Hello, my name is Randy Dobson. I'm an instructor here in the Houston, Texas area, and this video will be on the AutoCAD layer command. This will actually be the second, the two of two videos.
You should have watched the first one already. This one's going to take the layering just a little bit further along using the same screen I had before. One of the things that I...
stopped on the first one I want to continue is your line types. Whenever you see a certain type of line type and I'm going to I'm going to try to bring up something here real quick. Let me see bear with me one second.
I should have had this up. Okay, when you look here, you have different types of line types, which I'll be getting into this more. This one right here is called a center line.
You have a dash line. The long line with the two little ones, those are called fan lines. lines here it's two two dashes and so on zigzag so there's there's a correct way and there's an incorrect way of doing that I want you to understand that whenever you you see a line type you need to create a layer for that line type that is the correct way of doing it you can go in and hard change it i try not to teach that until my advanced classes but i want you to to learn it the correct way so you come up here to your layer properties and again this is a continuation of the first video and i'm going to click over here on the line type and as you can see there's only one line type So I need to load them, which is right here. So I select the load.
Now, instead of going through and picking all of these, I can just somewhere in this screen on my right mouse button click. And then with my left mouse button, hit select all. Then hit OK. now because I am in the circle line type I'm going to go ahead and pick dashed I'll just do dash 2 and then for the lines and once you load the line types they're there they stay in the drawing continuous I'm going to go to Center and text we will just leave alone now as you notice my lines are now center line and my circles are all now dashed okay this is the correct way to do it when i select this or hover over it you'll see that it says by layer color by layer line type that's what you want to see what some people will tell you is oh there's a quicker way to do it if you come over here and highlight this text and you come up here to where it says by layer and you change that to let's say batting okay what you've done is you've made a hard change this is not how I want you to do it but I want you to be understanding you because in a rush you might have to do it this way but in normal 99% of the time you're going to define a line type by its layer the problem is if you do this and say your client comes back says well i want my lines all to be dashed like the circle well i come up here to layer properties i go to center two and i come down here to dashed and i hit okay All my lines change to dash except this one.
This one will stay that batting forever and ever until I either change it to another line type or change it back to by layer. If you notice when I highlight this, it doesn't say. by layer that is breaking my rule that this should say by layer come up here to the top and as you can see it is back now correct this is how you want to set your line types okay If you needed a line type that was a phantom, you would come to layer properties. Say you just wanted to call it phantom.
I'll make it a new one. Go to continuous. Come down here to phantom.
Okay, I'm going to make it my active layer by double clicking on it. Let's make it another color. Let's just go with cyan. Now, since it's active, anything I draw, a line. excuse me, a line.
It's going to be a phantom line. If I draw a circle, the circle will be a phantom line. So this is the correct way of doing it, that you use the layers to create your line types. Now, sometimes you may want to have something on a drawing that's there for your information, but you don't want it to plot. You may have something, let's say that you do some text over here to the side saying, this drawing was rotated.
Okay, and I want that there and say I want it in the drawing, but I just want to tell anybody opens it up Hey, I rotated this drawing Well, I could come over here to layer properties make a layer and I could just call it no plot or I could just say notes But come right over here. That's kind of you kind of have to open it up a little bit And see right here when I click on this it will not plot Now the difference between like the on and freeze, I can actually see this. I'm going to show it to you real quick.
I'm going to take this note and I'm going to put it on notes. As you can see, I can still see it. But watch what happens when I go to plot. And there's another video on plot, so don't worry about that. And I'm going to do a window of this area.
and i'm going to say center the plot give me a preview well as you can see that text doesn't show up okay everything else does i can hit escape see there's the text but because i have it on that no plot uh i can you know put it there and just to kind of help it i could also go to lock which is no special password or key you just click i'm sorry not that one notes lot what that means is i can't edit it if i go to move see it won't let me move it i can't select it i can't erase it so it's it's there you notice it's kind of shaded back a little bit and when I hover it over it it gives the little lock symbol over it so that's that's a really nice thing whenever you go to create a dimension i'm just going to do this real quick dimensions automatically create what's called a def points layer which you'll learn about in the dimensioning layer but as you notice the printer is not even there to select okay the def points layer cannot print anything that's on def point layers will never ever print where here my notes i could always come over here and just uncheck that and then it would print but the def points won't do that okay so you know remember that now there are more advanced settings that will help you and I'm going to I'm going to make some new layers I'm going to call it storm text I'm going to do another one sanitary text and let's do table text Okay, so I've got these layers. Over here to the left, you have what's called a filter or a group. A group is where you can select layers to go into your group that you can isolate them. I'm going to go over here and say group and I'm going to say original. Original, if I can spell.
I don't think I spelt that right. So if I go back here to all the used layers, if you remember, I started with zero, circle, lines, notes, and phantom. Those are the ones in actually text.
Those are my original ones. I've highlighted those by holding the control key each time. Now if I just hold down my left mouse button and drag it over to original and drop, I can see that I've highlighted those.
See, there's all the used layers. Now there's the original ones I started off with. Okay.
So I can create any kind of group that I want to. So I've got them all used layers. It does not move everything to one layer. to this one only it just organizes them into a certain group now the filters I'm going to go back to all use layers the filter works a little different I'm gonna I'm gonna make another red layer here just to kind of show you the filter actually will pick something up and you don't you don't get to decide which ones go in they go in by what you set them So I'm going to say, I'm going to go to filters and I'm going to call this text. This is the name I give it.
And I'm going to click right here and see the little asterisk. That's a wild card. So it means I'm going to type in asterisk shift eight T-E-X-T. Any layer name that has text in it will now be in that filter. And as you can see, it's showing those.
I hit okay. Now only things with text. Here's original. Here's all used.
I could go one further and say I'm going to go to filters and say red layers and come here to color and you have to kind of do this little fly out. I'm going to pick only layers that are red and there they are. There's the red layers.
there's the layers i started with there's the layers that only have text okay so this is a nice tool uh i will tell you that when using autocad the more organized you are it does take a little time up front to be more organized but the more organized you are whenever you have to come back and edit a drawing and you will have to edit a drawing it's just depending on the level of editing that having everything organized like this is extremely helpful. Another example I use, I don't know if any of y'all have ever done your own income tax, but imagine you've got two people in your family. One that keeps all the receipts in a big box, and then you have another family member that has every receipt and a file within a folder organized and named for different uses.
Which one's going to get done with? their income tax quicker and probably more correct the one that had it all organized again you will work with people that will not be organized and they will swear to you that this is faster don't worry about that they are incorrect please have them email me so i can set them straight you there you want to do this the correct way up front no shortcuts but this is uh you know one of the things that can help you with doing layers i've not messed with my use layers if i came over here to the you know if i if i grabbed you know say this one and put it in the original by accident you know here there all the use layers are still fine if i change this storm text to green well anywhere i go that storm text is going to be green okay So it's just like making a copy. All of these are just copies of the main layers. And that concludes my video on layers.
Thank you very much.