Help modifying arch/civil dwg for backgrounds

[Arnis]

My company designs public utility services. We do most of our work as subcontractors with the company doing the MEP work. Their CAD department sets up a background drawing for us that we x'ref into ours. These backgrounds use either an architect or civil plan but the entire drawing is color 251. This is done so that our work is more easily seen. Is this a common practice? If it is, is the color changed for each layer in the Layer Properties Manager? I've tried to do this but sometimes the line won't change color.

Is there a tutorial for setting up architectural backgrounds? Should I have asked this question at the beginning? :oops:

Thanks for all help.

[hellnback]

I've used the same method before, can work well. Unfortunatley depending on the Arch/Civil guys standards/drafting techniques, you may get varied results. I.E. if they have changed the colour of the object rather than the layer colour.
If so go into the xref dwg and change everything to colour bylayer.
Also set the system variable VISRETAIN to (1), this will save any changes to layers in your dwg while leaving the original layer colours in the xref dwg.
Hope this helps.

[smorales02]

In most cases it is standard procedure to show everything that is "existing" greyed back so that the proposed stuff will stand out. If everything in the xref was don "by layer" than you can change it in the layer manager.

Does your company not want everything to be color 251?

[rustysilo]

Yes it is a common practice. Many will even go as far as renaming the layers to their own standards. I work in a civil engineering office and when I get a survey in I like to rename the layers with a survey prefix so I know that anything that starts with that prefix came from the survey. Sometimes I even go further than that renaming layers completely. For instance I'll put all drainage layers on a survey-drainage layer rather than leave them separate which is common among surveyors. They'll have a layer for pipes, notes, structures, etc. For us it is better to just consolidate them into one drainage layer.

[Arnis]

Thanks everyone for all your help.

[BOB'27T]

We do a very similar method also. We set the existing contours and points, etc. to gray. This keeps them in the background, which makes working & plotting easier to see our work. We like to rename the surveyor's layers to "EX.---". This seems to work pretty well.