Putting light fixtures in my ceiling plans.

[jfischer.110666]

What method are you guys using to get the lighting into the ceiling plan? Our electrical and mech. department are using ABS 2006. Should I be linking their files or what? Just curious what some of you may be doing for lights and diffusers. I am not worried about the modeling aspect at this point. Trying to put some cd drawings together. Thanks, Jason.

PS, I am a bigtime noob, in phase 2, trying to learn Revit and meet project deadlines.

[david_spehar]

We export ceiling plans to cad and our engineers use them as a background to locate diffusers, lights, etc. in our grids. Make sure they put the elements on their own layer and then link their file back into Revit. When you do, choose "Layers - Select". A dialogue box appears allowing you to check the layers you want imported. This way you just bring in the lights, diffusers, whatever, without the background. Note that Revit throws the link behind your model elements. You have to select the linked file in your view and "bring to front" (sometimes you need to temporarily hide your ceilings to see the link). Hope this helps.

[sbrown]

there is a whitepaper from autodesk about this. Basically you want to have the consultant open 2 viewports of their model, one with the ceiling plan view, one with the 3d view, then they export to dwg. and you will have a model from them with 2 blocks, one is the 3d stuff one is the 2d, you link that file to your project and you can turn on and off the 3d as needed. It works very well in my opinion because you can create section thru it.

[david_spehar]

I like that. Unfortunately our engineers are stuck in 2d cad land so we end up with dumb plan views only. Has anybody seen my t-square...?

[jfischer.110666]

Do you do anything about the grid line going across the light fixture when using a 2x2 grid? Is there a way to trim or hide a portion of the grid lines?

[sbrown]

just place a real(revit) light fixture there or diffuser. With ABS models it should hide it.