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How Important are the layers? Need a quick way to hide a bunch of stuff.

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Message 1 of 6
drathak
803 Views, 5 Replies

How Important are the layers? Need a quick way to hide a bunch of stuff.

The attached drawing is a one line diagram for one of our substations and is the first one I've done with Electrical.  Traditionally we would use this type of one line to make a simler operating one line from.  (It only shows the busses, breakers, switches, transformers and other major equipment.)

 

For my Electrical project I want to reference the more complete file into a second drawing and turn off everything I don't want to see.

 

I can get rid of a lot of stuff by putting those layers into a Group filter and toggle the visibilty of that group. But to get rid of everything and keep some others that I do need, I may have to violate the "everything in a block on layer 0" rule even more than I already have.

 

If I change some of the standard attributes to use my own layers, will the program change them back based on the attribute name or will it honor the fact that they aren't on layer 0 and just get confused somewhere else?

 

Also, I'm open to suggestions on other ways to achieve this.

--------------
Joe Weaver
Principle Associate Engineer - Nashville Electric Service
P&C Committee Chair – SDS Industry Consortium
5 REPLIES 5
Message 2 of 6

Hello,  

 

The Layers in the AutoCAD Electrical is important, AutoCAD Electrical use the layer name to identify the different type of the Electrical components, you can define these layer names in the Project Settings. By default, all the Schematic symbols need to be in the SYMS layer, wll the wires need to be in different wire layers defined in the Wire Type definition dialog, all the wire numbers will in the WIRENO layer. If you change the layer for the Electrical components to your own's layers, the application can't handle such components any more.

 

You can put the layers into Groups, and set the Visibility On/Off.

 

Can you let me know what you want to achive? what is the difficult there? I open your drawing in ACE2014, I can group the layers and set them invisiable.

 

Thanks,

Robin Shou

Quality Assurance

Autodesk AutoCAD Electrical

Message 3 of 6

The BLOCK REFERENCE (the symbol) should be inserted into the SYMS-layer.

However, the CONTENT of the block (the graphics) could be inserted on whatever layer you'd like, and them be turned on/off in any varaition. So you can have mulitple version of the graphics for the symbol, in different layers.

Just make sure you hav checked the "Apply to entities oin layer '0' only":

Capture.PNG

 

Then, all graphics placed in some other layer than "0", will STAY on that layer.

 


Trond Hasse Lie
AutoCAD Electrical and EPLAN expert
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Message 4 of 6
pvpatel
in reply to: rhesusminus

It looks like the symbols that come with AutoCAD Electrical are all created in layer 0 with "ByLayer" properties for color, lineweight and Linetype. Will it be a problem if we created all our symbols in Layer 0 but with "ByBlock" properties for color, lineweight and Linetype?

Message 5 of 6
Icemanau
in reply to: pvpatel

Yes, ACADE blocks are created on Layer 0 with all colours/line types and such set to By Layer.

You can go through and change the settings to what you wish, however, do not change the layer itself.

Be aware that there are a hell of a lot of standard ACADE blocks included with the package and it will take you a fair while to go through and change all of them.

 

When you insert the block using the ACADE insert commands, it automatically moves the graphics and attributes of the block to the defined layers as specified in the Define Layers dialog box (accessible from the DWG/PROJ Properties -> Drawing Format tab).

 

These layers can be turned on or off depending on your needs.

For example, I normally turn the XREF layer off until the dwgs have been finalised and then turn them on and move the tables to a blank section of the screen.

 

I also prefer to un-tick the box in the Define Layers dial that restricts the changes to Layer 0 items only. I have found a couple of blocks that I created did end up on different layers and rather than go through and find all of them, it is easier to just change this setting.

 

Regards Brad



Icemanau (NNTP handle: Brad Coleman
AutoCAD Electrical User and IT Hardware Support

Message 6 of 6
rhesusminus
in reply to: pvpatel

What Brad said.
Can't see no problems with changing all the entities in a symbol to "ByBlock".
But why would you want to do this? What do you want to achieve?

Trond Hasse Lie
AutoCAD Electrical and EPLAN expert
Ctrl Alt El
Please select "Accept Solution" if this post answers your question. 'Likes' won't hurt either. 😉

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