Designing Custom Pendant Gymnasium Lighting Fixtures Using Revit

Let's create a custom light fixture for our gymnasium. Let's start by taking a look at that gym. We're going to go to our project browser, locate the ceiling plans, and go to our L2 lighting plan.

And what we see here is this upper level of the gym. This is where we will place our lights. What kind of lights do we want to place? We want to place some hanging or pendant light fixtures for our gymnasium.

And the light fixtures will look something like this, kind of a round area to shade the light, and some housing, and some type of cord or hanger wire going up. So that is the fixture. And in Revit, that light fixture also needs to have a power source to connect to our electrical systems.

We'll add in a connector. Revit also allows us to have a light source, which lets this light fixture emanate light during a Revit rendering. To accomplish this, we will need to create two families.

The first family will be just the gym light geometry, essentially the 3D components that make up the light. Then we will load that family into our gym light fixture. And this gym light fixture family will contain our power source, and it will also contain a light source, which will emanate that light.

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So let's jump in and create this fixture. Now to follow along, in the downloads folder, there's a BIM 323 gym lights.pdf that contains this information. Let's start by creating the geometry family.

We'll go up to File, New Family, and let's select a generic family, Generic Model, Plain Jane. And we'll open that right up. Opening a family opens up quite a few views at the beginning.

We want just the front view opened up, so we'll click on the Front tab, and then we can click on the Close Inactive Views. We're just looking at the front. Now I want to give this family a name.

To do that, I save it. File, Save, and I want to give it a name. Let's call this Gym Light 3D Parts, and save it.

When I click Save, I'll notice that up at the top, it now has the name Gym Light 3D Parts. If I want to go a step further to make it easier to understand which family I'm in, I can rename the front view by right-clicking in the product browser and clicking Rename, and call this Gym Lights Front. Now I have this Gym Lights Front created.

I'll hit ENTER, and I can see that tab is called Gym Lights Front. Now to see everything together, I'm going to do WT on my keyboard for tiling the windows. WT.

And now I can see that gymnasium there, and I can see the lights. I'm going to slide the gym over. I don't need to see that as much, and I'm going to pull this family up so I can see the reference level.

So here's that front view. Now I want to follow these dimensions, and on yours, if you don't follow the dimensions exactly as I'm doing, that's okay. You can have a little bit of creative freedom to create the gym light that you wish.

So I'm going to create first the housing here. So I'm going to come in to this family under the Create tab and use the Revolve tool, which is awesome for round lights. So here's the Revolve tool.

I like to create the axis line first, because if I don't, I often forget it. So I'm going to create that axis line. It's just a line down the center of the light fixture.

Once I'm done with that, I'm going to click on Boundary Line, and if I have a three foot diameter, I want a one foot six radius. So I'm going to click in the center and do one foot six, and it looks like we go up 1'8", 1'8", and then back here. So that creates that first shape, and the next shape is six inches.

So I'm going to go three inches across. So another line, I'm going to go up three inches, and I'm going to go up a foot from there. So from here, up one foot.

Whoops, and I got it off a little bit to the side, so let me select that and click my line again. Here we go, straight up one foot, and then when I come back, I don't want to go the full three inches. I'm going to go just two and a half inches, and then up the four feet, and now I can complete that last half inch, and then back down to here.

Okay, that's looking pretty good so far. Now I need this curved line to create the light housing, so I'm going to come in and select the Spline tool, and I'll start right here, and just click a couple of points, and click to end. So there's my housing, and with this, I can delete out some extra lines I don't need.

So for this line here, I don't need that. That was just to get me to where I'm going, and I don't need this one here either. Now I don't want this to be solid because essentially there's a light source here that Revit will put in the light family, and if it's in a solid geometry, it'll feel like it's stuck inside solid geometry.

So I want to create it more realistic. I want this housing to be open on the inside, so to do that, I will use the Offset command. So OF on my keyboard to Offset, and I want to select Numerical, and I'll make this housing a little bit thicker than normal just to make it easier to read.

I'll do half inch Offset. I'll Offset, and make sure the Copy is checked because I want to make a copy of this, and Offset to the inside half an inch. So there's that housing.

Now I can use the Trim command, TR on my keyboard, and trim up the excess. And it doesn't work with Spline, so I have to actually manipulate this. I'm going to grab this, drag it in to where it intersects, and then drag this line, the dot will come up to there.

And then from here, I want to draw another line back to the axis, and I don't need that line anymore. I can delete it, and I'll use Trim command. That's looking pretty good.

Now to test this, I can hover over the line and hit TAB on my keyboard. Tab. If I do that, everything should select.

Essentially, it needs to be a complete uninterrupted line all the way around my shape, and it looks like it is. That's our goal. If we do that, we can hit the green check to finish, and it will spin that shape around and create our light fixture.

So there it is. Let's check it out really quick in the 3D view. I'll go to the top and click this house icon that's default 3D view, and I'll change it to shaded view.

If I spin around, I can see it's a light fixture that is open on the bottom. That's what we're going for. If yours doesn't look exactly like mine, that's okay.

We're creating a basic light fixture housing. I'm going to go back to the front view, and we'll close the 3D view for now. I'm going to go ahead and save this, and now I need to start another new family.

To do that, I'm going to go to File, New, Family, and I'm going to scroll down. This time, I want to create the actual light fixture, so Lighting Fixture, just a regular old lighting fixture, and click Open. Again, it opens up a bunch of views, but I don't need all the extra views.

I can come up to the top and click the Close Inactive Views, and now I'm at the ref level of this family, and yours will be family and whatever number of family you're on in your Revit session. So I want to give this a name. I do that by saying File, Save, and this time I'm going to call it Gym Light Fixture.

Gym Light Fixture, and click Save. Now notice at the top, it says Gym Light Fixture, and this reference level, I can also rename that if I'd like to. Rename Gym Light Fixture, and I can call this Reference Level or Grounds.

Either way is okay. I don't need to rename any corresponding levels, so I can click No there. Now with this view opened up, I'm ready to load my Gym Light Geometry over into this Gym Light Fixture.

So I will go back to that Gym Light, and I will load it into Project, and I want to load it into my Gym Light Fixture. So I'll do that and click OK. Now I notice I can place it now, and where I want it is centered in this family.

So right on the crosshairs of the two planes, I'll click, and there it is centered. And there's that warning I was talking about, light sources inside solid geometry. That's because at this moment, we've placed our light on the ground, and there's a conflict.

We need to now open up a separate view. So I'll click the Modify button because we're only placing one of these, and now I want to go to the front view of this light fixture family, and there is that light on the ground. And you can see that this yellow light source is trapped inside the geometry.

Revit doesn't like that. So I'm going to click on our light family, and I will move it up. I'm using M via my keyboard, and I want to move it up above this reference plane.

Any arbitrary amount is fine. So there it is. It's up above the plane.

And now let me give us some more real estate here. I can drag this down. Now I can move this light down and lock it to this light source elevation.

To do that, I use the Align tool. So AL on my keyboard, and I can align. So AL, or under Modify, this Align button.

So I'll click the plane first, and it's this light source reference plane. Click there. Then I click the bottom of the light geometry, and then lock it.

My goal is to make it so that the light source elevation, when it moves, so does the light. And we've accomplished that, so we're good to go. And I have a light source.

What is left? I need to add in the power source. We can see here we need a connector, 120 volt, 60 VA, and we have our light source already. So let's do that now.

So I'm going to zoom in a little tighter, and I will place the connector on the ground floor. It's going to go back to the gym light fixture ground, or if you didn't rename it, it's the ref level. Double click there, and under the Create tab, there is a whole connectors section.

Depending on the type of family, we have pipe connectors, duct connectors. In our case, we need an electrical connector. And then we can place this on a work plane.

Right now the default is set to face. We don't want that. We'll click on Work Plane.

This brings up the work plane dialog, and we can specify the work plane. Which work plane do we want? We want that light source elevation. We'll select that reference plane light source elevation and click OK.

And there it is. It placed it right there for us. We didn't have to do much beyond that.

If I go back to my front view here, it's a little hard to see because it's all overlapping, but there's a little tiny, looks like an outlet symbol, like a power plug or outlet, and that is that connector. And it's a green color. Now I can select on it and adjust its property.

So with that selected, I can change the voltage. And we have decided here we want it to be 120 volts. Now why is that? This is super important in electrical design.

If we didn't set this voltage and we tried to add this to a circuit in our classroom building, in the gymnasium, it wouldn't attach to a circuit because the circuit is at 120 volts. And if this were at zero volts, it would not connect. So let's make it 120 volts.

And then Revit needs to know how much power this light fixture consumes. Now we don't know per se. We would get this information from the manufacturer's cut sheet.

We will guess at this moment, and we'll start with 60. And I think that's a good number to start for this light fixture. So with these settings all done, we are set.

We can save this family. And now this is the family we want to load over into our gym project. So let's go ahead and change our views.

We can see the gym project right here. Here's the gymnasium in our main project. Here is this light fixture family.

And now we can click the load into family button. And I want to move it to my BIM 323 project. And there it is.

I'll be ready in the next video to place all of these light fixtures.