About Display Control

The AutoCAD Architecture 2021 toolset display control system is flexible and powerful and is drawing-based. Therefore, your default display settings should be established in your template drawing. The templates that come with AutoCAD Architecture 2021 toolset already have much of the work involved in setting up a display system done for you. While they may require some adjustments to conform to your office or project standards, you should, in most cases, start with the default templates and make modifications to the existing settings rather than try to create a display system from scratch.

Display Hierarchy and By Material Display Control

Display control of individual objects can occur at three levels: drawing default, style overrides, and object overrides. When you define an object style you should only apply style overrides when absolutely necessary. Frequently, you can use material assignments to control the display of linework and hatching components of objects. For this reason, many objects have By Material set as a drawing default for their display representations.

Display Control Customization

Like most aspects of AutoCAD Architecture 2021 toolset, the display system can be customized. There are a few things that you should keep in mind before doing so, however.

Best Practices for Customizing the Display System

• Start with one of the default templates. Creating a display system from scratch can be laborious and time-consuming. It is better to start with a template that is relatively close to what you need and make modifications to it.
• Modify existing display configurations and display sets before creating new ones.
• Do not create new display representations for objects unless you absolutely have to. Many times you can find an existing display representation that you are not using that you can modify to suite your needs. Remember that every display representation that you create is one that you have to manage.

Note: Remember that display control is drawing-specific. Changes that you intend to be part of your office standard should be made in the drawing template. You can use the Display Manager to copy display configurations, display sets, and display representations between drawings.

Attention: If you create a new display configuration that uses an existing display representation that has been modified, you must remember to copy both the display configuration and the modified display representation to your template. When you copy the display configuration to the template the associated display representations and display sets will only be copied with it if they do not already exist in the template. When you manually copy a display set or a display representation into a template that already contains display sets and representations with the same name, you will be prompted to overwrite the existing definitions.

Level of Detail

Level of detail should always be a consideration when creating new content objects and new display representations. By default there are three display configurations that address level of detail provided in the AutoCAD Architecture 2021 toolset template drawings.

Display Configuration	Design Scale [Metric Units in Brackets]
High Detail	1/4”=1’-0” [1:50]or greater
Medium Detail	1/8”=1’-0” [1:100]
Low Detail	1/16”=1’-0” [1:200] or smaller

Note: You may decide that the default display configurations are not appropriate for your preferred graphic standards. You can create additional display configurations and modify the existing ones to accommodate your own standards.

Architectural objects frequently include hatch pattern parameters as part of their display control. You should make sure that the hatch pattern scale and type is appropriate for the level of detail a given display representation is meant to address. Also remember to address hatch pattern scale and type in your material definitions, as it is a best practice to assign material definitions to style-based components. Hatch patterns that represent annotation standards (diagonal lines that represent brick in plan, for example), should be scaled appropriately for your level of detail. Hatch patterns that represent geometry (bricks in elevation, for example), should be given a scale of 1 unit.