How to grey out

[Anonymous]

Hi I am learning so please stay with me. 

I have a dwg of a store floor plan. It contains all the layers , blocks excetra . I have been tasked with annotating the lighting on the drawing which I have done and is fine. Problem now is my client requires that everything on the drawing requires greying out into the background and the lighting fixtures and the annotation I have added needs to be in colour.

i have never done this before so need some help. There must be a way rather than change all the VP colours or isolate, move , grey out everything then unisolate and move the fittings back. Basically i am looking for a quick and easy way as I have 50 drawings to tackle. 

Kind regards

[natasha.l]

Hello @Anonymous, 

Nice, sounds like you are creating a Lighting Plan. In this case you will create or import a ctb file for your Plot Style, you would assign all layers that are part of the background to plot in grey.

Please review this information to understand how to do this:

How to install a CTB or STB plot style file into AutoCAD

Then, select the ctb file or New from the "Plot Style Table - pen assignment". 

Assign layer colors to print to grey, Color 1 = Color 8 when printed 

Please "Accept Solution" if a reply or replies have helped resolve the issue or answered your question, to help others in the community.

[Kent1Cooper]

Can you simply change the colors of all Layers other than those of your fixtures and annotations?  That would not require dealing with colors by ViewPort, or any turning on or off of Layers, or Moving anything out and back.

[natasha.l]

Hello @Anonymous, 

Did you find a solution? It really depends on the business acumen what solution you go with. 

Please "Accept Solution" if a reply or replies have helped resolve the issue or answered your question, to help others in the community.

[SandyK711]

Hi @Anonymous,

Old thread, but I was looking for the answer so here's how I managed to make this work.

1) Draw a polyline around the area you want greyed out.
2) Use the WIPEOUT command and select the polyline you just created. (Or you can draw the polyline directly from the WIPEOUT command.)
3) Set the colour for the Wipeout (either directly or by changing the layer properties) to White (index colour 7).
4) Use the Wipeout's properties to set the Transparency to your liking. (I used 25%.)

I used this to "grey out" an area of a drawing that was not relevant to the current work being done. For your specific case you would have needed to select the lighting fixtures and the annotations and move these to the front.

[BillHVLDN]

Set all layout layers to Gray (8)

Force all objects to have color by their layer

1. Run the command: SETBYLAYER. 
2. Edit its Settings and activate changing the Color property. 
3. Select the objects. and agree to change all selection, including blocks (and nested blocks) to be set to: "ByLayer".

Create your drawing on top of this grayed out layout.