Work with layers

- [Instructor] Another way to organize your scene is to use layers. Layers allow you to have named groups of objects that can be shown or hidden at will. Now Layers is its own separate window so on the Mac you would go into Window, Layers. On the PC, you would find it in the tray so you want to make sure that Layers is checked and then when we go into our default tray you should be able to find it. Now however you get into the Layers window, you will see that it's really very simple. We have named layers here and then we can turn them on or off in terms of visibility.

So I have a layer here for the roof so I can take the roof off the house. If I want I can turn off the actual shell of the house itself, and that just reveals all the stuff that's inside, which would be for example the bath, doors and windows, as well as the kitchen, and then I also have one for the foundation. Then finally I have this one here for landscaping. Now if I try to turn this off it's going to give me an error, and that says that I cannot hide the current layer.

And this little radio button here, this little black dot, that tells me that this is the current layer. So anything that I create will go into this layer. Now if I want to change the current layer, I can simply click that radio button on. Now, when I change my layer, notice how it also makes that visible. So I can go through all of these and turn them on, as well as make them visible. Now as I've mentioned before, when you create something it will go into the current layer.

So if I have the landscaping layer as my current layer, and I were to draw something simple like a box, and maybe use my push/pull tool to pull that up into geometry. If I were to go to another layer and hide that, you can see that that landscaping layer includes that box. Now, we can also switch objects between layers. So for example if I hide my landscaping layer, you'll notice that while this sidewalk here probably should be part of the landscaping.

Now we can change the layer of something using what's called the Entity Info window. Now we can find it in an couple of places. The easiest way to get to it is to right-click over the object and go Entity Info. Now on the Mac this will bring up a separate window. It will show up in my tray on the PC. So this object here is actually a group, and that group is on the house layer. So if I want to I can change it to any of the other layers in my scene.

In this case I'm going to change it to the landscaping layer, and when I do that it disappears, but if I switch on the landscaping layer, it comes back. Now we can do that again, say for this patio. This patio is actually on the foundation layer, but let's go ahead and put it on the landscaping layer as well, and now we can turn all of that on or off. Now if you want to you can create or delete layers as well, so if I want to I can delete a specific layer.

And those assets will go to the default layer which is always called layer zero. If I have layers that are empty, I can click on this button and purge them. And if I want to create new layers, I can hit this plus sign. And when I do, it brings up a new layer, and let's go ahead and create a sidewalk for this scene here. So I'm going to type in the word Sidewalk, and let's make that the active layer. So now, when I draw, I can actually draw in this layer.

And so now I've drawn the basics of a sidewalk, and then I can push/pull that up a little bit to actually make it a little bit more realistic. And now if I want to I can turn that layer on or off. So as you can see, layers are a really great way to keep your scene organized. So, go ahead and create layers and use the Entity Info window to assign your objects to those layers.