Wiring Custom Gymnasium Lighting Using Revit's Callout Views

Let's place our awesome new custom gymnasium lighting fixture. To do that, we want a view of just the gymnasium. We'll go up to our View tab, find the Callout, and draw a rectangular Callout around just the gymnasium.

I can make the Callout look a little bit better by selecting it and pulling its View Tag up to the top. With a few adjustments, that can look really nice. To go to this view, I double-click on that Callout bubble, and now I'm in the gymnasium view.

Over in my Project Browser, I can scroll down and give this a better name. Right now, it's just a generic name. I can right-click and select Rename, and I can call this Gymnasium Lighting Plan.

Pressing Enter locks in that name, and I can begin placing my light. To do that, I'm going to go over to the Systems tab and go to Lighting Fixture. I want to select the Gym Light Fixture we created and look at the options.

Right now, it is set to place directly on Level 2. This is another way of placing lights directly on a level, and this is the Level that's in the electrical model. If the Architect moves things around, these lights will stay put. I want to give these lights some additional height, so in addition to being on Level 2, I want to add 4 feet, and press ENTER to lock that dimension in.

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Now I can zoom in a little closer and click at the top-left grid, and that will place the first gym light. Then I will click down the column and place the remaining lights until I have 4 gym lights in the first column. I can go back to Modify.

I can select all 4 of these lights, and by pressing CC on my keyboard, I can copy them down so that every one of these columns has 4 gym lights. With that, I'm done placing the gym lights. I'm going to go back to the Modify button.

What's next? Let's add in some Light Switches. Now, I know there are some doors in this gym that are located on Level 1, and that's where I want to place these Light Switches. So, to see those doors, I'm going to create some View Regions.

I'm going to go up to my View tab, then find Plan Views, and select Plan Region. I'm going to select the Rectangle Tool and draw a rectangle around the top door area. I will click Edit in the Properties window for the View Range, and change my cut plane to Level 1. I can also change the Bottom to 0. I'll leave everything else as-is and click OK, then Finish.

Now I might need to move these blue grips around to see the door, but so far this one is looking OK. I can adjust them a little bit. Now I can press CC on my keyboard with that Plan Region active, and copy it down to where the other door location is.

There it is. Click the Modify tool. Now I can use these blue grips to adjust, but I notice that it's cutting into the Level 1 ceiling, and it doesn't look so good.

So I might click the Edit Boundary button. Then I can see these pink lines, and they're easy to align right to the wall, so I can click Finish and avoid any issues with the Level 1 ceiling. Now that I can see my two doors, I want to place light fixtures. I go back to my Systems tab, go to my Devices drop-down, and pick Lighting Device.

Now I can zoom in to this top door, and I can notice where it's going to place this Light Switch. It wants to place it on Level 2, so I'm going to change that to Level 1, and it wants to place it way up at 17 feet above the floor, because it was thinking about Level 2. Well, I want it down at Level 1, and I want to add 4 feet. Now I also want to verify that I'm placing 3-Way Light Switches, scheduled on Level 1, with an elevation offset of 4 feet.

Now I can hover over the wall. It's set to Place on Vertical Face, and I'm placing on the Architect's walls. It sometimes has a hard time placing the switch exactly where I want it, but that's not a big deal.

I can hit the Spacebar on my keyboard, and that switch will flip to the face of the wall where I want it. So I'll click to place the first one. I'll repeat that process for a second Light Switch.

Now I'll come down to the other door, and I want a Light Switch here and here. So 4 Light Switches in total, and then I can click the Modify button to be done. I've got Light Switches, and I've got lights, but they have no power.

So let's add some power. First, I will select all of the lights on the lower half of the room. I can draw a selection box around them to select all of those light fixtures.

Now I need to give them a switch as well, so I'll hold Control on my keyboard and grab one of the Light Switches, then go to the top door, hold Control again, and grab another Light Switch. So I've got the two Light Switches and all of the lights on the bottom half of the gym. Revit is smart—it brings up this Power button for us. We'll click the Power button and power these up by selecting their panel, Panel Board 4. Now they're assigned to a circuit.

Now let's try another way of showing the wires between these lights. We previously drew our own wires, but this time, let's click the Arc Wire button. This will automatically place wires.

It's not perfect, but we can make a few edits. Let's click the Modify button and zoom in to the first wire. You can see that it cuts across a couple of lights, so I will select it and find a small adjustment handle that lets me modify the curvature.

That connects that switch to the first light. Now notice that Revit connected all of the other lights, and those look good. They loop back to the switch correctly. Now, this wire—where is it going? Way off in the distance.

It's trying to indicate that it's going back to the electrical room where Panel Board 4 is located. If I zoom out, I see this small dot, and I can drag it back to begin adjusting the direction. I also have a curvature dot—an open circle—I can pull back into the room and adjust the line so that it appears to point toward the electrical room.

Perfect. That’s our first switch. Now let’s wire up the other lights. We’ll put them on their own circuit and assign them to the other two Light Switches.

First, I’ll select all of these lights, then while holding Control, I’ll grab the Light Switch at the top door, and then, still holding Control, I’ll grab the Light Switch at the bottom door. These will all be on one circuit. I’ll plug them in by clicking the Power button, assign them to Panel Board 4, and run the automatic Arc Wire.

There it is. Now I need to make a few adjustments. I’ll click the Modify button, and here I’ll pull the wire back into the room and adjust the curvature so that it appears to point toward the electrical room.

There we go. This Light Switch connector could use a little more curvature, so I’ll grab the curvature dot—an open circle—and pull it outward. Let's take a look at the bottom area.

We have a line, and its curvature crosses another light fixture, so I’m going to pull it in the opposite direction. And there it is. Notice what Revit does that’s pretty helpful:

If you have intersecting lines, it automatically creates a break so that they don’t get confused. So there we go. Everything is wired up.

Now to wrap up this plan, let's add a few labels. Let's go to the Annotate tab, then go to Tag All > All Objects in Current View. We want to scroll down until we find Lighting Fixture Tags.

We don't want a leader line, so we will simply click OK. Now they all populate with Light Tags, but the tags are empty. They display no information.

That's because we haven't yet set a Type Mark. So let's click any one of the Light Fixtures, then click Edit Type, and we need to give this a Type Mark. We'll scroll down in the Type Properties window and look for Type Mark.

It's set to nothing right now. So let's make it GL1—for Gym Light 1—and click OK. Now that the Type Mark is populated, every single Light Fixture receives the tag GL1.

And it looks really good. Now we can come back to Annotate, and we want to add a Room Tag. So Annotate > Room Tag.

I'll click right here to place the Gym Room Tag, and click Modify to finish. You might be asking yourself, what is this right here? That is the HVAC model. Those are the supply grilles for the gymnasium.

And they look fine. If we wanted to change how they look, we could change our Detail View, and sometimes that might update their appearance. In this case, we're just seeing the bottom of those elements, so the change wouldn't be significant.

So I think it's okay for now to leave it as is. And with that, we have our gymnasium lights placed in a beautiful Gymnasium Lighting Plan.