Creating Layer States for Floor Plan and Roof Plan Views in AutoCAD

In this video, we are going to add our layer states for the floor plan and roof plan views. In order to do that, let's open up the layer states manager.

We can find that under the layers dropdown, and then you'll see here unsaved layer state, and then we can manage layer states or add a new layer state. Let's go to manage, and we can see here that we have no layer states. If I go new layer state, we can name it.

This one will be named floor plan, and the description can be blank because this is self-explanatory. I'll hit okay, and we can see that a floor plan layer state has been added. It is a model space, and this is same as DWG, yes.

If we edit the layer state, we'll see a very similar window to one we've seen before. This looks almost identical to the layer properties window. We can see that we have our light bulb on and off, our sun and snowflake, and our padlocks, also our colors, line types, and other information.

In this case, this is the floor plan layer state, and in the floor plan layer state, we do not want to see any of the layers associated with our roof or our foundation. We can make layer zero our current layer in the layer state, and we can grab our foundation layers. I'm holding shift to select all three.

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I'll turn those off, and I'll do the same with the roof. I'll pick roof, hold shift, grab a roof text, and then I can turn these off. I can leave a pattern off because this is a working layer state and not a finished layer state.

I'll hit save and close, and when I go to my layers dropdown, we can see that nothing has changed. These are still an unsaved layer state. This is just where I'm working in the moment.

If I go back to the layers dropdown and choose my unsaved layer state dropdown, I can now see that floor plan is an option for layer state. Let's choose it. It looks like nothing has changed except we can see that layer zero is now our current layer, and the layers for a roof and foundation, structural foundation, are off.

This is how our layer state has updated. Let's add another layer state for the roof layer. Now, we don't have any geometry yet, so when we turn the layer state on, it will show a blank screen, but that's okay.

That's what we want. Let's go to layers. Here, I'm choosing floor plan and then manage layer states.

Let's add a new layer state. This one will be named roof plan. I'll hit okay.

Let's edit the roof plan layer state. We can see that it's set up to match the existing drawing. I'll leave zero on, and I'll leave it as the current layer, and I'll select all of the rest of the layers and hit the light bulb until they are all off.

Now, we can come back to our roof layers and turn them back on. In our roof plan layer state, we now have layer zero on and all of the A roof layers on and nothing else. Now, this is a little deceiving because we need our A no plot on as well.

Even though it is currently set as architectural no plot, we will use it for all of the views in this plan drawing. Let's hit save and close. Now, we can see that we have a floor plan and a roof plan.

When I go to the roof plan, you can see that layer zero is still active, and there's no other geometry on the screen. This is because we have no geometry drawn on the layers that are on A roof through A roof text. I'll control S to save, and we will set up our foundation and electrical layer states in later videos.

For now, let's start on the roof plan. You can see in your handouts folder that the roof plan is fairly simple, consisting of a top-down view of the roof. The floor plan cuts underneath the roof, so we have not seen any of that geometry so far.

I'm going to go and turn on our A dash wall layer. A dash wall. This is not changing our layer state, it's just allowing me to see this information as we begin drafting.

Now, I'm going to go to A dash roof outline and make that my current layer. Now, the interesting thing about A dash roof outline is we want to trace the outline of these walls, but we don't want it to appear as if it's an object that we're really seeing above the roof. If we were standing on top of the roof, we would not see the walls themselves.

So, let's draw this rectangle to start. I'll go to rectangle. I have my running object snaps on, and I see endpoint is selected.

So, I can pick this endpoint to this endpoint, and now I can see that the outline is traced. This is the only geometry we need to finish our roof plan, so I can go back to layer state. As soon as I turn the A wall layer on, you can see it went to unsaved.

I can go back to roof plan, which will turn off the A wall layer. CTRL S to save. This geometry does outline the walls, but we wouldn't see it this way above the roof.

So, if you check your handout, you can see that we represent this with a dashed line. The dashed line means hidden in this case. In order to change this line, I want to update the layer properties.

So, I'll go to layer properties, find A roof outline, and over here we can see that there is a line type column. So far in this course, we've only used continuous for every single layer, but this is where we want to change that information. If I click the word continuous, we can see that there's only one line type in this drawing.

We can load other line types that come default with AutoCAD. So, I'll load, and in this case, if we scroll down, we can see some line types just starting with regular names. Batting, border, center, and so on.

In this case, scroll down and find the hidden line type. This is what we're looking for, a hidden line underneath the roof. I'll choose OK, and now hidden is in the drawing, but we need to select it and hit OK to apply it to our current layer.

Now this line type has been updated to say hidden. Let's close layer properties and see if anything has changed. It has.

We can just see it when we zoom way in that this dashed line is very, very small. In fact, when we zoom extents, we can't see the dashed line at all. This is because the line types have been created to fit on paper space, not model space.

These are scaled at 1 to 1, not at our scale factor of 48, like we've done with our paper space symbols. In order to update our line type scale, we can simply type in LT scale and hit ENTER, and now we can change our line type scale to our anticipated plot scale, which is 48. 48, enter, and we can see the line type update.

If you do not automatically see your line type update when you think it should, we can go view, regen, or regen all to see the screen update. Now this line is a hidden line, and we can control S to save. Okay, let's continue in the next video with the rest of our roof plan geometry.

See you there.