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Thursday, March 1, 2018

Managing Content with Revit's Preview Visibility Feature

Back in the day, just a few versions of Revit ago, it was tricky to manage element visibility within the Family Editor environment.

For example, the screen shot of the title block below shows the address for each of our offices all piled up on each other. Dealing with this in older versions of Revit, I would select one (not really knowing which one was going to get selected) and move it a specific distance to the right (e.g. 6"). I would do this until the one I needed was selected, or the last one.

Now, we have an amazing, yet somewhat hard-to-find-on-your-own new feature called Preview Visibility. I do not see it used or mentioned very often. And, just the other day someone was telling me how they just told a super experienced Revit use about this, who had no idea!


The Preview Visibility feature is controlled by an icon on the View Control Bar in the...
lower left of the view, as pointed out above and shown below. FYI: This is not a simple toggle as there is another option in other family types.

When turned on, any visibility controls set for specific elements either show or hide based on the current Family Type settings as shown in the next two images.



That it... simple and easy to use, as well as super helpful!

Since we are talking about title blocks, I will do another post on managing signatures... stay tuned for that.

This feature works a little differently in a family with geometry, which I will save discussion on for another day. For now, if interested, check this Autodesk Help topic out: Preview Family Geometry in the Family Editor

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