VISUALSTYLES Command

I am writing this article in preparation for a Custom Training gig I will be performing for a friend who runs an Autodesk Authorized Reseller and Training Center. The request for focused, specific, narrow training brings up questions about how different people learn CAD in general and how you tackle learning specific commands or skills in particular.

At the most basic level, a training session is simply a demonstration meant to be inspirational. Indeed, I rarely take any class to learn. Watching demonstrations is not how I learn. I am hands on. Give me access to the software, hardware and documentation, and I know what to do: I experiment a lot. Some commands, like VisualStyles, are well hidden gems. Instead, I usually resort to the SHADEMODE command, which is a great start before you tackle VISUALSTYLES. Therefore, if you want to learn VISUALSTYLES, study SHADEMODE first.

The beauty and power of VISUALSTYLES lies in the fact you can customize or create new styles beyond what the SHADEMODE command offers. Learning the command is a matter of learning how to modify existing and create new styles. In the big scheme of things, it is that simple. In reality, there is an amazing amount of things to learn, buttons to push and parameters to experiment with. How long does that take? I think you can start to scratch the surface after a few hours. It's really not the type of thing you want to do in one sitting. Instead, it is something you want to experiment with frequently, for example, during a short break.

As time permits and I discover especially cool tricks, I will return and update this article. Here's a quick introduction to the visual styles we get in AutoCAD Architecture 2020 out of the box.

The styles shown above are different viewports of the same manufacturing press. To set each viewport's style, I used the SHADEMODE command. You can see the options AutoCAD Architecture 2020 offers out-of-the-box in the screen capture below:

The options include 2dwireframe, Wireframe, Hidden, Realistic, Conceptual, Shaded, shaded with Edges, shades of Gray, SKetch, X-ray and Other. Please beware 2dwireframe does not allow Perspective projections. For that reason, it is my least favorite of the bunch. However, in large and complex assemblies like this, it can provide for much faster pan and zoom operations. Furthermore, please beware that setting up a view with multiple viewports, taxes AutoCAD graphics resources dramatically. I'm using an NVidia RTX 2080 card and i9-9900k CPU, but AutoCAD does not take full advantage of the hardware, especially when compared to other programs I use.

My favorite styles are SKetch and X-ray. I love the hand drawn look and feel of sketchy lines and I love to experiment changing the default settings using the VISUALSTYLES command. Likewise, X-ray automatically assigns transparency to otherwise opaque surfaces. One trick I discovered yesterday was how you can selectively assign X-ray like behavior to specific elements by placing them in a layer where the Transparency is increased from 0, the default value, to something like 85. The higher the setting, the more the material will behave like a transparent ghost or halo image.

There is a lot of encyclopedic experimentation that is possible and required to test the extent and flexibility of the VISUALSTYLES command. My main aim here is to encourage you to first experiment with SHADEMODE and then get much more creative using VISUALSTYLES.

Here is a screen capture to whet your appetite so you can see the many options you can manipulate. The meaning of many parameters is not readily obvious and requires experimentation.

For Sketchy alone, as you can see in the screen capture above, there are at least twelve (12) different options to explore. Each option, in turn, has two or more choices you can make. Therefore, you are dealing with at least twenty four (24) or more combinations. Changes in each option may not be readily apparent. I suggest you experiment by changing only one parameter at a time and doing so in an extreme or dramatic fashion. Otherwise, you may not notice the changes.

Please share your favorite insights and findings in the comments. Using these commands effectively is much more efficient than paying many artists to attempt to do the same thing by hand. The world of Computer Graphics is really revolutionizing not only how engineers work but also how artists create. Doing things the old, manual fashion way, while pleasurable and fun, is simply and generally prohibitively expensive.

When you use technology correctly, things happen with much higher quality, ease and speed. It is a joy to know what tools to use.