Ceiling nots not working in Revit

    Hello, I am new to Enscape and was wondering why the recessed ceiling lights that come in the Enscape library do not automatically attach to the ceiling as a host. How can I fix this?

    All enscape assets are placed by work plane associated with your view by default, if you use the "..." menu under an asset you can choose to place on surface & be hosted instead.


    That said, keep in mind all enscape assets are just "dumb" models, not revit families - so they can't by themselves interact with your model in anyway, which means you'll need to manually cut out holes in your ceiling & add blank Revit lights to where you place these if you want to actually have them work like revit families.


    IMO, for Revit, it's far better to actually build up a library of revit-native lighting families than use Enscape lights as it actually will give you control over the lighting & render out correctly. The only exception would be for things like table/floor lamps or one-offs like a pendant.

    Quote from skhayward

    That said, keep in mind all enscape assets are just "dumb" models, not revit families - so they can't by themselves interact with your model in anyway, which means you'll need to manually cut out holes in your ceiling & add blank Revit lights to where you place these if you want to actually have them work like revit families.

    This is not 100% accurate. The Enscape assets are families. You could change their category and add a void in the family, then use the cut command to cut the family out of the ceiling.


    It's not necessarily the "best" workflow, but it would definitely work, and it would allow the Enscape asset to be tagged and interact with the ceiling while still having it render as an asset.


    The one thing that you can't do is change the hosting behavior (e.g. make it ceiling of face hosted) of an already existing asset. But for those cases, you could first create a family, and then link that family to the asset.

    Oh cool, I wasn't aware Enscape's assets were actual existing families- I just assumed they were generated every time you used the asset browser or reloaded the model. In theory this means you could add actual lighting data to them as well, right?


    I also assume that these families you modify could only exist in the project you edit them in, so you'd have to redo them for each project or each time you pull that asset out of the asset library? I wonder if it'd be possible to save heavily used ones as actual revit families, put in the proper edits, then reuse them in projects & have it still work in Enscape. I'd love to be able to place an enscape bed and have it actually look correct in plan & in render with edits to the family. The existing "replace a revit family" option in Enscape is almost useless as it never gets the alignment of the model correct with any family I've used.

    Yeah you can totally save these families out and re-use them.


    When you place an asset from Enscape's library panel, enscape does a few things


    1) it creates a new planting family on the fly

    2) creates a 3d shape as placeholder geometry in that family (as a nested family)

    3) it adds a few parameters to the family so that enscape knows that this is an asset that should be replaced with the detailed version when rendering


    You can modify this family as much as you like, as long as you don't mess with the enscape parameters, it will work fine. For example, you could delete the placeholder geometry and model something yourself in Revit. It will still be replaced. You can then load the asset into other projects, it will still work fine.

    We even built in formulas in some of our standard families with a checkbox "render as asset" and then the formula automatically fills in the right ID so enscape replaces it with an asset.


    It's quite versatile!