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/5 min read

Creating a Detailed Suspended Ceiling Light Fixture View for Classroom Lighting

Suspended Ceiling Fixture View

1

Create Reflected Ceiling Plan

Per-level RCP showing ceiling grid.

2

Place Fixtures

Drop lighting fixture families on the ceiling.

3

Tag with Fixture Type

Tag each fixture with its type mark.

4

Add Section/Detail Callout

Show suspension detail in section view for installer clarity.

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This tutorial walks through creating a detailed suspended ceiling light fixture view for classroom lighting, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

Now let's complete a detail view for our suspended ceiling light condition over each classroom. To help us out with this, there is a PDF handout and it looks like this. It's the BIM 323 lighting drop and mounting heights and it has two details, the lighting drop and the mounting heights.

We're going to start with that lighting drop detail so you can refer to this PDF and all the items in green are the items that we're going to add to the detail. Let's find that detail. It's in our project browser.

It's under legends and it's under lighting drop. We'll double-click to open it up. One quick side note, we can totally create these details as drafting views.

That's very acceptable and common to do. I have them here as legends. I think either way is okay.

The reason for legends would be to keep these in my project template and kind of keep them separate as something that I use over and over again and don't really edit once I've done it once. But it's totally okay to create these as drafting views as well. All right, so over here on the right side, I'm going to create some other information. In an electrical detail, we're simply using lines and text to create this information.

So I'm going to go to my annotate tab, detail lines. I want to swap over to the wide lines and I'm going to create first kind of a vertical line from the ceiling and that's going to be our wire. So this is going to start somewhere right here, just to the right of this junction box.

I will click one time and go up about to here. Once I'm there, I can change over my line type to a tangent and arc and that lets me connect back to that junction box with an arc. Easy-peasy.

All right, now I want to create this light fixture. It's a surface mounted light fixture and I'm going to go back to my regular line. Now, you don't have to follow that PDF exactly.

It can be a little tricky to read the dimensions on that PDF. We just want to create a generic light fixture. So it's okay if it's not perfectly dimensioned.

This is simply a diagrammatic detail view, so we're not dimensioning too much other than what's critical. You can see a note here and dimension. We're kind of talking about what the standards are that we're describing.

I'm going to drop down to medium lines now and I'll click right here. I'm going to come across about one foot six inches and then from here I'll go down about a foot and then to the right three feet and then up, you guessed it, a foot and across one foot six. So there's my little light fixture.

Now with that same line style selected, I want to draw a line down the middle as just a reference line to get everything centered up. I'm going to select now my circle and somewhere on the right I'll click and I want about a three inch radius and hit ENTER. I'll hit Escape, select that circle, press MM on my keyboard to mirror, and mirror that across.

That's to give an idea of the two light bulbs in that light fixture. So I'll delete that reference line. I don't need it anymore.

Now that I have this all done, I can add in my text notes and the dimension line. So first I'll start with the dimension line. I still have that medium line selected, so I can go to annotate and detail line, click right here and go up.

I can align with that right there, no problem. Click and I can select this line, grab the blue dot, pull it back a bit to create that witness line for my dimension. I can grab this dimension line and drag it across, and I can grab this tick mark, press CC on my keyboard to copy, and copy that.

Now I've got that dimension and I can add some text. So this text, if I select it, I'll notice it's one eighth inch text. I want to create the same.

So I'll hit escape and go back to annotate. I want the text tool, and I want that one-eighth-inch text. I want to start it with a leader.

I'll click the leader on the left side, and I'm selecting this dimension right here. So I'll click one time and I'll come up kind of a little bit higher, right to the top and I'll click and I can click one more time and start typing my text. My text here, I'll put on caps lock.

MC cable may be used if fixture is within six feet of junction box and minimum #12 wire. All right, so that's it.

So, I'm going to go ahead and click Modify. With this, I can shrink it down a little bit by clicking the blue dot, and that looks pretty good. If I'm not sure it's lined up, I can click that little move and it will snap and line up to the other text. All right, so with that I'm pretty set with that dimension at the top.

Now I want to add a note here for this light fixture and another way to add the note is to copy one that is existing. So I can select the ceiling verbiage here and do CC on my keyboard. Click one time, drag it down and give it a name.

So, this is going to be 'SURFACE MOUNTED LIGHT FIXTURE, ' and it's typical, so we'll put 'TYP' for typical, and there it is. Go back to modify and drag the leader dot down to point towards that light fixture and I'm set. I've wrapped up the lighting drop detail.