Hi,
I want to create a ceiling for my building model so I can put light fixture in it later. What command should I use to create a ceiling? Should I just use the slab command?
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There is a vaRoof command as well, it really depends on how you will be generating the fixtures. VisualArq doesn’t allow for lights I don’t think, as such you will probably be working with polysurfaces anyway, so it won’t be a simple case of just plugging it in.
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Hi Eve, for flat ceilings you can use the slab object or as @Artstep says just Rhino surfaces or polysurfaces.
How does one add lighting fixtures to a ceiling? For example a recessed lighting fixture that will need to perform a boolean operation
The VisualARQ Element objects (if you a block of a lighting element for an Element style), can’t be hosted on other objects (that’s a planned feature though). So you will need to perform the boolean operations using auxiliary volumes of subtraction (either on a slab or on a polysurface), and place the lighting element in the desired position.
For pendants and such you could create an element or furniture.
If you need a recessed light fixture, make it a window and set the host to Slab or Roof.
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@arcus such a creative workaround! 
@Benjamin_Paolo_Fortu you can also use the vaAddInterferences command between the lighting element and slab.
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That works!
That brings me to the topic of not linking object creation methods with categories that I emailed you about . . on some level you just need grasshopper styles with all the creation methods available and nothing else. The user can then decide how to categorize the objects.
We have the same problem that we have with Revit were all of a sudden a curtain wall object is used to create a kitchen or railing for example. It makes for a poor model where data is improperly labeled.
In the end I think the idea of BIM is a bit of a misnomer. Most current software is really about creating PDF drawings not a data model that can be accessed and queried. If you are creating a data model, you don’t want lights categorized as windows.
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100% agree.
Ideally the items would be categorized correctly. You could probably set those light fixtures on a light fixture layer and then when you export the IFC assign the objects in that layer the IFC Electrical Element (would that be the right entity type?). But, you are right, in revit I would end up making all kinds of things out of curtain wall because it is so versatile, while so many other tools are so inflexible.
The promise of BIM is that it slowly eliminates the pdf drawings altogether. But I think that dream is mostly held by the people that make the software, not the people that build the buildings or take liability for those drawings / BIM models.
I would also like more flexibility in how to categorize the objects and what inputs they need.