Many new users of Civil 3D are trying to get a working grasp of styles. Some are setting up their own styles, some are contracting others to do it for them (I have enough work orders on my desk to wallpaper my office…and all but one are for template creation). First of all, if you’d rather pay someone else to create your styles for you, email me – a link to my email is to the right. However, some of you would rather do it yourself, and may have a few questions. For those people, I’m about to clear something up that may have been puzzling you.

Styles are different in the sense that you can really forget everything you ever learned about drawing layers – objects defined by a style can be displayed by the object style. Or, you can set everything up and define your object display by layer. Takes some getting used to – and for the most part, I’ve found that a combination of both methods works well for me.

When you’re first setting up styles, you have to go to your settings tab, right click on your drawing name, and click drawing settings. This will allow you to lay the foundation for a lot of the styles that you need to create, mainly by choosing your object layers. Setting these object layers is pretty self-explanatory, but there’s a small check box at the bottom of that window that confuses people – Immediate and independent layer on/off control of display components.

What?

It seems as if a trip to the help file is in order…..

Help specifies the following:

Specifies whether object display is controlled by layer visibility.

Selected: Object components on a layer are turned off when you turn off the layer.
Cleared: Object components on a layer are not affected by layer On/Off settings.

To say it in a way that can be understood even better –

Check it if you want to be able turn objects on or off with the layer commands.

Don’t check it if you don’t want to use layer commands.

Have fun!