3D light fixture family/ceiling issue...

[Matthew Stuver]

I am creating my lighting families... And let me tell you, I am having a lot of fun... Right now I am creating an architectural troffer like the Attune from Daybrite. Everything looks fine and dandy but for some reason I can not break the plane of the ceiling. See attached PDF. There may be a very simple answer for this, but like I said I am having too much fun. Has anyone come across this yet? Please let me know what I am missing here.

Thanks,

[Andre Carvalho]

...but for some reason I can not break the plane of the ceiling.

If it is a ceiling hosted family, edit the family and create an Opening on the ceiling (Opening > sketch), locking it to the fixture planes. It will create the opening on your project ceiling.

Andre Carvalho

[mwiggins121466]

Unless there has been a change.....if your arch model is linked it will not do it.

[guitarchitect7]

If it is a ceiling hosted family, edit the family and create an Opening on the ceiling (Opening > sketch), locking it to the fixture planes. It will create the opening on your project ceiling.

Andre Carvalho

What happens when it is not a ceiling hosted family. I'm trying to create a puck light that can reside in anything (cabinet, countertop, etc.). How can I get it to break the plane of the object? I tried creating a void just for kicks and obviously that didn't work.

[Andre Carvalho]

No it won't do. Unless you edit the cabinet or countertop family and load your puck fixture there. if you do it on the family, it will cut. If you just load your puck fixture family into the project and try to apply it to the countertop, the void won't cut it.

Andre Carvalho

[guitarchitect7]

I even tried creating a seperate family as an opening, but the only way to do that is still ceiling based which then doesn't allow me to place in the puck light family.

I just moved the light source past the puck light opening so that it still shines through even though not cut through. What a headache, but it should work.

Thanks.

[mthurnauer]

I am an architect working on my first all revit project and wanted to know what other MEP firms do regarding ceiling light fixtures and diffusers. The firm we are working with do not use and ceiling hosted elements. They use non-hosted light fixtures and create work planes at the same height as our ceiling. This seems silly and also frustrating because they don't have their content at the right height and it shows up wrong on our interior elevations. When I went to their office and see why they are doing it that way, I was surprised to see that there is no copy monitor function for ceilings. How are other MEP firms doing their lighting? It seems that most of the manufacturers that are providing content of their light fixtures make them ceiling based so you must be able to do this.

[wblaney]

The stand workflow we settled on uses face-based fixtures instead of ceiling hosted. You can search the forums for plenty of info on how that works.

When creating a face-based family, you can create a void extrusion and use it to cut the host face. This has worked fine for cutting standard ceilings drawn in MEP. It will not cut ceilings in linked models, as mentioned above, and it will not cut a ceiling modeled as an in-place family, even if that family was assigned to the "ceiling" category when it was created.

We're still trying to find an MEP engineer willing to jump into Revit and actually use it to produce drawings. Several have started "playing" with it, but nobody has jumped in. Until then, I'm using our MEP license to do mostly lighting calcs and watts/sf for energy codes while trying to get a strong workflow in place for when an MEP engineer finally pulls the trigger.

hth,
Wes

[mwiggins121466]

We are a full service firm using Revit for all disciplines. Currently we are using non-hosted fixtures. We have our arch place ceiling height tags on all the rooms then we use that view in our model to place the fixtures (in VV, Revit links, on the arch model click custom). As far as using reference planes you can align and lock those to the arch linked ceilings so the fixtures will move with the ceiling. Also there is new functionality of a “face based” light fixture that will move with the linked ceiling provided there is a ceiling when you place the fixture. We have also built a mask in the fixture for a 2X4 in a 2x2 ceiling for the arch. Keep in mind all these methods have drawbacks just decide what is acceptable for your workflow.

[mthurnauer]

My understanding from our consultant is that the reason they use the work planes is that it prevents the possibility that if a ceiling is accidentally deleted or some other type of problem, at least all of the fixtures and circuiting don't get blown away. So, is the face-based fixture going to be the new standard and are manufacturers going to make content that works in that way? Its seems that this issue is a very big problem. One suggestion would be that if a ceiling changes or walls for that matter, that the MEP should be given a warning message that items have been disassociated from their host, but the content should not be deleted with the host. I was initially thinking that our consultant just was fighting with the functionality of Revit, but after seeing how it works from their end their needs to be some major revisions. Just one last clarification, if you use the face-hosted content, will it be deleted if the host changes or is deleted? we have often had problems where our ceiling sketch in the architectural model becomes invalid and gets deleted and can easily recreate it, but if the MEP loses the associated content that is a problem.