Lighting Pipes or Hanging Positions for fixed grids

[Mike_M]

I've been drafting in Vectorworks for a few years now but plenty of the functions withing Spotlight are unfamiliar to me. I've been tasked with creating a lighting plot for a theatre that has a fixed grid. While the trim of a few pipes could be changed, they rarely are. Most are fixed to a catwalk. I've checked out a few articles and videos. Some convert objects into groups>symbols>hanging positions to insert their lights on. Other create pipes using the lighting pipe tool and then insert lights via the lighting device tool.

 

Two end goals here. First is to have rep plots that shouldn't change much. Secondly is to have files that various designers (familiar with vectorworks) could manipulate with relative ease.

 

From what I'm gathering, hanging positions might be ideal if you were drafting for an event space with truss for example. You might want to manipulate an entire piece of truss at once. That there may be more functionality for moving location, keeping all of your lighting objects in place. In my case, I'd like the pipe to remain constant but allow for lights and side arms to be added, removed and moved around. I'm not overly concerned with focus points at the moment. It seems most of our designers prefer to be in the space for focus anyway and my primary goal is the established Rep Plots.  

 

Does it make more sense for me to simply use the lighting pipe tool versus creating hanging positions?

 

Bonus points if anyone had a suggestion for integrating side arms into my process here. Right now I'm thinking I will use the lighting pipe tool to create my fixed grid. Then use the the lighting pipe tool to create simple representations of 12" and 24" side arms. Then convert those to symbols to be able to add more for different plots/shows. What I think is a bit of bummer is I have to adjust the z height of each one. They don't snap to the height of pipes (or hanging positions for that matter) light objects from the lighting device tool does.