Wednesday September 16, 2015 at 10:10am
SOLIDWORKS allows the use of layers in a similar fashion to 2D CAD programs. However they may be an occasion where your drawing annotations or dimensions do not conform to the layers you think they are located on.
SOLIDWORKS allows the use of layers in a similar fashion to
2D CAD programs. However they may be an occasion where your drawing annotations
or dimensions do not conform to the layers you think they are located on.
First of all you could do with showing the “Line Format”
toolbar (View > Toolbars > Line Format) it will look something like this:
The first icons on this toolbar refer to changing and
creating new layers.
The layer properties button allows you to create and edit
the existing layers that are setup:
So once you have configured these you may transfer items
such as annotation or dimensions onto these layers in any of the following
ways;
Right click and item and “Change Layer”
Select an item and then change the layer through the
Property Manager (note this shows the dimension property manager, other
annotations may look different)
You can also set the default layer for various annotation
types through the Document Properties, and then subsequently save this as a drawing
template to be remembered for future drawings.
Now for the problem that may occur. You think you have
changed the layer correctly but the colour scheme or line weight still doesn’t
show through as expected. The reason for this is typically that you had already
changed the default display style for the annotation prior to attempting to
change the layer- these settings take precedence over the layer properties.
You may have altered the colour of line font using some of
the other icons on the Line Format toolbar such as Colour, Line Thickness or
Line Style. To correct the problem you have to set the annotations back to the
default options where the layer properties can then take effect.
Firstly select all of the items that will not change (note Selection
Filters can be really handy for this).
Then press the “Line Colour” button and then ensure the
“Default” checkbox is selected
You may need to repeat this for Line Thickness & Line
Style
Then you should see that the layer settings take effect
correctly.
One other common question related to Layers is the ability
to set a component’s outline to a layer style. To do this you right click on
the part within a drawing view and choose “Component Line Font”
From here you can then untick to “Use Document Defaults” and then choose the
desired layer as well as changing the setting to all views in the document.
Written: September 2015, Adam HartlesUpdated: June 2021, Aaron Moore