When it comes to working in Revit, one of the most annoying things is
when something is missing and you cannot seem to find it. You know it should be
there, you know it should be visible in view but for some
reason it's just not there. Well because of this issue I decided to create this video which is going to be the ultimate Revit visibility
troubleshooting guide. We're going to go through a 21 point checklist so if something
is missing in Revit your you're definitely
going to find it. Let's go. Okay now quickly before we jump into Revit I would just like to ask you to check out my
website BalkanArchitect.com. I'm going to link it up
just below this video in the description and
then also up in the cards above that's where I upload
all of my Revit courses where I take the extra
time to go slowly step by step and explore all of
Revit's interesting topics. So if you're interested
please check it out. Okay so now without any further ado, let's jump straight into Revit. Now the first few things
that we want to check are going to be down here on this bar. So what I like to do first is just to check the temporary hide
isolate and to see if something needs to be revealed, if
something needs to be reset. In this case we don't really have anything hidden so we can leave that out. Then we have the reveal
hidden elements and then you can see what's
been hidden in this view. So you can see we do
have some elements that are hidden but if none
of these are a problem for us I can just turn this off. Then after that the
next thing that you want to check is going to be the detail level. So sometimes in the
different detail levels it's going to appear like
some things are missing. So I suggest you just toggle
through coarse, medium and fine level of detail just to see if something changes and if something
perhaps appears or disappears that's supposed to be there for example. And then finally we have the option to check the visual styles. So what they like to do is this is especially useful in floor
plans, elevations, sections. If something is not there you can just go and set this to wireframe
and it might reveal something that might be
hidden behind a different element. So for example if I have like a floor or a wall in front of something by setting this to transparent
it's going to reveal that. So for example here you can see when this is transparent I can see like this line of the chair or something like that. So it is going to show you what's hidden behind
different Revit elements. Okay moving forward the next thing that you want to check is the object styles dialog. Now this is going to be project wide so if something is missing in all of the views it might be because of this. So if you go here to
the Manage tab, we have the Settings panel and there
we have the Object styles. Now usually you can't really turn off the visibility of
something in Object styles. However, you can change
the align color to make it seem set at half tone or even set to white. So it's not going to
appear in certain views. So you can just go through this list and see if something is out of place. So for example, here, I
have actually used this dialog to set the furniture,
furniture systems and generic models to gray so they appear as half tone. So this is something that you can just go through and see if
something has been changed. If something is out of
order, if something is set to white, then it's
just like somebody set it to invisible when you
have your regular views. So this is something worth exploring. Now, moving forward, let's go here to the View Properties. So whenever nothing is
selected in the view, the Properties panel is going to
display view properties and it's just going to show the view type here. So for 3D it's going to
say 3D View. For floor plan. It's just going to say floor plan. And this is where we have a lot of our visibility settings. So the first dialog that I like to check is going to be the
Visibility Graphics dialog. You can go here to edit and there is quite a bit of things to check here. So for example, first make sure that the visibility has been
turned on for everything. So you can go here and you can scroll down and see if something
has been unchecked. In this case we can see that the mass is set to be unchecked, the parts are set to be unchecked and
the topography is set to the visibility of the
topography has been turned off. So this is something just
that you should kind of go through and make sure
that nothing is out of order. Moving forward, on the other side here we have the half tone settings. So for example, here the furniture has been set to half tone. So this is something
else that you might want to explore and just make sure
that everything is all right. And then finally we have the detail level and you can actually
customize the detail level. So for example, in this
situation you can see that the walls don't
really show the wall layers. And let's say I want
to see the wall layers. This is set to define level of detail. So why aren't they showing? Well, here in the Visibility
Graphics overrides menu, when I scroll down to walls,
you can see that this has been override to say
course, if I just change it to View or by View and hit Apply. Okay, now you can see we have the visible wall layers here. So that's something that might be affecting your visibility as well. Let's then go back to
visibility graphics overrides. Now, this is not the only
thing that you should check. First of all, make sure that this kind of main toggle is checked on. But then we also have
annotation categories and you want to go through those if some annotation elements are
missing or they're presented in half tone or something else. We can do the same thing for analytical categories, imported
categories and then finally we have filters and design options. Moving forward we have the view range. Now view range can in a lot of cases be responsible for
something that's missing. This is the view range
and I'm not going to go too much into this just because
it's a very complicated topic and I already have a video on this topic. So I'm just going to link
that up in the cards above. So you can go to that video and you can learn more about the view
range settings and why something might be missing
because they are set wrong. Moving forward. For sections, for
example, we have this clip. So if I open up a section and then here in the view properties
you're going to see that we have the far clip offset. Now something might not be visible because of this far clip offset. So if I go back here and if I change this to be really close
and go to this section, you can see some of the
elements are now missing. So you can go here
to the far clip offset, you can change the value
here or you can go to and set it to no clip and then click OK. And now it's going to
display way more things. So this is something that you might want to explore when it comes to your sections. Going back to our first
level floor plan, something else that you might want to check here in the properties is going to be the phasing. So if you're using phasing in the project, it might not show some elements because of the phase or the phase filter. So if I change this to existing, well, nothing is going to be visible because the phase is set to existing and we don't really have anything
existing in this project. Also the phase filter
might be affecting this. So you can toggle through
these settings and just see if something is going to
change something on your view. Then similar to facing,
we have the design options so you can find the design options here and then you can toggle
through those and see if something is missing or if
something has been changed so you can check that as well. Then. Moving forward we have
the discipline parameters. So here we have the discipline. This is set to architectural. If we have a different discipline, it might show things differently. So if I try to change this for example to electrical and then hit apply. You can see that a lot of these elements are going to show in half tone. So that's just because
this is a discipline setting, it's not something that
we can change anywhere. It's just part of the whole kind of built in discipline system of revit. So just make sure that the discipline has been set correctly. If you want to keep
both disciplines, you can have two different views
set to two different disciplines. Then we have the view crop. So for example, if I go and create something here, so let's place some walls. If I select these walls and just move them, you can see
they start disappearing at a certain point and now
they're completely gone. Well, this might be
because of the view crop. So here if I go back to the view properties, scroll
down to crop view here you can see that this view is cropped. However, the crop
region is set to be invisible. So now I can see the crop region, I can extend it so I can see that wall, or I can just turn off the crop altogether. And now we can see all of those elements. Now something similar
would be the section box. So for example, if the section box is turned on, it might not show some elements. So for example, here you
can see now that wall here is missing and I just have
to move the section box. Now, in some cases I like to actually hide my section box. And if somebody is using the
project who isn't familiar with the fact that I use a
section box and that I have hidden that section box,
they might not know where that element has been, why
that element is missing. So you can just go here to
reveal hidden elements and then if you see the section
box, you can move it. Or if you want, you can just turn off the section box altogether just
to make sure that you can see all of the elements
that you want to see. And finally we have the mass settings. So if you have some sort of massing in your project, it might not be showing
because the mass settings. So here you can set this to
show mass by view settings or just going to override
it and set it to show mass. So regardless of the view settings, it is going to display the
massing. Moving forward something that is
really difficult to figure out in some cases is groups. So for example, if I go here and find these walls, let's actually add a
window or something there. Okay, so we have this
set of walls with a window. And let's say I want
to group this, so I'm just going to select it and
turn it into a group. Okay. So here for this group, if I use the tab key and select one of the items like this wall, and here I'm going to get the option to exclude this
from this group instance. So if I click that, that's going to be missing from this group. However, if I go here to reveal hidden elements, it's not going
to display that element. So I might not realize why that's missing. So you have to select the group and then when you select it, it's
actually going to show it in this blue kind of highlighted view. And then if you want to
actually bring it back, you can just use the tab key and
then you can restore that. Now let me just ungroup
this and I'm going to show you another very bad
way to hide things in Revit. So here if I go to the modify tab and then go to the Line Work tool, we actually have the ability
to use invisible lines. So I can actually use invisible lines and turn this completely invisible. So this is not going to
appear over here at all and we actually have to
select it to see if it's there. So one way to see if
something is missing is simply to go here and set this to shaded. Now you also might need
to change the detail level. So here if I set this to coarse and shaded, it is going to display this. But again, using the
Line Work tool is usually a very, very bad way of hiding things. It's just for very specific situations. Now I have just brought
this back to the original display and another way
that you can hide elements is with a detail item which is
actually a masking region. So if I place a masking region over this, it's just not going to be visible. However, in this case, this can be fixed. So if you just go here to wireframe, it's going to basically
look through that masking region so you can see your elements. So this is one way to avoid the masking region visibility issue. And if you don't know, masking regions are available over here on detail items. So here we have the masking regions and then you can just mask whatever you want. And if you don't want
to see these edges, you can just select it and go
to edit boundary, select all lines and set them to invisible lines. And then it's going to be
completely invisible and it's going to cause all sorts of issues if you've hidden something
that you don't want to hide. And finally, I just want to talk about sections and elevation markers. So these section markers,
in some cases they might go invisible when
you change the scale. So here if I change the scale to one to 200, you can see that they're gone. Now the reason for this is because there's actually a
setting in these elements. So when you select
your section, you can see it says hide at scales
coarser than, and then in this case is one to 100. So you might want to change this to 100 to 200, and then when I set this to 100 to 200, it's still going to be visible. So it's only showing this
section, not the other one, because I didn't change
it for the other section. And this is an instance
parameter, so it's only going to affect the sections where
you have made that change. So there we go. I hope you have learned something new about how to set up visibility or how to figure out visibility
issues inside of Revit. Now, this entire checklist,
I'm going to attach it as a PDF on my patreon page. So if you don't know, I have a patreon page where I upload all of
my Revit project files from my tutorials, like this
office building project file. If you want to access all
of those and the checklist PDF, I'm going to link
that up in the cards above. And also it's going to be down them in the links below this video. Thank you for watching guys. Make sure to check out my website. BalkanArchitect.com for more Revit courses. There I have over 120 hours of content and I'm adding more each week. Make sure to subscribe for more videos. And also I've added a video over there that might interest you as well.
