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David Sellers/4 min read

Creating a Symbol for the Ceiling Light Fixture

Light Fixture Symbol Checklist

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This tutorial walks through creating a symbol for the ceiling light fixture, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

In this video, we will work on the ceiling light. The ceiling light is a symbol, not a fixture in this case, because the symbol is purely representative.

The specific light fixtures or ceiling fixtures will be outlined in a separate schedule or chart. For this project, it is just a symbol. Let's go File, New.

Use our template and File, Save. This is the ceiling light. Enter to lock it in.

I'll go to Layer Properties and make the new layer. E-SYMS. The color will be 61.

And let's make it our active layer. CTRL+S to save. If we look at the handout, we can see the ceiling light is a circle, which is a one-eighth inch radius, and then four lines coming off of each quadrant.

The total length of that line is one-half inch. Let's use some creative construction geometry to create this symbol. Let's start with the circle.

Circle, 0,0. Enter to lock it in. And it does show a radius of one-eighth of an inch.

1 over 8. Enter. Zoom extents.

And I'll zoom out. CTRL+S to save. Now in this case, we're going to use a second circle to help us understand that one-half inch distance.

The great part about circles is they are always the same distance from the center. If you are trimming using quadrants, it is half inch from a vertical diameter and a horizontal diameter. So let's see what I mean.

I'll go circle. The center point will be 0,0. Enter.

D-Enter. 0.5. Enter.

Now, if I go to measure distance from the Shift + Right-Click + Quadrant at the top to the Shift + Right-Click + Quadrant at the bottom, we can see that distance is one-half inch. If I hit distance again, Shift + Right-Click + Quadrant on the left to the Shift + Right-Click + Quadrant on the right, we can see that this is also a one-half inch distance. We can use these two circles as our cutting edges to clean up our construction geometry.

But first, let's draw that construction geometry using construction lines. I'll go to the Draw panel and choose construction line. The construction line is at 0,0.

And in this case, I can either choose the quadrant or turn on ortho. I'll choose to turn on ortho and I'll click to make a horizontal line and then move my mouse and click again to make a vertical line. Enter to say that I'm done.

Now we can see that the points we want to save are this line segment, this line segment, this line segment, and this line segment. And we want to do this efficiently using the trim tool. When we click trim, we can see that the cutting edges are automatically selected.

And this is not the case in older versions of AutoCAD. If I come into the center, you can see that I would have to click four separate times to trim out these objects. Now that might not be too many for this workflow, but it does add up quickly with larger workflows.

In this case, I want to select our cutting edges and define them as only the two circles. You can see that's the letter T, or you can click Cutting Edges here. And I will choose the circles as my cutting edges.

And this is required in older versions of AutoCAD. I'll hit ENTER to lock it in. And now when I go into the center of my circle, you can see that the line is only cut where it touches or crosses the cutting edge.

So I can click here, click here, go outside my circle, and click, click, click, click. I'll hit ENTER to lock it in. And now all I need to do is delete my construction geometry.

I'll select this outer circle and hit the delete key. In the next video, we will move on to our real-world fixtures.