Outside the Lines
Technical Marketing Manager Todd Hunter provides his colorful views, opinions, and expertise on Autodesk Impression, remote controlled helicopters, Triumph motorcycles, and everything in between. Read his blog and chances are you’ll learn more about treble, bass and oil filter maintenance.
Latest Post
- posted 10/26/07 by Todd Hunter The Law and Order of Draw Order
- The method of managing draw order that most people are familiar with is within the layer palette. Objects on layers near the top of the layer list will appear “in front “ of or in the foreground, and objects on layers toward the bottom of this list will appear “behind” or in the background of the rendering.
This is a simple and effective way to control draw order, but what if you have a DWG with only one or just a few layers? Usually in this circumstance you will have lots of layer overrides. That is, objects on the same layer but with different styles other than what has been assigned to the layer.
In the example below, all of the line work is on layer 0 and a Soft Charcoal stroke has been applied to the layer. Since there is only one layer, Area Styling has been used to fill the colored areas and all of the different colored fills are on layer 0 as style overrides.
Notice in the image that the colored fills overlap or obscure the charcoal lines. We want the edge lines to be dark and really “pop” so we need to change the draw order to bring the lines in front of the colored fills.
“But Todd..” I hear you say.. “How can we change the draw order if all the objects are on the same layer?” “Simple,” I reply. Draw order can be controlled within the layer.
To do this we first need to select all the lines. To make a selection set of just the line work on layer 0, 1st select a line, then select all instances of lines by clicking the check-mark in the lower right hand corner of the style editor.
Once all the lines are selected, right-click and go to Arrange Selection, then Bring to Front of Layer
After we do this, the lines really “pop” now. So you can still tweak your renderings even if you are working with only one layer.