Visibility Parameters for Images

Earlier I wrote about how to link visibility parameters within families and using If/then statements in Visible/Invisible. Well, what if you wanted to be able to control the visibility of an image in Revit? (So that you can control whether it was shown or not on a title block perhaps). 

Ryan Duell, one of our Product Support Specialists, helped to answer this question...   

The only way to gain visibility control of an image is to place the image in a generic annotation family, and then nest that family into another generic annotation family as a Symbol and then insert that into your title block family.

It is important that in both generic annotation families, that you make sure that under the settings pull down menu, Family Category and Parameters, to check “Shared”.  This will allow the parameters in the symbol family to be shared when it is nested into the other generic annotation family and again in a title block family. 

Once you have the generic annotation family created and nested into the other generic annotation family, you can create a parameter in that family for the visibility of the nested family and link it to the parameter on the generic annotation family that contains the image.  At this point you can load it into your title block and create similar parameters to link so that you can actually control the visibility of the image when it is in a project.

It is a good idea to draw invisible lines in the generic annotation family that contains the image as this will make the image easier to select in the family. 

I’d also recommend setting all the visibility parameters to be instance parameters so that you can turn off each instance separately.    This process works pretty well to control the visibility of images contained in title blocks.  You can load the final family into the title blocks (as many as you want) and then create parameters within the title blocks to control each image. 

I wouldn’t recommend this process for inserting images into other types of views within Revit.  This is because these images are contained in generic annotation families, which scale as if they are annotation based on the scale of the view, meaning you could get some images that are way too small or too large.

Comments

[Dwane]

Harlan,

I also posted about this and have a step by step process with images on the following post...
http://revit-archcenter.blogspot.com/2008/12/change-image-in-revit-title-block.html

Dwane