Surface Mount Light Fixture under stair landing?

[jsnyder.68308]

I am sure someone has come across this before, but searches have come up empty for me.
We need to place surface mount can light fixtures at the under side of stair landings. They need to be modeled in 3D because designers want to see the fixtures in section as well as RCP (rendering and/or light source are not issues here - this is just for CD's).
It seems to be quite a struggle to get this to work properly in a Revit sort of way. The bottom of a stair landing does not want to host a face-based family. We can place reference planes at the underside of each landing, but there are lots of landings in lots of stairs (= too much work to name/track all the ref planes). Then you have to muck around with the view range in the RCP to get the fixtures to show up.
Are we missing something obvious (or clever), or is this just a lot of work with plan regions, reference planes or non-hosted light fixture families?

[azmz3]

We actually ran into a similar situation in a project I am working on. we had to have surface mounted lighting thats did not go thru the ceiling. basically what I did was took a light fixture family and copied it into a new family that was not hosted. This allowed me place the lights on the face of the ceiling without cutting it, and they will still show in section or RCP

[Andre Baros]

If there is supposed to be a ceiling there, we model a ceiling, if there isn't then we've gotten into the habit of creating "J-boxes" for light fixures. Small 4"x4" patches of ceiling just to host the fixture. For surface mounted fixtures this ends up more like the real world anyway. This also allows fixtures to schedule correctly since you don't have two different families for the same fixture.