Mastering Layer States for Floor and Roof Plan Management in a Single Drawing File

In this lesson, we're going to start working on the roof plan, but before we get to the roof plan, I want to set a couple of layer states so that we can quickly jump back and forth between our roof plan layers and our floor plan layers. That way when we want to switch back and forth between editing one of those objects, we can do it all in the same file. Many offices will put the roof plan and the floor plan in different drawings.

They will draw a floor plan, open a new file and attach the floor plan as an underlay or an X-ref. That underlay can be used to be connected to the roof plan geometry. In this case, it's a small project and we want to practice with layer states.

So instead of doing a separate file with our layer state, instead of doing a separate file with an X-ref for our floor plan, our roof plan, and if we needed a foundation plan or an area plan, you could have multiple drawings, but in this case we're going to put them all in the same drawing. If we open up layer properties, we can see that a little while ago we turned off all of the roof layers. Now I want to take this one step further and turn off every layer that isn't the floor plan and isn't at quarter inch scale.

So up here, this is the DIMS 96 for our roof plan. I'll turn that off. I'll turn off the symbols for our roof plan.

I'll turn off the symbols for our 24 inch scale, which are the keynotes we'll put back in the drawing later. And in this case we can see as we go down, everything else that's currently on is going to be used in the floor plan because we already turned off all of our roof layers. Now this is up to you.

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If you want the no plot on or off in your layer state, some people prefer their layer states to be drafting ready or presentation ready. If it's drafting ready, you're going to be having the no plot on because we're snapping to it, dimensions or call out views, et cetera. Or if it's going to be presentation ready, we'll have the no plot off.

In this case, let's leave the no plot on. And now we're ready to add our layer state. So under the layers dropdown, we're going to see that it's currently named unsaved layer state.

I'll hit that dropdown and hit manage layer states. Now this is going to be the current lay ISO state, which is not currently happening. So let's hit new.

So you'll see that there's one in here, lay ISO state. We want to make a new one. I'll hit new and we'll name this floor plan.

I'll hit okay. Now here's the floor plan. If you hit edit in the layer states manager, you'll see a similar view to our layer properties window and it has the same exact information.

If we ever needed to edit a layer state and we missed a layer or say we want to come back and turn off no plot, we can edit the layer state here and hit save. For now, I like all my settings, so I can hit cancel and I'll hit close. And now let's set up our layers for our roof plan.

So in this case, I'm going to select all the layers and turn them off. So I'll hit turn off the current layer as well, which is ANO Sims 48. In fact, I'm going to make zero our current layer.

And we'll start by turning on layer zero. We need our symbols and our dimensions for the 96 scale because our roof plan is going to come in at one eighth inch. And then with a shift select, holding shift, I'll select all of my A roof layers and I'll turn those back on.

In this case, we don't need to use the A text layer because we have our A roof and A ANO Sims and we'll put all of the appropriate text dimensions, et cetera, on these layers. So I'll go ahead and go up to my layer dropdown, manage layer states again. And once again, we're going to hit new and this will be roof plan.

I'll hit okay. I'll hit close and I'll close layer properties. Now this is kind of silly.

We are not in any of our layer states right now. So I'm going to go up to my floor plan layer state. And when I click it, you will see that all of the correct layers have turned on.

Now we saved our layer state with A ANO Sims 48 as the current layer. I want that to be layer zero. So I'm going to go into my manage layer states right away, edit the floor plan and layer zero should be the current layer.

We know double click here to make layer zero the current layer, hit save and close. And now let's toggle between roof plan and floor plan. And we will see that when we go back to the floor plan layer state, it will go to layer zero.

So I'll hit control S to save. And we have successfully set up our roof plan layer state. Obviously when we go to the roof plan, there's nothing drawn.

We need to turn on a couple of layers to get started with drawing our roof plan. So I'm going to turn on layer zero, turn on a wall and turn on a no plot. These are going to help us as we start drawing the roof plan.

I'll hit control S to save. And in the next video, we'll draw our roof plan geometry.