Visibility Plugin — Detailed User Guide

Overview

Visibility Plugin turns Revit's built-in Comments parameter into a visibility switch. You tag the elements that belong to one deliverable — say construction set — and from then on a single button hides or shows all of them at once.

The typical case is a model that has to serve two deliverables. A concept design submission should not show the lintels, the wall build-ups or the detailed dimensioning that the construction set needs. Instead of maintaining two models, or hand-picking elements every time, you mark them once and flip them off before the concept submission and back on afterwards.

Nothing is deleted and nothing inside the elements changes. The plugin uses Revit's own per-view Hide in view override — exactly what you would get by selecting the elements and pressing HH, only applied to every matching element in one step, and reversible in the same step.

Key Benefits & Use Cases

Concept design vs. construction documentation

One model, two deliverables. Tag everything that only belongs to the construction set, hide it for the concept presentation, unhide it when you go back to detailing.

Phased or staged handovers

Comments such as phase 2, tender or client extras let you switch whole packages of elements on and off without touching Revit phases or design options.

Coordination and clean-up

Temporary elements — survey solids, reference geometry, imported junk — can be tagged once with something like temp and hidden across every view of the model whenever you need a clean set of drawings.

Anything already using Comments

If your office already writes values into Comments for scheduling or filtering, those same values become visibility switches for free — the plugin reads the existing data, it never writes to it.

Requirements

• Autodesk Revit 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026 or 2027 (Windows only — Revit has no Mac version).
• ArchPlug Core, the shared runtime. The installer adds it automatically if it is not already on the machine.
• No account, no license key, no internet connection at run time. The plugin is free.

Installation

1. Download ArchPlug Visibility Plugin Setup from the plugin card or from the button above.
2. Close Revit and run the setup. It installs the plugin plus ArchPlug Core, and registers the add-in for every Revit version it finds.
3. Start Revit. A tab called ArchPlug appears in the ribbon, with a Visibility panel and a Visibility Plugin button.
4. Hovering the button and pressing F1 opens this guide.

User Interface Walkthrough

The window is deliberately small: a list of comment fields on top, the scope and the two action buttons below. It stays on top of Revit and you can keep panning and working in the model while it is open.

Comment fields

Each row is one comment value. The field is a drop-down and a text box: open the arrow to pick from every Comments value that already exists in the model, or simply type a value in. Matching ignores upper/lower case and leading or trailing spaces.

The + and – buttons

The + button adds another comment field, – removes the last one. The window grows and shrinks with the number of rows, up to twelve. HIDE and UNHIDE then act on the union of everything you entered — empty rows and duplicates are ignored.

The element counter

Under the fields the plugin reports, for example, 142 element(s) - 0 hidden in active view. It recounts on its own shortly after you stop typing, so you always know how many elements a value actually matches before you press anything.

Scope: Active view / All views

Active view affects only the view you are currently in. All views walks through every graphical, non-template view of the model — plans, ceiling plans, elevations, sections, detail views, 3D views, area plans and structural plans. Sheets, schedules and legends are skipped, since they hold no model elements.

HIDE and UNHIDE

Two separate buttons, so there is never any doubt about which direction you are going. Neither one closes the window — the result is written to the status line underneath, for example Hidden: 142 in 1 view(s).

Step-by-Step Workflow

1. Select the elements that belong to one deliverable and type a value into their Comments parameter — for example construction set. Any Revit selection method works, including filters and schedules.
2. Open ArchPlug → Visibility Plugin.
3. Pick construction set from the drop-down (it is already there, because the plugin reads the values out of the model).
4. Check the counter: it should report the number of elements you tagged.
5. Choose the scope — Active view for a single drawing, All views before a full submission.
6. Press HIDE. The elements disappear; the status line confirms how many, and in how many views.
7. When you go back to detailing, press UNHIDE with the same value and scope.

Feature Reference

How elements are matched

The plugin reads Revit's built-in instance parameter Comments (Identity Data) and matches the whole value, case-insensitively, with leading and trailing spaces removed. Construction Set, construction set and construction set are treated as the same value; construction set 2 is a different one.

Several comments at once

Every field is evaluated independently and the results are merged, so an element that carries any one of the values is affected. That makes it easy to hide, for instance, lintels and wall build-up together while leaving other tagged elements alone.

What hiding actually does

HIDE calls Revit's Hide elements in view override, the same mechanism as selecting elements and pressing HH. UNHIDE removes that override. Consequences worth knowing:

• The elements stay in the model, in their schedules and in their quantities. Only their visibility in a view changes.
• Everything is per view, so different views can be in different states on purpose.
• You can always confirm what is hidden with Revit's Reveal Hidden Elements (the light-bulb icon in the view control bar).
• Elements that Revit refuses to hide in a given view are skipped rather than causing an error.

Working while the window is open

The window is modeless: you can pan, zoom, change views and select elements without closing it. It also stays in front of Revit, including when Revit is on a second monitor or a view is torn off into its own window.

What is remembered

Your comment values, the number of fields, the chosen scope and the window position are stored per user and restored the next time you open the plugin. Updating the plugin does not reset them.

Keyboard

• Enter in a comment field — recount immediately.
• Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y — undo/redo your entries inside the window. It never touches Revit's own undo stack.
• Esc — close the window, exactly like the X in the corner.
• F1 over the ribbon button — open this guide.

Tips & Best Practices

• Agree on the vocabulary first. A short, fixed set of values — construction set, concept, temp — is far easier to live with than free-form notes. The drop-down shows you everything already in use, which makes drift easy to spot.
• Watch out for near-duplicates. construction set and .construction set are two different values. If a count looks too low, open the drop-down and check whether a second, almost identical value exists.
• Tag through schedules. Adding a Comments column to a schedule is usually the fastest way to tag many elements consistently.
• Use Active view while you work, All views before a submission. All views touches the whole model and takes longer on large projects; there is no reason to run it for a single drawing.
• Revit's undo still works. Both HIDE and UNHIDE run as a single transaction, so one Ctrl+Z in Revit reverses the whole operation.

Troubleshooting & FAQ

The counter says "No element carries this comment", but I know I tagged them. Open the drop-down and pick the value from the list instead of typing it. The list is read straight from the model, so what is in it is guaranteed to match. The usual culprits are a stray character at the start of the value, a double space in the middle, or the value having been typed into the type Comments rather than the instance Comments.

Does the plugin change my model? No. It never writes to the Comments parameter and never deletes anything. The only thing it changes is per-view visibility, which is the same override Revit gives you through Hide in view.

I hid elements in all views. How do I get them back? Type the same comment value, set the scope to All views and press UNHIDE. The plugin finds the elements even while they are hidden, because it searches the model rather than the current view.

Why are some elements still visible after HIDE? Either they do not carry exactly that comment value, or Revit does not allow that particular element to be hidden in that particular view. The status line reports how many were actually hidden, so compare it with the counter above.

Does it work with linked models? No. The plugin works on elements in the host model. Elements inside a linked file are controlled through the link's own visibility settings.

Do view templates override this? No. Element hide/unhide is an override on the individual view and is not controlled by view templates, so it survives applying a template.

Is it really free? Yes — no account, no license key, no trial period. It installs the same shared ArchPlug Core runtime the paid plugins use, so if you later add another ArchPlug plugin, that part is already in place.