How to install lighting in eaves

[Darren S]

I am a student as at Lanier tech. and we are trying to install down lights in an exterior soffit/eaves. We have tried looking in the reference manual and have not found any answers. The ligths follow the picth of the roof plane even though we have the boxed eave selection checked. Wer have tried building invisible walls ans creating a room , we have tried deleting the roof plane and placing the lights first, but the lights change to follow the roof picth when we rinstall the roof plane. We have tried other things and can still not get it to work. Please help. Thanks

[Tommy Blair]

Some of the ceiling lights do work for eaves too but not the recessed down lights. What I do is copy the recessed light from Chief's library to your Users library. Then open it (open symbol) and make it sit on the floor. Now you can place it and adjust it's height to fit the eaves and manually place it.

[David J. Potter]

You should be able to do this manually, what I have done to overcome the down-light following the slant of the roof is to also place a soffit (cabinet tools) in the eave (down lights are programmed to follow soffits by that I mean they are programmed to align with soffit objects by default).
Some would call this a "work-round", I just call it getting my work done.

DJP

[Tommy Blair]

There's always more than one way to do things with this program.

[mkennedy]

You should be able to do this manually, what I have done to overcome the down-light following the slant of the roof is to also place a soffit (cabinet tools) in the eave (down lights are programmed to follow soffits by that I mean they are programmed to align with soffit objects by default).
Some would call this a "work-round", I just call it getting my work done.

DJP

If my cordless is dead I just pound the screws in with a hammer - some call this a workaround, I just call it getting my work done

[Joe Carrick]

Try this one:

1. Do not specify a Soffit.
2. Create Ceiling Planes to serve as the Soffit
3. Recessed Can Lights will now install correctly in the Ceiling Planes.

As Tommy said, there are always other ways of doing things. As an alternative, you can leave the Soffits but just create a Level Ceiling Plane 1/2" lower than the Soffit in which to install the lights. Without the Ceiling Plane the Can Lights actually attach to the bottom of the sloped eave which is higher.

BTW, I think this is something that CA should consider - shouldn't a soffit really be just a "Special Ceiling"? If it was then this and several other problems would cease to exist.

[dshall]

Some of the ceiling lights do work for eaves too but not the recessed down lights. What I do is copy the recessed light from Chief's library to your Users library. Then open it (open symbol) and make it sit on the floor. Now you can place it and adjust it's height to fit the eaves and manually place it.

I like Tommy's solution

[Joe Carrick]

I like Tommy's solution

What don't you like about mine? You do know that it's easy to create a single flat ceiling plane to act as the soffit and then break/stretch it all the way around the house. Now you can actually control the material and the lights actually snap right to it?

This also works for cantilevered floors, etc.

[Tommy Blair]

Joe, there's nothing wrong with how you want to do it. I just posted how I have been handling that situation. I have the 6" & 4" recessed cans already set up in my library ready to use whenever I want. All I do is place one and copy it where ever I want.

[dshall]

What don't you like about mine? You do know that it's easy to create a single flat ceiling plane to act as the soffit and then break/stretch it all the way around the house. Now you can actually control the material and the lights actually snap right to it?

This also works for cantilevered floors, etc.

I am not sure if I realized that if I create a ceiling plane in the middle of the desert, the light would snap to it. I will give it a try. But with Tommy's solution, the plane is not necessary, and we already have a soffit created with eave. Tommy's solution is less work.

[mkennedy]

i'm on the fence - i don't like having things drawn that i wouldn't normally display, otherwise I forget they're there, so i'd rather not draw an eave soffit unless i was going to draw it on every job, in which case I'd like it to be automatic?
on the other hand, i don't like manually setting the locations of things that could\should be placing themselves automatically, so i'd rather not calculate\manually enter the clng ht in the light - i will inevitably leave one or two at an incorrect default height and waste 5 minutes scratching my head trying to figure out why I've got no light in that rendered scene.
I'm not on my 'puter rite now, but...I'm gonna try using the roof overhang - isn't that a pline, can't I change it to a clng plane?

[Joe Carrick]

I don't think there's anything that can be "changed to a ceiling plane". OTOH, I think that CA should make the "Soffit" act like a "Ceiling Plane" - at least for the purpose of snapping symbols to them.

I think of it this way:

If a room has a ceiling then a "Ceiling Plane" is created by default and the lights snap to that. If the room doesn't have a ceiling then the lights snap to the "cathedral ceiling". If you consider a "Soffit" to be just an "Exterior Ceiling Plane" then it should work the same way.

IMO this should be a real easy fix that CA could do.

[mkennedy]

yeah, I kind of vaguely remember being able to change a p-lines layer settings to terrain perimeter and having that work, but....