Deepen your understanding of how to set up an electrical plan and install lighting fixtures using Revit MEP. This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to properly place and align lighting fixtures on a level 1 ceiling plan.
Key Insights
- The BIM 321 course content introduces Revit MEP, a helpful tool for setting up electrical plans and loading in lighting fixtures on a level 1 ceiling plan.
- Placing lighting fixtures involves choosing 'place on face' from the panel and properly aligning them using dimensional constraints.
- Creating EQ constraints allows for the lighting fixtures to be accurately aligned, which can then be removed once the fixtures are correctly positioned.
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 actually got our electrical plan set up for our lighting and we also went ahead and loaded in our lighting fixtures. So please make sure that you're on the level 1 ceiling plan and I'm going to go ahead and go to lighting fixture if you're not already there and we're going to choose the 6 inch incandescent, 120 volt, recessed cam downlight.
I want to go ahead and it's very similar to how we place the actual air diffusers. I need to go ahead up to the panel here and choose place on face. Now I can just go ahead, go around and place it.
I'm going to go ahead and place 3 here and we're going to line them up here in a second. I'm going to place one here. I'm also going to place one here, here and here.
I'm going to go ahead, place here, here and here. I'm going to go ahead and place this guy here, there, there and there. These little floor drains that you see, those are just showing because they're in the view and they're perfectly fine.
We can go ahead and turn off our plumbing fixtures if we wanted to but I'm not going to worry about too much right now. I'm going to hit escape and now what I want to go ahead and do is I want to use my dimensional constraints to make these look correct. So let's go ahead.
Learn Revit MEP
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
I'm going to select my, I'm going to go to the annotate tab and I'm going to go aligned. I'm going to go ahead, pick here and hit TAB and I'm going to go to this, I'm picking the wall edge there and I'm going to go to the center line, center line, center line, tab, wall edge. There we are.
And then I'm going to go ahead and hit that EQ constraint and that's going to line those up. There we go. We can go ahead and just drag this up and leave this here for right now.
I'm going to go back to aligned, pick here, pick the center line, center line, center line, wall edge. Hit my EQ constraint, perfect. I'm going to go ahead, go aligned here to here to here, EQ constraint, tab, select the wall edge, center line, there we go, EQ.
I also want to go ahead and align this. Make sure that this guy is centered, which it looked like that one was pretty good. Again, I'm just going around and establishing these equality constraints so that all of it is good to go.
What I can go ahead and do now is, once I have those selected, I can select all of these EQ constraints and I'm just going to delete them from the drawing. Now what's happening is, it's saying a dimension with a lock and or EQ constraints is being deleted but the elements will still be constrained. Push unconstrained to remove the constraints or OK to leave the elements constrained.
I'm going to hit unconstrained because I don't want to leave that there without knowing it. So I'm going to hit unconstrained and there we are. I need to go ahead and get the rest of the lights dialed in in this bathroom.
So I'm going to go AL for align, I'm going to select that edge there and this edge here. I want to go ahead and select this edge here, there, and then I'm going to go back, select this and just make sure they're all aligned. I want to align this with this, come up to the other bathroom, there and there, there and there.
I want to make sure that they're aligned here. And there we are. We've gone ahead and dialed in our bathroom there with the lighting fixtures.
Pretty quick, pretty simple, and pretty easy to do. I'm going to go ahead and stop this video here and in the next videos we're going to go ahead and start putting in some troffer lights and aligning those to the ceiling tiles. See you then.
