Adding can lights to architectural layouts requires a detailed understanding of the tools and features available in Revit. This article provides a step-by-step guide on choosing the right fixtures, placement, and adjustments to ensure the lighting serves the intended purpose.
Key Insights
- The process begins by going to the architecture tab and selecting the component to check what fixtures are loaded in. The right fixture, in this case, a recessed lamp round, is selected from the Imperial library and loaded.
- The placement of the can lights is done on the face of the ceiling at the appropriate intersections. Details such as the downlight's characteristics and the exact placement of the lights are pivotal to the overall aesthetic and functionality of the lighting.
- Additional fixtures are added as needed and their locations adjusted using the dimension tool. The final process includes reducing the height of selected fixtures to prevent interference and using the copy feature to ensure uniformity across the layout.
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To add the can lights, we need to go to our architecture tab and then component. And I always like to check to make sure and see what's loaded in. And it doesn't look like we have any light fixtures loaded.
So what we'll do is we'll do load family and from our Imperial library, we're going to go to lighting, architectural, internal, and you can see there's a whole bunch of lights that we can choose from here. We're looking for recessed lamp round with the right fixture selected here, we'll go and click open. And they're going to ask us which one of these types we want to load in.
And there's a lot here. Um, so we're looking for the downlight. Um, I'm going to go with the four inch trim list downlight here.
And it's important to pick the right one because the IES file, which is what describes the, the web or the flood of light that comes from the fixture is determined by that. So the wall wash and the downlight are both going to give you two totally different characteristics of lighting. And so you want to make sure you grab the right one.
So four inch downlight, and now we're going to place it in our ceiling. And you can see here, we have two different options placed on vertical face place on face, and then there's even the place on work plane. In our case, we have a face to place it on.
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We want to go to place on face. And then you can see, I can start to add them now because we've done the leg work and added in these, this grid here, we can easily place them at those intersections at each one of these locations. And so we'll have eight lights total for these can lights.
And there we go. The next fixture we're going to add is going to sit. There's going to be three of them and they're going to sit here, here and here.
And this is one that we have in our Imperial library. If we go to insert load family in our BIM 301 folder, Revit families, we've provided this edge light fixture here. Once it's loaded in, you can go to architecture and component.
Make sure you're on the right fixture type here, and then we can go to place on face again. And right now it's rotated, but that's okay. Cause I can just hit space bar to locate it.
And I don't know exactly where it needs to go in this dimension, but I do know that I want it to sit on this center line here. So I'll place the three that I want, and then I can go back in and modify their location. So once I've done placing those lights, I'm going to go ahead and use my dimension tool to center them between this grid that we've created.
And since these are detail lines and not reference planes, a lot of times it'll use the model element as the primary fixture and that's fine. But what we can do is we can actually change it to a detail line and that'll allow me to move it around. And I'll just go ahead and mirror that line that I created here into each one of these bays.
And then I'll adjust my light fixture location to match. It looks like I got that one right in the center and I'm using the align tool. And what's important is when you use a line with light fixtures, you want to be very diligent and make sure that you're finding that center line.
So you see how there's a lot of stuff going on here. I want to make sure I get to that center line to make sure it's lined up. Now we can take a look at it in 3D and these lights are pretty crazy looking.
As you can see, there's a lot going on with those fixtures and there's a lot of things that we can change. So right now the, the layout of the balls, maybe not exactly what we're going for, but not too big of a deal because we can change that. And so what we can do is we can start looking at some of these settings and you can see there's quite a bit going on there, but a lot of it can be modified here.
So what I'm seeing is there's a lot of height in these that we don't necessarily want. So I'm just going to go through and reduce all of these down. So I'll make this one six feet.
And this is totally random. You can definitely change this to however you want. It's something that's kind of fun to play with actually.
And so I'm just going to adjust these around so that they're a little different. And so I'm going to go six feet. So working my way down nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, and then into the teens here.
Um, so six feet, two feet, three feet. We'll make this one five feet. Um, you can even kind of play with these in a section or elevation view.
They'll have grips that you can pull around if you want to adjust them that way. And so you can see as we adjust them, they're starting to pull up from the floor a bit there. So ball number three, I'm going to make five feet and I'm just trying to make kind of a, a pattern with these so that they're not, that they're not all the same.
The problem really lies with these next few here that are 17,16,15,14,13, and so on. Um, that's way too tall. That's in the realm of where people are going to be touching those.
And we definitely don't want that. So I'll make this one two and a half feet ball. Number 15, we'll go with three feet, 14.
We'll make that one five and a half feet. And like I said before, this is completely subjective and I'm just picking arbitrary numbers. There's nothing to the values that I'm selecting here.
I'm just kind of eyeballing it based on what I think it might look like. And so if we change this ball number 12, we'll make that two feet and then we'll go five feet, three feet, and one foot should be fine there. And so you can see here, the one that we modified is the first one.
Looks a little bit more reasonable than the other two, um, because those ones were just based on those values. And so what I would do honestly here is if you wanted them to all be different, you could, but in this case, I'm going to delete the other two, the ones we didn't mess with. And then I'll just copy this one over.
And then we can take a look at it in 3D and we can also do some rotating and things like that to make them so that they don't look the same.
