How To Import Layers In Autocad From Another Drawing

Jeff Morris | Sr. Applications Expert

AutoCAD Templates are a great tool for companies to work within their established CAD Standards. A good rule for the template creation is the 80/20 rule (80 percent of outcomes come from 20 percent of input), which means the template will not (cannot possibly) include everything needed for all types of drawings, but the 20% of all standards needed to accomplish 80% of your work.

I often have seen overloaded templates which attempt to include EVERYTHING, which bog down the drawing. This is not ideal. It is better to only have the most used items, and create the more seldom used items as needed. This of course is a bit tedious and prone to error.

There are 2 tools I will discuss to assist with this, primarily importing items as needed.

Design Center

The first tool is the Design Center, something I believe is quite under-used (and under-appreciated). Design Center allows for the importing of layers, textstyes, layouts, etc. from external drawings. Multiple drawings will need to be set up with the different layer groups (or one drawings with all the layers). Store these CAD Standards drawings in a central place on the network which can be reserved for your CAD Standards.

To open the Design Center, either click the appropriate icon on the View tab, Palettes panel (as shown) or <CTRL>+ 2 will toggle the Design Center on and off.

In the Design Center, navigate to the CAD Standards Folder, then right-click on the folder name and "Set as Home". From now on, clicking on the Home Icon will directly go to this folder.

When expanding the drawing tree (Item #1) it will allow you to inspect the items within the drawing. By selecting the Layer Branch (Item #2), all layers are shown on the right panel. You can select multiple items by picking each one while holding the <CRTL> key, or select the first one, and holding the <SHIFT> key select the last one and all items in between will be selected. Then right click (Item #3) and choose Add Layer(s).

You can change the display view similar to the Windows File Explorer and choose either large icons, small icons, list or details, by selecting the icon from the drop down menu of (Item #4) shown above.

This noted method will also work for all other items within the tree, not just layers. For layers, just the layer definition come across, the objects on the layer will not. For layouts though, the entire content of the layouts are imported, including viewports, titleblocks etc.

Layer States

The second method is the Layer States tool, accessible within the pull-down of the Layers panel, as shown.

In AutoCAD, this tool is also accessible on the upper left corner of the Layer Properties palette, (Note: This icon is often not visible within Civil 3D by default, however it can be made visible by dragging the layer name column field within the Layer panorama to the right). Using the keyboard shortcut <ALT>+S will also launch the Layer States manager when in the Layer Properties palette.

You can import layer states from other drawings by selecting "DWG" from the "Files of type" list, or better yet, importing "*.las" layer files. Layer files can be created by exporting layer states from existing drawings. I recommend storing these layer files in the CAD Standards folder.

If you do not "Restore states" when you import the layer states, the layers will be created, but all colors and linetypes will be set to white and continuous. You can always restore the layer state later to set the appropriate color and linetype.

If a linetype does not exist in the drawing, the user will be give you an alert and will set the linetype to Continuous.

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