I'm going to go ahead and zoom in, and we're going to go ahead and place some wall washers up in this conference room here, maybe to highlight a piece of art or something along those lines.
So let's take a look at our layout real quick. If I were to go to right here, that would be centered, so I'm going to go ahead and put two wall washers in these two tiles here, maybe even space them out a little bit more. So I'm going to go ahead under my Systems tab, I'm going to go ahead and go to Lighting Fixture. Please make sure you have your 6-inch incandescent wall washer selected.
I'm going to go ahead and choose my placement option as Place on Face, and here we go. So I'm going to go ahead and place one here and place one here. There we go.
Now, I need to make sure that those are centered in their respective ceiling tiles. So I'm going to go ahead and go to my Annotate tab. I'm going to use my aligned dimensions: pick here, here, and here, then hit EQ. I'm just going to pick here, here, and here, hit EQ.
There we go. I'm going to hit Escape to deselect. Then I can select those, delete them, and I'm just going to go ahead and hit Unconstrained.
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I tend not to like to leave things constrained if I'm not using them, if I'm not showing that dimension on the actual plan. Let's go ahead and go to the other side here. So I'm going to go to my Systems tab, Lighting Fixture.
Now my placement option is Place on Face. Now, if you notice, the direction that the little arrow points is the direction the actual lighting fixture directs light. So what I want to go ahead and do is I'm going to hit the space bar, which will allow me to rotate it each time I press it.
So I'm going to place one here and place one here. I'm going to go ahead and let's align those or put those in the correct location. So I'm going to go to my Annotate tab, aligned, pick here, here, and here.
I'm just going to pick here, here, and here. I'm going to hit Escape, select the dimension, hit the EQ constraint. Select the dimension, hit the EQ constraint, and there we are, delete and Unconstrained.
We've placed some wall washers in there. I'm going to go ahead and come down to my next room. Let's go to my Systems tab.
Let's go Lighting Fixture. I'm going to go ahead, let's go that down light six inch, and I'm going to choose my placement option as Place on Face. I'm going to go ahead and maybe space these ones out a little bit farther.
So I'm going to start here, let's go two over here and let's go two over here. As you can see, that doesn't really line up. So I'm going to go ahead and actually move this guy.
Just click it, drag and hold, and bring it over here. Click, drag, hold, bring it over here. Click, drag, hold, and bring it over here.
There we are. Let's go ahead and align those guys. So I'm going to go to my Annotate tab, aligned, here, here, and here; here, here, and here; here, here, and here.
There we go. I'm going to hit my EQ constraint, press Escape, then EQ again, select here, and EQ. Now those are the wall washers I'm going to go ahead and put into this model, I'm going to hit Unconstrained.
I just removed the dimensions. Now we've centered them left to right but we need to center them up and down. So for that, I'm going to go ahead and go back to my Align. I'm going to pick the edge of the wall, the center of the light here, and there.
I'm going to hit my EQ constraint. I only need to do this once because from here, I'll hit Unconstrained again, then go AL for Align, pick that one there, then pick the next two. Hit Escape, I'm going to go Aligned tab, select, get that wall edge there to there, drag away.
If I don't want to have to deal with that, this dialogue of that, I'm just going to select it, uncheck EQ, it's not going to move it back to its original position, it's going to still leave it as equalized and then just delete the dimension. Now I can go Align, here and here, come up here, let's do my Align dimension, I'm going to come from here to here to here. Actually, because you can see we have a little bit of a T-bar ceiling, I want to go from that. So I'm going to select this and delete it, go aligned, pick here, here, and here, EQ, uncheck EQ, and delete that. Then I'm going to go ahead and align this with here and here and Escape to say I'm done. Perfect.
So as you can see we've got those wall washers kind of dialed in, there we go and I'm not going to worry about any more wall washers. So let's go ahead and talk about another type of light. I want to go ahead and talk about wall lights because we sometimes do use those, we use wall sconces, these different kinds of things, and maybe we want to add some wall sconces into the actual hallway here.
So what I'm going to do is go Systems, Lighting Fixture, and I want to load a family. I want to go to my lighting folder, then MEP, internal, and see if we can find a wall sconce.
So, sconce light, up light, sphere, flat round—I’m going to select the sconce light, up light, hit Open. These will be placed on a vertical face because they attach to the wall, but we also need to change their elevation. If I look here, I can place it but it’s not showing up. We’ll address that in a moment. I'm going to go ahead and change my elevation; let's change it to 7 feet, and there we are.
Now I'm going to place it about right here. There we go. We did not align that light, but that's okay—we can fix it. I’m placing it opposite the other lights. I'm going to go ahead and align this guy real quick because we missed that one, which happens. There we are. So I'm going to go ahead now and say I want to create this guy again. I'm going to select that and hit Create Similar.
This command allows us to select something in the drawing, say you have a very long list of different types of families in here, select that, go Create Similar, then just change the elevation back to 7 feet. I'm going to go ahead, pick here, and we're going to align those here in a second. It's going down opposite; I'm not going to worry about one in the bathroom, and there we are. And actually, if you notice, it appended to the grid line, but I want it to append to the wall instead. We need to pay attention to where we're clicking, but we can also quickly fix this; I do not need to delete it.
What I'm going to do is select the light, go Pick New Host or Work Plane, pick new vertical face, and make sure I'm picking the wall. There we go. I'm going to go up here, select this light, pick new, and re-host that element to the correct piece.
Select here, pick new, there we are, and we're good to go. Now I also want to go ahead and align these lights to these ones here. So I'm going AL for Align, pick there, make sure that's aligned.
Pick here, make sure that's aligned. Pick here. Oops.
I still have Multiple selected, as you may have noticed. When it controls you back, uncheck Multiple Alignment. There and there, there and there, there and there, here and here. Even though they look like they're aligned, I'm still going down the wall and doing that.
Those are wall sconces, and we've added them in. Wall sconces are slightly different. We need to place them on a vertical wall face, but we have to set an elevation for them because they are hosted to the wall, and that elevation must be set.
We'll zoom extents, press CTRL+S to save the file. I'm going to go ahead and stop this video here. We'll move up to the second floor, get our lights dialed, and start talking about other pieces.
See you then.
