What happens if you right click on the family in the PB, and choose "create instance"? Can you see it then?
Also, make sure that you are within your crop boundaries (if the view is being cropped). It won't show outside of the boundary. Can you see any temp dimensions when you try to place it?

Are these families you know have worked in the past? The only thing I could think of is to check to see if the objects in the family have their visibility settings set to not see in the view you're trying to insert it in. But if you've used them successfully in the past, then this is likely not the problem. Worth verifying tho ..

Perhaps the family is corrupted? Or even more likely, there are settings within the parameter that "buckle" the family on loading into projects - but then you often get a warning about those. If you can place them, but not see them, do they schedule?

How are you trying to place families in your view? By Home -> Component, or by dragging over from the Project Browser?

from the OP I don't think that this is a placement problem. I think that the OP is loading a family and it doesn't appear for placement when loading is done. As Dan Z said: "go to Families, right click, and use Create Instance. If that doesn't work then the OP does have a placement problem. We won't know for sure until Andy returns and tells us.

Firstly, Thanks for all the replies.

Yes I have tried your advice and right clicked on the created family in the PB and selected create instance but nothing happens either. It's not a clipping issue either. I will simply open a new project and create a wall, then go to load famlies and say... load a window straight out of the revit library add to my wall and nothing willl appear.

Now, I have just recently installed the trial versions of Rafters+ and Trusses+ which are add-ons for revit from | tools4revit - Productivity Extensions for Revit Architecture, Revit MEP and Revit Structure. I'm still waiting on an activication code from them so haven't actually used any of these add ons' features yet, however they are still installed since I can see them in the ribbon.

Do you think it may be a problem with my video card because yesterday when I was experimenting with creating my own custom families and loading them into my project, the screeen kind of blanked out and then it said there was a driver issue.... but this has happened to me a few times before anyway so it may not have been connected to families.

I'd like to also add that prior to this strange non-appearance of families, whilst experimenting with custom family creation, I was doing things like loading 3d masses from Rhino 3d into the family creater and then loading those into the project, which was working fine. Then I was loading 2d dwgs from revit as a tracing reference guide (much like when you load a plan into a project and star creating walls)... It was not long after I started doing that when the problem hit.

Ok, so that's a bit of a mouthful, but I thought it best to describe everything I was doing yesterday just incase it may have lead to my problem.

Cheers

If using wroksets, verify the current workset is visible. If not, make it visible and all your "missing" content will appear. I have seen this happen a few times.

Bringing back an old thread because i'm having a similar issue. When I right-click in PB, the "create instance" is grayed out. So I'm not sure how to put this family into the model. Any advice?

Is it because that family type is allowed in the view your in? For instance you can't add model component while in a sheet view.