Light Lister

[Anonymous]

In Revit I can use a dialog box called a light lister to go through and turn on or off various lights that I have placed in a model. I have made a fly-through of a building and to do so I placed a number of lights in the building as well as an "undersun" and window lights. For a sun study, I want to turn off just the interior light objects so I can watch the effects of natural daylight on an interior space. I turned off the light objects and I apparently also turned off the "undersun" and the window lights because now the interior is dark except for the windows.
Do I have to locate each individual light and turn it off so I can have the sun objects and window lights left on? I would like to leave the light objects in place, just turned off. Is there a group switch for that?

Thanks...
Roger

[Karl Ottenstein]

rhendrickson wrote:
Do I have to locate each individual light and turn it off so I can have the sun objects and window lights left on? I would like to leave the light objects in place, just turned off. Is there a group switch for that?

Yes and no. Apparently, you are selecting all of your lights by choosing the lamp tool and then doing a select all (cmd/ctrl-A).

Instead, assign useful ID's in the ID field of each light and use Find & Select to select the desired group of lights and turn them off in one step. (You cannot group across stories).

For example, your interior lights might has an ID with a prefix of 'int', etc.

Cheers,
Karl

[Karl Ottenstein]

Actually, I think it would be more effective to use an interactive schedule to adjust your lighting. Attached is one such example, grouped by story. You might want to have another grouped by interior/exterior, etc. Create as many sorted/grouped lists as you need.

Note that the intensity field and the on/off checkbox are dynamic. Just edit your lamps here.

Karl

[Karl Ottenstein]

Here are the settings for the posted schedule. Not that the format makes any sense - it is just an example.

Karl

[Karl Ottenstein]

Finally, Roger - if you don't want to have to be checking a bunch of boxes - you can organize one of the schedules to group all similar lamps together, so that one checkbox turns the group off. In the schedule below, lights are separated by floor, but then on a floor, they are grouped by ID/library part name - so in some cases the checkbox turns on/off multiple lights.

There is no way to automate the process though - as there is in Artlantis, where different views can be saved which have different groups of lights on or off.

Hi to Kathleen and Gary. 😉

Karl

[Anonymous]

Interesting you should bring this up, I was playing with this idea the other day.

I renamed the IDs of groups of lights used for a particular 'scene' to an identical name, 'scene 01' etc. I then gave each light a different contour colour for easy identification when there are several the same. It would have been useful if GS hadn't hidden the custom text parameters that could have done the same job. The schedule lists the lights by id number -i.e. per scene, then by colour. The next step was adding all the possible parameters that you may need to control them. I didn't finish it, but I've attached it to see if it may be useful to you.

The idea was to make it simple to switch on just the required lights especially when there are several in the same area for different scenes.

The trouble was getting the parameters in the best order for greatest control (Which they are not yet!), but the concept seemed to be pretty sound. Unfortunately you can't control the built-in sun, and ambient light level this way, but you can't have everything!

[Anonymous]

Thanks! I built a schedule and turned off the selected interior lights. Now we see if the other light objects will have the desired effect in the room.
Up to now there hasn't been much daylighting effect and I know that this configuration of windows will produce much more light than I have been able to document.

Thanks again....
Roger

[Karl Ottenstein]

rhendrickson wrote:
Thanks! I built a schedule and turned off the selected interior lights. Now we see if the other light objects will have the desired effect in the room.

Roger,

If the effect you are talking about is just to make a rendered image illuminate the way you envision it, then glad this helped and you are on your way.

If by 'desired effect' you mean you are trying to determine if the lighting will be effective in real life... then you should note that there is nothing real about the way things are illuminated by ArchiCAD. You should consider Artlantis, Maxwell, or other software to get a better feel for reality. (You'll still be fudging artistically, but only with radiosity and more can you get realistic illumination.)

Cheers,
Karl

[Link]

Karl wrote:
Instead, assign useful ID's in the ID field of each light and use Find & Select to select the desired group of lights and turn them off in one step. (You cannot group across stories).

You should be able to if they appear in the 3D window.

Cheers,
Link.

[rocorona]

Yes, as Link pointed out, now the Group command can be used in the 3D windows, to group elements on different stories.

Another way can be the use of the Selections palette, where you can save various selection status, to avoid repeating the selection process for every test.