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. To do that, we'll go up to our view tab, find the callout, and draw a rectangular callout right 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 say Rename, and I can call this Gymnasium Lighting Plan.

Enter locks that name in, 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 that gym light fixture that we created, and look at the options.

Right now it is set to place right at level 2. This is another way of placing lights right 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 Enter locks 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 that 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 with 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 down 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, and then find Plan Views, and select Plan Region. I'm going to select Rectangle Tool, and draw a rectangle around the top door area. I will click Edit in the Properties window for a view range, and change my cut plane to level 1. I can also change my bottom to 0. I'll leave everything else alone and click OK, and 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 do 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 that 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 hit Finish and not get any weirdness with that 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 dropdown, 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 in the air, 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 the lighting switches 3-way.

So 3-way lighting switch, schedule level 1, and elevation from level 4. 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 has a hard time sometimes placing the switch 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. So I can draw a big box around these, 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, and then I'll go to the top door, holding Control, grab another light switch. So I've got the two light switches and all of the lights on the bottom half of the gym, and Revit Smart, it brings up this Power button for us. We'll click the Power button, 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 now this time, let's click the Arc Wire button. This will automatically place wires.

Now it's not perfect, but we can make a few edits to these. Let's click the Modify button and zoom in to this first wire. You can see that it cuts across a couple of lights, so I will select it and find this little dot that lets me adjust the curvature.

So that connects that switch to the first light. Now notice that Revit connected all of the other lights, and those look good, and back to that switch, we're okay. Now this wire, where is it going to? Way off in the distance.

It's trying to tell us that it's going back to the electrical room where Panel Board 4 is located. If I zoom out, I see this little dot, and I can drag it back, and it starts to adjust where this is pointing to. But I also have this curvature dot, it's an open dot, I can pull that back into the room and begin to adjust this line so that it looks more like it is actually pointing towards that electrical room.

Perfect, that is our first switch. Now let's switch up the other lights. We'll put them on their own circuit and set them to the other two light switches.

So I'll first select all of these lights, then holding Control, I'll grab the other light switch at the top door, and holding Control, I'll grab the other switch at the bottom door. So those will all be on one circuit. I'll plug them in by clicking the Power button, place them on Panel Board 4, and I will do the automatic arc wire.

There it is. Now I need to make a few adjustments. I'll click the Modify button, and right here I will pull this back into the room, adjust the curvature so that it looks like it's actually pointing towards that electrical room.

There we go. And this light switch connector could stand to have a little more curvature itself, so we'll grab that curvature dot, it's an open dot, and pull that out. And let's take a look at the bottom here.

We have this line, and its curvature is crossing through another light fixture, so I'm going to pull it the opposite direction. And there it is. And notice what Revit does that's pretty cool.

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, and we'll go to Tag All, and All Objects in Current View. We want to scroll down until we find Lighting Fixture Tags.

We don't want Leader, we will simply click OK. Now they all populated 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 1, any one of the light fixtures, and we will click Edit Type, and we need to give this a type mark. We'll scroll down in the Type Properties, and we're looking 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 Type Mark is populated, every single light receives a tag, GL1.

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

And I'll click right here to place that Gym Room Tag, and Modify to be done. You might be asking yourself, what is this right here? That is the HVAC model. Those are the supply grills 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 how it looks. In this case, we're just grabbing the bottom of those, so that won't change too much.

So I think it's okay for now to leave that. And with that, we have our gymnasium lights placed in a beautiful gymnasium lighting plan.