perhaps one of the biggest issues when creating drawings on a computer is making sure they turn out the way you want them to on paper that is where good layer management and layer use comes in the purpose of layers is to organize the data in your file so that you can work with it and so it has a correct visual display on paper not just the screen because who cares ultimately what it looks like on the screen that’s not what you’re giving your client you’re giving your client the drawings you know okay sometimes the CAD file goes along with it but the drawing is where you make your money so it needs to be correct layers control how an object looks but you can overwrite a layer settings on any object by signing that object a color line type line weight transparency etc don’t do this I would love to tell you to never ever ever do this but there will be a rare occasion when it’s appropriate but they’re extremely rare the three keys to good object visual display management in AutoCAD are won by layer number two by layer at number three by layer every object can be either assigned its properties
individually or it can be assigned by layer three main display properties an object can have or set to or color line wait in line type each layer can have all of these properties set as well and transparency is another one if you use that it’s a good practice to keep all of your objects set to by layer that allows you to control them in your viewports viewports our windows and paper space that look at model space we’ve kind of looked at this already but I want to go over it one more time in this file go to the paper space tab named layout one and I’m in the architectural example Imperial drawing file
open up the layer manager type LA on the command line that will take you right to it now if you make changes here then the changes are made everywhere we only want to change the objects though in a specific part of our drawing we can make a detailed view of any part of our window here of one of our doors or a combination of wall joint or anything and so sometimes though you want to make other things faded back or to be dashed or not shown at all and that’s okay you don’t want to have to make a new file for all of that you can do that right here to do that you have to edit the layers while in an activated viewport since these are all drawn to by layer we can make the change here double click in your viewport make sure it’s locked click on the button here if it looks like this an yellow unlocked lock that means you can mess things up I means I can zoom it in hand around and on it’s all messed up well if you find that you’ve done that just undo
then click on the button here unlock it again this will keep the scale right and everything so if I double click in here this will be my viewport it’ll be highlighted everything will be
constrained inside that viewport I can still since I’ve locked it zoom in and out and pan around and I don’t affect the scale on my drawing or the view and now open up the layer manager now you’re managing what’s in this viewport I have all my regular controls here but now I have all of them once again so these are called you know off freeze lock color line type line weight transparency plot etc and now I have viewport freeze viewport color
viewport line type viewport line weight etc they’re the exact same things and they work the exact same way and they’re changed the exact same way as before only now I can change my walls in this viewport alone too let’s go with a pink color
see their pink here if I double-click outside the viewport
close my layer manager so it’s out of the way you can see I made them paint here that’s only in this viewport if i go back to model space see there’s still this ugly brown color
who wants brown walls anyway
but I can do that if i copy this viewport
same settings as in this viewport so if I double-click inside it to activate it open up my layer manager I can scroll across here and change my walls to any other color
they don’t change the line work at all I just changed the way it’s set to in the lair I’m controlling the visual display of these layers so that I can show it differently now why would I want to change the color well maybe I needed to print differently you know in green instead of in pink maybe I’m using what’s called a CTB file to control my line weight than not the layer manager and green prints out lighter and I need that to be faded back that’s another option and are another reason to do it if I unlock this and i zoom in
so right here to make a detail of some sort lock it back so that i can zoom in and pan around now i can work in here since these are different colors I don’t have to change the line work at all I can just leave it the same and just display it in a different way and when I go to print this out it’ll look
different and I can make more drawings from one set of line work much easier much more quickly and without messing up my original work
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