Discover how to annotate your electrical lighting plans by adding and modifying wires in a BIM 322 course. Learn different ways to automatically generate or manually draw wires, and get acquainted with the process of arcing or chamfering them for optimal visual clarity.
Key Insights
- The BIM 322 course teaches students how to annotate their electrical lighting plans by adding wires, revealing which lights are connected and which panel they lead back to.
- You will learn various methods to generate wires: by automatically generating them or manually drawing them in. Two distinct wire representation styles are discussed: arc wire and chamfered wire.
- While creating an electrical lighting plan, it's crucial to maintain clarity and avoid confusion with other lines like leader lines, room tag lines, or dimensions. Thus, arc wiring is commonly used because it stands out and is less likely to be confused with other lines.
Welcome back to the CAD Teacher VDCI video course content for the BIM 322 course. What we did in the previous videos is we went ahead and created sheet views for our electrical lighting plans. And so what we're going to start doing now is start annotating this guy out.
And the first thing I want to go ahead and do is add in wires. And wires showing which lights are connected to which and then which panel they're going back to. And it's a very actually simple process.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you guys a couple different ways that we have of doing it. I'm going to go ahead and zoom into the bathrooms up here. Now all these lights have already been placed into a circuit for you so there's no big deal there.
You don't need to go back through and circuit these. So what's going to happen is I'm going to go ahead and hover over one light and then tab. And then select and that's going to go ahead and bring up my circuit.
The dash lines that you see here going from light to light to light are the automatically generated wires that Revit has already kind of pre-placed. Now they're pre-placed there but if I hit escape as you can see they don't show up. So I'm going to hit a tab again and click to select.
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And so what we're going to do is we can either automatically generate our wires or we can manually draw them in. And so I want to show you guys the automatic way of generating them and then we'll go ahead and put them in manually. So as you can see I have these two little symbols down here.
This one here represents an arc wire. This one here represents a chamfered wire. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you both.
I'm going to go ahead and click after I have the circuit selected click here on the arc wire. And I'm going to hit escape to deselect. And as you can see it creates the individual wire pieces.
Great. I'm going to go down to this other bathroom. I'm going to tab select here.
Pick. And I'm going to go ahead and click on the chamfered wire. And as you can see the arc wire looks vastly different from the chamfered wire.
It's kind of a personal preference on what people tend to use. People tend to use the arc wiring because it tends not to get confused with other lines like leader lines, room tag lines, dimensions, those kind of things. So these really do stand out.
So what we'll be doing for this course is we'll be going ahead and using the arc wire lines. I'm going to go to control Z a couple times. And I got rid of all of the wires that I had currently drawn.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through the drawing and go ahead and place the wires. So hover over a light. Tab.
Select. And I'm going to click on the generate arc wiring. Here.
Tab. Select. Generate arc wiring.
Down here. Tab. Select.
Generate arc wiring. Down here. Tab.
Select. Generate arc wiring. Tab.
Select. Generate arc wiring. Tab.
Select. Generate arc wiring. Tab.
Select. Generate arc wiring. Tab.
Select. Generate arc wiring. And don't worry if the arrow heads right now are not in the place that we actually want them.
Like they're not readable like with this one here. What's going to happen is we're actually going to go ahead and back and adjust those. So just keep going along and creating your wires.
There we go. Almost there. Okay.
Now, if I zoom into this light in the janitor storage, because it's only a one light, it does not have any specific, it doesn't allow us to generate any automatic wires. We have to draw these in manually. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead, and I know it wants to go to this panel here.
This is our LP1B panel. This lighting system here goes to the LP1B system. So up in the systems tab, I'm going to go over to the electrical panel and see where wire.
And you see I have the arc wire here. Go ahead and save the project if that pops up. And synchronize with central.
Now, where I want to start these wire from is I want to start them from the insertion point or this point here. And this would be the snap. This would be what the snap looks like that you should be getting.
I'm going to pick here. Now, this is an arc wire, and so I need to specify three points. So I'm just going to pick a point out here.
And then I'm going to go back to this panel here. Pick. And there it is.
As you can see, it kind of trimmed out that wire for us. I'm going to hit escape to deselect. I'm going to pick here.
And I'm going to go ahead and actually grab this head and bring it back. And bring this guy back a little bit so I can adjust that arc just a little bit. So after we've placed this one here, we're going to go ahead and place a wire for this guy here.
And so this lighting fixture goes to, I can look at the property, I can select it and look at the property panels, and it goes to LP1B. So what's going to happen is I'm going to go ahead, hit escape. I'm going to go to my systems panel, electrical.
Go to wire, arc wire. I'm going to pick here. I'm going to go out here.
And I'm going to come back around. And so it's kind of hard to see in here. Just hit escape.
And I need to go ahead and click it, and I'm going to go ahead and adjust it. Here's where the arrowhead is. And I'm going to go ahead and kind of drag it around a little bit so I can start to kind of get this guy to change.
And I'm just clicking the little shape handles and adjusting it. I'm not actually going to have this point directly to the panel like I would others because it's so close. I'm going to have it go off to the side here, but it's still going to have a tag eventually that's going to say, hey, this is going to go to this panel here.
Hit escape. And we'll adjust this actually a little bit so it looks a lot like our other ones. So I can go ahead and take it to an edge.
Just adjust it slightly. There we go. And there we are.
I'm going to go ahead and zoom extents. I have all my wires now placed. And in the next video, we'll go ahead and start adjusting these arrows so that we can start cleaning this up and making it look a little bit better.
See you then.