Fixing Nested Plan Swing Visibility in Revit Door Families

A few years ago, we’ve created a guide on how to create nested plan swing family.

Recently, I’ve received questions from users asking how to resolve issues with the visibility of the family below.

You can watch a video version of this tutorial:

As you can see, the plan swing is visible in the plan view even though the cut plane is above it. You might have this issue where you see plan swings from doors located one level below.

The problem with plan swing family is that they only contain symbolic lines. You can check an option called Show only if Instance is cut.

The problem is that since it is a symbolic family, there is nothing to be cut. Revit considers that this family is never cut. Therefore, the swing is never visible.

That’s when the ultra-secret comes in! Our issue is that there is nothing to cut. What if there was? You can draw an invisible model line that has the same height as the door. Go to the elevation of the plan swing family. Create a reference plane and assign the height dimension.

The model line is considered as a model element, which means that the nested swing family is now cut. Load the plan swing back into the project. It is visible once again.

You might notice that when you select the nested plan swing and go to the Visibility/Graphics Overrides menu, there is an option called When cut in Plan/RCP (if category permits).

This option is grayed out. This is a bit confusing, because this seems to imply that the nested family will not be visible if the family is cut, but it isn’t the case.

Revit will simply use the settings from the nested family to determine if it should be visible when the main family is cut. You can leave the option like this. Leave “Plan/RCP” active.

Load the family back into the project. As you can see, the plan swing isn’t visible when the cut plane doesn’t intersect it.

 But when the cut plane of the plan view intersects the door, the plan swing indeed becomes visible.

Hurray!