What is BIM Content?

Revit Content Creation

BIM Marketing for Manufacturers

IGS Group - BIM Content & Revit Content producers primary logo with text

Knowledge Hub

Contact Us

Success Story: Darkon

Darkon Lighting, a 100% Australian-owned leader in bespoke lighting solutions, partnered with IGS Group to develop a comprehensive BIM strategy. The primary objective was to create a high-quality Revit library, enhance collaboration with specifiers, and expand Darkon’s presence across key geographic markets. In this Success Story, we’ll explore:
  • The challenges Darkon Lighting faced in adopting BIM
  • The solutions provided by IGS Group
  • The outcomes and benefits of this successful partnership

Success story header featuring Darkon Lighting's partnership with IGS Group. Includes a modern office setting with the "Darkon" logo displayed prominently and text summarizing the collaboration to enhance BIM strategy.

Background & Challenges

Darkon Lighting has established itself as a leader in the Australian lighting industry, specialising in architectural downlights, extruded aluminium profiles, and decorative lighting.
With state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities in Melbourne and offices in Sydney and Perth, Darkon serves diverse sectors, including commercial, government, residential, and education.

As BIM workflows became increasingly common in the AEC industry, Darkon recognised the opportunity to better serve specifiers by offering high-quality BIM content. However, they faced several challenges:

  1. Diverse Product Range
    Darkon’s extensive and customisable product range required BIM content that could accurately reflect their offerings, including parametric capabilities for complex lighting solutions like curved and linear systems.
  2. The Specific Complexity of Lighting Revit Families
    Creating Revit families for lighting products presents unique challenges. Lighting elements often require advanced parametric functionality to account for multiple configurations, such as different beam angles, housing types, mounting options, and finishes. Additionally, integrating accurate photometric data, which allows designers to simulate realistic lighting effects within their projects, adds another layer of technical complexity. Ensuring Darkon’s Revit families were both highly functional and user-friendly demanded significant expertise and attention to detail.
  3. Scalable Development
    With a continuous flow of new products and evolving priorities, Darkon needed a phased approach to Revit library development that balanced financial investment and marketing opportunities. A process of ensuring updates to their Revit library were easy to transfer onto their website and communicate with customers would also be important.

COO, Darkon Lighting: “Our main objective was to create a library of high-quality Revit content for our products and to get it into the hands of as many design professionals as possible. Providing content that helps specifiers explore creative project solutions has been especially important to Darkon. In choosing a BIM partner, Darkon looked for an Australian company who could develop Revit content which met the quality requirements of our local clients, and who had a broad understanding of Australian design and construction workflows. IGS initially came recommended by one of our key specifier clients.

Solution

IGS developed a sophisticated Revit library for Darkon, ensuring the content addressed the diverse needs of specifiers and provided maximum flexibility for various project requirements. The library included both face-based and non-hosted families, a strategic decision that catered to varied user preferences and the specific demands of lighting design and documentation workflows.

Face-Based and Non-Hosted Families

For building products which are generally affixed to a surface such as a wall or ceiling – such as Lighting, Tapware, Sanitaryware and Bathroom Accessories – there are two ways of creating these Revit families; being ‘Face-Based’ or ‘Non-Hosted’. Among Revit users there is no general consensus on which format is universally preferred.

Lighting products like Darkon’s often require flexibility in how they are placed within a Revit project. By offering both Face-Based and Non-Hosted Revit families, Darkon ensured that their products could be used by designers and BIM admins with varying preferences and across a wide range of scenarios:

  • Face-Based Revit Families: These are designed to be hosted on surfaces such as walls, ceilings, or floors, making them suitable for lighting fixtures that require precise placement on a specific architectural element. For example, downlights or wall-mounted luminaires can benefit from being face-hosted as they align directly with design geometry, ensuring accuracy in documentation.
  • Non-Hosted Revit Families: These families provide the flexibility to place lighting elements without being tied to a specific host surface, which is often seen as advantageous in collaborative environments where multiple designers are working on the same model. Non-hosted families reduce the risk of issues arising from hosting elements being deleted or altered—such as walls, ceilings, or floors—during design revisions or when linked models are updated. This makes them especially valuable for linear lights spanning open spaces or requiring unconventional placements, as well as during early design phases when host elements may not yet be finalised.

By providing both options, IGS ensured Darkon’s Revit content accommodated varying user preferences and could be used effectively across all stages of a project—from conceptual layouts to detailed construction documentation. This dual approach also reduced potential frustrations for designers, who often work on projects with varying levels of detail and host element requirements.

Benefits to Specifiers:

  • Flexibility to work across different project workflows and stages
  • Enhanced accuracy in aligning lighting elements with design intent
  • Reduced time spent troubleshooting placement issues during model development

Parametric Linear and Curved Lighting

One of the standout features of the Darkon Revit library is its highly parametric functionality for linear and curved lighting products. These families were designed to address the unique complexities of specifying and modelling such products in Revit.

Complexity in Developing Parametric Lighting Families

Linear and curved lighting systems often involve a wide array of configurations, including variable lengths, curves, angles, and even the ability to form closed shapes like rings. Developing Revit families that accommodate these requirements involves:

  • Advanced Geometry Controls: Ensuring that designers can easily adjust the shape, size, and curvature of lighting fixtures while maintaining design integrity.
  • Material and Finish Options: Allowing specifiers to match finishes to project requirements for accurate visualization and documentation.
  • Photometric Data Integration: Providing accurate lighting data for simulations, ensuring designers can visualize how the lighting will impact the space.
  • Connection Points and Continuity: Addressing how modular segments connect seamlessly to create continuous lines or patterns. Developing these families required careful planning and execution to ensure the families remained user-friendly and responsive in a project environment.

Benefits for Designers
By incorporating these parametric capabilities, Darkon’s Revit library allows specifiers to:

  • Streamline Customisation: Quickly configure lighting systems to meet unique design requirements, whether straight, curved, or circular.
  • Save Time: Reduce the need to manually create or modify custom lighting families, allowing designers to focus on the creative aspects of their projects.
  • Improve Accuracy: Ensure that modelled designs align with Darkon’s manufacturing capabilities, minimising errors in documentation, procurement and installation.
  • Enhance Visualisation: Use integrated photometric data to evaluate the impact of lighting solutions on the overall space.

COO, Darkon Lighting: “Partnering with IGS has been a great decision. The feedback from design practices on our expanding Revit library has been extremely positive, and the syndication and analytics provided by BIMcontent.com have been invaluable.”

Syndication via BIMcontent.com

A key advantage of Darkon’s partnership with BIMcontent.com was the platform’s syndication capabilities, which ensured efficient, simultaneous updates to their Revit library across multiple platforms. With this feature, as updates were made to the Darkon library over time, these were automatically reflected on:

  • BIMcontent.com, where thousands of specifiers browse and download content.
  • Darkon’s own website, via an embedded iFrame, allowing customers to access the latest Revit content directly from Darkon’s online presence.
  • The BIMcontent.com Revit plug-in, used by designers to search for and load Revit content directly into their projects without leaving their Revit project models.

This syndication process, managed by the IGS / BIMcontent.com team, simplified Revit library management for Darkon, ensuring their specifiers always had access to the most up-to-date and accurate content. Additionally, it streamlined the communication of updates to the A&D market, as new or improved content could be promoted through BIMcontent.com’s marketing and communication tools, keeping Darkon’s products visible and relevant to both new and existing Darkon clients.

Benefits for Darkon:

  • Time Efficiency: Eliminated the need to manually update content on their website and other platforms.
  • Improved Customer Experience: Specifiers could rely on consistent, accurate content wherever they accessed the library.
  • Enhanced Communication: Regular updates and new product launches could be easily shared with customers, keeping them engaged and informed.

Outcomes

  1. Improved Collaboration with Designers
    Darkon’s high-quality Revit library has made it easier for designers to explore creative lighting solutions and integrate Darkon’s products into their projects with confidence.
  2. Increased Market Presence
    Through the widespread exposure and marketing efforts of BIMcontent.com, Darkon expanded their brand awareness in new geographic markets, engaging more specifiers and strengthening their burgeoning presence in these locations.
  3. Enhanced Project Delivery
    By ensuring Revit content aligned with manufacturing capabilities, Darkon improved the accuracy of project documentation being submitted by specifiers for review and streamlining workflows from design to installation.
  4. Ongoing Growth Opportunities
    The phased development approach allowed Darkon to regularly release updates and communicate with specifiers, keeping their brand front of mind and supporting continued growth.

What Did The Client Think?

COO, Darkon Lighting

Our partnership with IGS grew organically through observing BIM workflows being increasingly used on architectural projects. IGS has been instrumental in helping us develop
a Revit library that meets the quality expectations of our clients and expands our market reach. The positive feedback from designers and the insights gained through BIMcontent.com have reinforced the value of this partnership.

Table of Contents

Sign up today for news, industry insights & content releases!

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our privacy policy.

FAQs

FAQ Question 1

+

FAQ Answer 1
FAQ Question 2

+

FAQ Answer 2
FAQ Question 3

+

FAQ Answer 3

The building industry is rapidly evolving. Don’t get left behind!

Join the growing list of leading brands who leverage our BIM Content Creation Services
and associated Building Product Marketing Strategies to grow your business.

Contact Us

We look forward to speaking with you!


For inquiries about BIM content creation, web or product marketing solutions as well as general inquiries and support, please fill out the contact form provided, or contact us via the details below.


1300 980 763

[email protected]