Grey out

[Anonymous]

Can anyone help . Client wants his drawings so that only the lighting that has been installed shows in colour and the rest visible but greyed out. These are store floor plans and I need to keep the layer integrity on the dwg. I have over 50 to do so looking for a quick and as easy as possible solution . I may add that I am very new to autocad and this is something I can't see how to do with ease. I can achieve a result but a long way round ie: copy,move, isolate, unisolate move back all that kind of jazz. Please anyone I would be most greatfull for a probable simple solution

cheers

jeff 

[pendean]

There is no quick fix but simpler than your idea: you will need to assign all the other layers/objects a gray color (like color 250 or 251 or 252 or 253, depends on what looks good when you print or pdf them out), except for the ones you want in color, then print without using any plot style in PLOT command.

Set up a LAYERSTATE to do the above to speed up the process (if all o your objects are drawn BYLAYER all the time and everywhere): make sure you save a layerstate to capture the original settings so you can put them back.

[Erense]

Are you drawing the Electical into the floor plans directly?

If you use the Floorplans as an External reference, you are able to show the 'xref' layers in one color not dependent on the original colour.

Use the VISRETAIN value to change whether the layer colours of the main drawing should dictate the shown colour (VISRETAIN=1) or that the colour of the XREF should be visible (VISRETAIN=0).

Use this in combination of the changes @pendean suggested.

[dominique.spicher]

Hi @Anonymous 

just checking in, if one of the solutions of @pendean  or @Erense are answering your question, cause both are viable options.

If it is just the output, be it a physical print or a PDF file, that needs to be grayed out and your lighting content in color, you could also create a Plot style for that. Select a "unique" index color or colors for your content (color should not overlap with the colors from the floor plan layers). The following article describes how to go about creating a Plot style.

• How to create a plot style in AutoCAD

Instead of the color black you can simply choose a grey index color for all the colors but the ones you create your content on. If the color of your content is a bit too "unique" because the general colors are already in use by the floor plan data, you can also change this in the plot style. Just select a different color replacing the "unique" one in the Plot style

Every one of these possible options is one that gets you to the representation you need, you now only have to choose 

Cheers, 

[dominique.spicher]

Gooood morning @Anonymous ,

since we haven't heard back from you so far, I was just wondering if any of the above listed suggestions were what you are looking for.

Have an awesome week everyone 

Cheers