Revit 2024 – Assign Different Colors to Different Lighting Families Despite Same Category?

[delorenzoSBRMU]

Hi everyone,

I’m facing an issue in Revit 2024 and hope someone can help me out. I want to assign different colors to different lighting families:

• General lighting → Blue
• Emergency lighting → Green

The problem is that both types belong to the same category: Lighting Fixtures. I initially thought I could solve this with filters, but since they share the same category, that doesn’t seem to work.

I’ve searched the forum but couldn’t find anything that really answers my question.

Is there a way to differentiate these families by color? Maybe by using a property in the type or instance parameters that I can use as a filter criterion? Or is there another solution I might have overlooked?

Thanks in advance for your help! 😊

[iainsavage]

Use the value of one of the parameters (description, comments etc) in the families, or the family name or type name etc in your view filter. Create different filters for different fixture types and then set different colours for each filter.

[andy_hudson]

You can filter on more than just categories.

You can create a filter based on Family names, and them rename your families to have Emergency or General in the file name, then filter and assign colours.

Personally I'd add a shared Parameter, say "Lighting Type", then for the lighting fixtures, give the parameter a value of either General or Emergency.

Then create a filter where Parameter "Lighting Type" Equals General, and set the colour to Blue, then create a filter where parameter "Lighting type" equals  Emergency, and set the colour to green.

Learn to use shared parameters and filters, filters are the most powerful tool you have for utilising element information in your model

[HVAC-Novice · Accepted solution]

Create a shared parameter that makes a fixture to be "emergency". in my example below I use the parameter Elumtools uses. But you can create your own. (Elumtools uses that parameter to perform the emergency lighting calcs in Revit)

Then use that to filter and apply whatever color or pattern you want. 

FWIW, in location most designers indicate emergency fixtures with a black dot (red circled in my screenshot). I do the same and that visibility also is driven by the above parameter. I assume this is an old traditional method before color printing was a thing. 

[delorenzoSBRMU]

Thank you very much for your answer!