Every Revit user has lost an hour to an element that simply is not there. Trace picks the element — in the model, inside a link, or by ID — and runs its visibility checklist across any views you choose, live, in the order an expert would ask. Green means ruled out; amber and red are the app's own “possible cause” and “definite cause”. A handful of causes fix themselves in one click. Revit 2024–2027.
Revit has a dozen ways to hide something and no way to ask which one it was.
Trace is purely on-demand and read-only — no event subscriptions, no persistence. The only writes are the one-click fixes you ask for, each in its own transaction, each one Ctrl+Z away.
Pick element… hands Revit the click — “Trace: click the host element you can't see.” — and In link… Tab-cycles into linked models. Or type an ID, or just keep your current Revit selection: a whole multi-selection becomes a batch — up to 250 at once. Then choose the views: the active one, or any set of printable views from the picker.
Analyze sweeps card by card — Existence & selection before Visibility & graphics before View extent and View context — each row lighting up, then landing green, amber or red, one step at a time so the order teaches; the Fast toggle skips the animation for bulk runs. Finished views collapse, causes sort to the top, and the view's summary settles on its verdict: Found the cause.
One render walk per view asks Revit what it truly drew. When every rule lands green and the walk says drawn, Trace refuses to shrug: “No cause found — and Revit IS drawing this element here. You're likely looking at the wrong place, it's behind something, or it's off-screen.” And when temporary hide/isolate blinds that walk, Trace says so rather than guess.
On a red or amber row, Show where opens the view and highlights the element; Fix it repairs the reversible causes — temporary hide/isolate, a category turned off, hidden in view, a hidden sub-category, workset visibility — inside one transaction, one Ctrl+Z, then re-runs just that check so you watch it flip green. And when a view template owns Model Categories, the category fix refuses and names the template, instead of committing a change Revit would silently revert.
Select fifty elements and Analyze: every check folds its answers into one row that never implies more than it covered — “3 of 50 elements —” followed by the check's own sentence when it hits some, “Ruled out for all 50 elements.” when it clears them, and a counted note when any element could not be evaluated. Select N affected grabs the whole flagged set in the view; the per-element Fix it steps aside, so a green row can never claim it fixed a crowd.
Find a view where it shows walks the printable views for one where the element genuinely draws, switches to it and zooms. Across many views the headline keeps score — “Cause found in 2 of 6 views.” — and Stop keeps the partial results, so nothing is lost to impatience. The built-in manual is generated from the same registry as the checks themselves, so it can never drift from what Trace actually tests.
Copy findings puts the causes on the clipboard, headed “BIMIO Trace — why can't I see this element?”, ready for an issue or an RFI. Export report writes a self-contained HTML report — the diagnosis and its narrative, the verdict breakdown, every check, and the full how-to-fix manual — and opens it. In Lens, a Trace card explains a selected element's invisibility only when there is something to explain.
This is an actual HTML report Trace exports — self-contained, works offline, shareable as one file. Scroll it right here, or open it full-screen.
Trace ships on the Views panel of the BIMIO tab. Pick the element, run the checklist, and answer the RFI with evidence. Revit 2024–2027, full trial, no card.