X-Ref Question - Changing Color

I have a second floor plan x-ref'd into one sheet twice. I need to grey one out and not the other. Is that possible?

You can make adjustments to the XREF layers in each Viewport. This way, you only make specific changes to the plot Viewport, saving you the hassle of duplicating anything in the Model.

 

Also, if you use STB plot styles, you can make this change very easily by simply changing the layer of the XREF to whatever plot style you desire.

This is the second time this was asked in this week. So I though I'd do a "decent" "tutorial" on it.

 

Whether you use STB/CTB the VP overrides should perform adequately as StykFacE's explained. Basically you don't need 2 copies of the xref in the layout DWG's model space. You'll need 2 viewports in paper space (they may even overlap). While you're inside one of these open the Layer Manager and set the VP Color for the relevant XRef layers (if using CTB) or the VP Plot Style (if STB) - note it's the 2nd column for color/plotstyle in the layer table (the 1st sets for the entire drawing, the 2nd only for the active viewport). So you may need to scroll right in the layer manager to see these columns.

 

You can do the same thing for VP LineType and VP LineWeight. And these days there's also a Transparency property - it also has its corroborating VP Transparency property.

 

As another tip: you can select multiple layers at once by holding down Shift/Ctrl and then set their properties in one-go (saves a lot of time).

 

As example, here I've got the Layer Manager open while inside a viewport's model space (i.e. on a PS tab but the VP is active and the croshairs are only inside it) of the Layout DWG. You can see the VP Color is set to 8 for Model|Layer1 and Magenta for Model|Layer2 (note the VP overridden layers are highlighted by a light-blue background to indicate that they're overridden):

If I change the active VP to another, the layer colours are not overridden and they show as the original Red and Cyan.

And then here's how the 2 viewports appear on the paper space:

 

If you don't want to use VP overrides (for whatever reason ... e.g. if you need to have the DWG work with an older version ACad) you can do it the "old" way: After attaching/overlaying the xref, right-click and rename it in the XRef Manager. Then xref a second copy of it in again. You'll have 2 sets of XRef layers from the same DWG - each would work independently from each other.

 

As an example of doing this: Here's the xref manager with a renamed version of the Extra.DWG (renamed to "Extra Renamed") as well as a 2nd normal Extra.DWG xref (Note I've renamed the xref item, not the file itself. Both xref items still come from the same Extra.DWG file, so any changes in it will reflect in both versions of the xref.):

Then the layer manager shows the Extra|Layer3 and Extra|Layer4, but also a separate set of Extra Renamed|Layer3 and Extra Renamed|Layer4. These can be changed independent of each other. E.g. here I've changed the colours of Extra Renamed|Layer3 to White and Extra Renamed|Layer4 to 9. Yet the Extra|Layer3 is still Green and the Extra|Layer4 is still Blue.

And here you can see the result inside one single VP:

And then just FYI the attached is an eTransmit (in 2007 format) of the 3 DWGs used in this example.

Layout.zip

irneb, that is a very detailed explanation. Good job my friend.

irneb, that is a very detailed explanation. Good job my friend.

Thanks! My though was "a picture is worth a thousand words" ... ... so that post is in effect 6511 words! Hope someone understands it! Or even just "reads" it!