Creating a new Lighting Family (using a Seed Family)

Alright. So in case you ever have to make a family from scratch, you can go about it in two different ways. The first way is creating it from scratch, and it's not it it's easy to get started. It's just very tedious to do. So up here in file, you can always click the new button and hit family. And then in here, pick your language and your your, you know, unit of measurement. So it's English imperial. Scroll down here to, let's say, lighting fixture. And for me, I I'm gonna pick, like, the the non hosted one. So what we call we call the level hosted or universal hosted fixture.

Just allows you to host it without needing a ceiling plan or reference plan or whatever. But, anyways, so I'm gonna pick this as my template. I'm gonna hit open, and this is pretty much a blank slate. There's not much in here besides, like, maybe this is actually the light source. So what you're seeing is just the light source and nothing else.

But if you go to the floor plan, I mean, what you could do is you can start making extrusion. Let's say you start from the middle. You go up, like, here, and, you can make this extrusion, you know, stick up, I don't know, like, let let's do, like, I don't know, six inches. And if you go over here to the three d view, actually, it's it's it's way down here for some reason. So, I mean, you could start building it this way, but the problem is nothing in here is linked.

So even if you dropped an electrical connector on here, the electrical connector, none of this stuff is linked to any of the shared, shared parameters. Your fixture itself doesn't have any shared parameters. Nothing set up. So this is literally starting from scratch, and it's like, why would you do that when you can start at second base by using one of your existing fixtures as what we call a seed family? So I'm actually gonna close this, and what we're gonna do is alright.

Close all this. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna come in here. And, usually, if you wanna make a new family that resembles something similar to one of your existing families, use that as your starting point. So for example, here's a round pendant. You can see how there's, like, a stem already, and then there's, like, a round fixture up here. So this is pretty much just a revolve. So I I went over here. I drew a side profile and revolved it around the center axis, and that's how I made the curved one. Let's say you wanna make one that's just squared. Well, it'd be much easier to come in here, change this from, like, a curve to a round.

So I guess we could, you know, do something like this. Hit okay. Well, this one, did too quickly. If I here. If I remove constraints just for a minute, you can see, like, all of a sudden, I make kind of, like, a flat fixture.

It's a lot easier to do something like this and save this back and make a new version of it. So that's why I highly recommend using one of these as, like, a seed family. If you're making something that's already here, like, you know, a different track or a different exit sign or pendant, start with up here. But if you don't have if you're making something completely different, say, like, like a squiggly fixture or something unique, you can use one of these what we call the IES carriers. So this one just has an IES file, electrical connector, and then this is just symbology.

So, like, if I were to try to view this in three d, there's nothing here. There's no three d element modeled in this space. So this is a great great family to use as a seed family. And what I would do is, like, I would go ahead and hit edit family, and then this is kind of your template. You have your photometric and your connector already in here.

And if you, like, click on your connector, you'll see that this is already linked in here. If you go up here to your, family types, you see that all of your shared parameters are already in here in the correct order. So like I said, this starts you at second base, and it makes it a lot easier to make a new family. Alright. So we're gonna before we make any changes, we're gonna save out a copy of this.

So, basically, go up here to file, hit save as family, and then this one will just be your new or or just we'll just call this, yeah, new fixture. K. Hit save. Alright. And once you have this thing named something different, you can go ahead and start creating your family.

So over here, I'm gonna go to the floor plan, and then I'm just gonna define the first shape. Let's say I wanna make a you know, just I wanna make a square fixture. You'll see that I already drew some lines in here. So these are just symbols symbolic lines. It's not a three d element, and they're attached to oh, whoops.

I don't wanna drag that. They're attached to these reference planes. So the idea is you change the distance to these reference planes, and it'll move the lines for you. The the reason I like this setup is because then, you know, I can go in here, take these lines, get rid of them, and I can go ahead and create an extrusion by simply just drawing it bigger than I want to. And then now I can use the align tool.

So it's for me, it's a l. If I click the align tool, I could snap each one of these reference planes to align, and then by hitting this little lock icon, I lock it all to the reference plane. So I'm gonna go around. Go ahead. Lock everything in here. Perfect. And then done with the align tool. I'm done with the extrusion tool, and there we go. So now if I go over here to the three d view, you'll see that I now have a three d element, which is awesome. If I go back to actually, you know what?

Here. Over here in the three d view, once you draw your three d element, I like to do the depth control in here. So, like, over here, extrusion end, I'm going to link that to the fixture depth and hit okay. And there we go. So I just made a flat two by two by three and one eighth inch fixture, and now I'm pretty much done. You can add stems and pendants and whatever by just going up here to create and add in, you know, sweeps or lines, whatever you want in here. But the gist of it is all done. We have the connector that's ready for powering. I don't have to touch it. The photometric is good to go.

You can change if you want to. Light source. Let's say you don't wanna use a a rectangular one. It's already set up for rectangular, so I advise you not to mess with this one. If you want a circular one, obviously, pick the other IES carrier.

But, yeah, you can if you don't wanna use an IES file, I believe you can just, go ahead and change it to a general, you know, box or something if you wanted to. And that'll pretty much you could change this to, let's say, fixture length. Change this one to fixture width, and there you go. So now if you go up here and change the the fixture size, let's say you change this to a four by two, hit okay, you see how it just kind of stretches out, goes to the shape you want, and it's ready to go. So at this point, you're done making your fixture.

You would load into your project and close. So, yes, you wanna see you wanna save this new fixture, and now you have a brand new fixture that you defined yourself. So over here, you see new fixture. You can rename it. So edit the type. Rename this. This this could be it in, like, B2 by four, b 24. Oops. Two by four. Okay. Cool. And then fill in all the rest of your stuff. The emergency should work. Let's see how that's already set up. You can power it.

You can select you can assign different loads to it. So over here, if you go to edit type, you can see that the electrical loads are down here. Preferably, I think you just change change the one of them. I think if you change the other one yeah. They they're both linked together. One is a standard fixture parameter, and then the other one is a shared parameter, which I use for scheduling. So I kinda link them together. You can change it to whichever you need to, number of poles, your lighting classification. Hit okay. And all of this yeah.

You see? One one twenty volts, 36 VA. So all of it's ready to go. And there you go. You create a new family. Like I said, use one of the existing families as a seed and go from there. It's the easiest way to create new families. Alright. And if you want to get rid of a family, it's pretty easy. You basically click this, right click, find in project browser, and you can go ahead and select this guy.

Right click, and hit delete. And then once you delete that, it's gone from the it's gone from the project. Because sometimes, like, what I'll do is I'll make a family, but then, like, I might have to make a different one or a revised one or something, and you have to make sure that you clear them out. Otherwise, you're gonna have a ton of families in here that you're never gonna use. I'd like to keep this list relatively trimmed down. I don't want, like, thousands of families in here. It's just so hard to find things. Okay. Alright. Well, good luck, and go make some of your own families.