AutoCAD: Tips & Tricks

- [Instructor] Welcome to another AutoCAD tip and trick. We're going to have a look, now, at the visual effect settings in AutoCAD. We've got a drawing to do that with and it's called Visual Effect.dwg and you can download it from the library to follow along with this tips and tricks video. In the drawing, we have two rectangles. This rectangle, here, if I hover over it, you'll see is on the layer Unlocked and it's red and it's also an unlocked layer. This rectangle is on a yellow layer called Locked and it is a locked layer. You can see the little padlock appearing next to the crosshair, there. So if I go to the drop down here, in the layers, you can see Locked, Unlocked, and you can also see the little blue padlock, locked, unlocked. Now, the reason I've got a locked layer is I just want to show you something in the visual effect settings when we go to them. Now, your visual effect settings are what appear when you select objects. So if I do a little crossing selection over that corner of the unlocked rectangle, can you see there, it selects it but it's the visual effect of the selection? Let me hit Escape there to deselect. I click once, drag the crossing selection, like so, and can you see there, it's sort of a semi-opaque green with a dashed boundary around it? Now, those settings can be changed. You can change the green, you can switch off the boundary as well. So how do you do that? Well just hit Escape a couple of times. Make sure you've got no commands running or anything like that. And then it's a right click on the mouse and down to the Options, here, on the shortcut menu. That'll open up the Options dialogue box. You then go to the Selection tab at the top of the dialogue box. And what we're going to do, we're going to click on Visual Effect Settings. That will open up the Visual Effect Settings dialogue. And as you can see, there, there's our selection area effect. Now, indicating selection area with the tick, there, is what shows the boundary, whether it's dashed or solid. So a crossing selection would be dashed, a windows selection would be a solid, continuous line. But here's the best bit. You can change the color, you can change the opacity. So let's change our window selection color to red and let's change our crossing selection color, there, to something like cyan. And we'll change the opacity. We'll up that to, say, 75. So you'll notice, can you see the preview, there, changing as well? So if I drag that to 75. You can also just type the value in the box if you want to. So there's our little previews. There's our crossing selection, there's our window selection. Now, you've also got a selection preview filter. So I could, if I wanted to, with my objects on locked layers, there, I could also lose that particular preview on anything on a locked layer if I wanted to. I can also apply that to Xrefs, tables, groups, multiline text and hatches. I'm not going to in this case, but because I've got an object on a locked layer, I could actually exclude that yellow rectangle from the selection preview filter. I'm not going to though. I click on OK, there, for the changes. I'll Apply that and I'll OK it. So let's do a window selection of the left-hand rectangle. Click, and look. It's very red, but it's also much, much more opaque because we changed that value from 25 to 75. It still selects in the same way. Once you've done the selection, the object displays in the same way. So if I did a crossing selection of this one, there's that really opaque cyan color. You've still got the dashed outline 'cause we left the box ticked, but it still selects an object on a locked layer without the grips displaying, because obviously, it's on a locked layer. So I'll just hit Escape there to deselect. It's then a right click, back to Options, and I'm going to set everything back to the original settings. Visual Effect Settings, there, in the Selection tab in the dialogue box. Now, the window selection color is normally color 150. So this time, you go to Select Color, type the value in the color box, 150 there, and OK it. And then the crossing selection color is normally a 100 color. So again, in the box, 100 there and OK it. Change your selection area opacity back to the default of 25 and click on OK. Click on Apply and click on OK again. And now, my window selection is back to the blue that we're used to, and my crossing selection is back to the green that I'm used to. And you can see that those visual effect settings can be made quite dramatic if you want them to be, but you might just want to leave them at the defaults. It's entirely up to you, but now you know where to change them in the options in AutoCAD if you need to.