Friday

Hip tip: Organization of layers inside the blocks

3 Comments Jan-18-2008 | Posted by Orhan Toker | Printable Version | Level |

All AutoCAD versions. This article prepared with AutoCAD 2002

Hello,

Yesterday, Eren has started his series of articles about blocks. There are several advantages of using blocks in AutoCAD. You can read these advantages in the first article of his series (Blocks I). In addition, by organizing the blocks in a more clever way, you can increase the benefits gained from using blocks. In this article, I will explain about organization of layers inside the blocks. As you know, blocks are definitions that include AutoCAD entities and a certain insertion point inside them. As an example, you can draw a table by its four legs, one slab and possibly a glass. Thus, this is a group that is made up of six numbers of quadrilaterals. All of these entities all together resemble a table (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 My simple TABLE block.

Think of this shape as a block named as TABLE. In the definition of my TABLE block, there is one table slab, four numbers of metal legs and one glass panel. While creating the block, I used TAL_T_WOOD, TAL_T_GLASS and TAL_T_ METAL layers (T letter that I used in the middle of layer names represent word table). By this way, these layers are also defined inside the definition of the block. Assume that after creating the block, we used TAL_FURNITURE layer for inserting furnishing elements at the several locations inside the drawing. When we want the table to look without glass, it will be enough to freeze TAL_S_GLASS layer. Note that, if layers of the entities that are used inside the block is zero, then block will take the properties of the layer we use while inserting the block.

As it can be understood from this simple example, if you carefully select, arrange and name the layers that you use inside the blocks, then you can use the same block for different purposes.

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