I cheer hard for my Pittsburgh Penguins, love coaching my kids in ball. Outside of work I am blessed with four beautiful daughters. We’re always looking to get stronger, faster, and more efficient. After spending many hours there implementing their Vault they decided to give me a permanent office! Reporting to the General Manager, I’m responsible for overseeing the companies technical operations and technical growth. Now I am the Technical Services Manager at Prairie Machine & Parts Mfg (a mining equipment manufacturer. Data Management has always been a big part of my professional life, for the most part with Autodesk Vault and all of its flavours. I’ve been using AutoCAD since r13 (c4 to be specific… I know, I know missed all the “fun” of r13), cut my solid modeling teeth on Mechanical Desktop, and have been using Inventor since before it was known as Inventor (anyone remember Rubicon?). But I got to see a lot of great places, meet very interesting people, and help solve many problems with Autodesk software. During my travels, I've delivered more hours of training, support, demos, and implementations that can remember. I spent the first decade of my career working for an Autodesk reseller as an Application Specialist. Hello! My name is Mike Thomas and I have a lot of experience with Autodesk products, primarily in the Manufacturing realm. The import button in this dialog is used to import the. Select the Layer State in the Layer States Manager and click the Export button to export the. Layer States can be exported so that they can be used in other drawings. To include the layer with the state, so that the Layer State can manage it you need to edit the state and add the layer to the state. The default option is to have these new layers turned off automatically in the State. You also set how you want new layers introduced into the drawing to behave with Layer States. You can enable the inclusion of XREF Layers. Take note of the options within the Layer States Manager. Using the Edit option you can tweak all aspects of the layers… on/off, frozen / thawed, color, linetype, locked / unlocked… you can even remove layers so that they are not controlled by the layer state. Never fear, the Layer States dialog is here to save the day! You’ve created a state but realize after that one of the layers is the wrong color and another is frozen and should be thawed. That’s the process! I now can quickly flip back-and-forth between the two states, quickly restoring the desired layer states. I then capture the current state as Layer State “WORKING THE WALLS” Making further layer changes I freeze layers, turn layers off, and change a couple layer colors. Next, using the Ribbon, I save the active status of the layers as state “EVERYTHING ON”. Using the layer dialog I insure everything is set as I want. I want to be able to quickly restore all layers to be visible, thawed, and with the correct colors as per my standard. Take for example this architectural drawing. When you find yourself repeating this process of performing repetitive layer state changes to a group of layers you need to look at using Layer States.ĪutoCAD’s Help describes Layer States as a method to “ Save, restore, and manage sets of layer settings” The process for capturing a Layer State is very straight forward…. Step#1 set the states of your layers of how you want them captured, Step#2 take the Layer State snapshot. For example, turning off Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC layers when working on the Walls of a building, and then locking the walls, turning on the Electrical to make changes to the electrical related objects. Its also very common to perform the same set of state changes on a group of layers. The one constant thing about layers is that they are constantly in a state of change… layer on, layer off, layer thaw, layer lock, layer color change, layer freeze, layer off, layer on, repeat, and repeat again. “The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change ” ― Heraclitus In Part 1 of the series we looked at Layer Filters, in this next part lets take a deep dive look at Layer States I used to always say during my days of teaching AutoCAD that there is a fine line between efficiency and laziness, that we should strive to be lazy, do things as efficient as possible, so that it doesn’t take as long, we don’t have to work as hard, and we have more time for more important things like coffee! In this continuing series on AutoCAD Layers I’m taking a deep dive into not just using layers, but using all the tools at our disposal, to be as efficient as possible. They control the visibility of objects and they control what is plotted and what isn’t plotted. We use layers to control colour, linetype, and lineweight of our objects. We know that layers are an important component of working with AutoCAD.
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