Look Settings

VIEW ▸ Look Settings opens the dialog that tunes the current look. Everything in it previews live on the canvas as you change it; OK commits the whole session as one undo step, and Cancel puts everything back.

Lines

The line treatment is the hand every stroke on the sheet is drawn with. It is separate from the stroke style (the dash pattern), which is kept.

Treatment	Character
Clean	Exact geometry. What CAD Line, Illustrative and Realistic use.
Ink	A confident pen: slight wobble, rounded ends, a little weight variation.
Sketch	Loose: visible wobble, corner overshoot, several passes.
Marker	Broad felt tip: heavier, soft-edged, a little bleed.
Pencil	Graphite: grainy, lighter, doubled strokes.

Treatments are sized in page units, so they read the same whether the sheet is 11×17 or 30×42, and they are stable: the same drawing wobbles the same way every time it is rendered, so the export matches the screen.

Lettering

The font every text object and leader draws in. Three hand-lettering faces ship with the application and travel with it, so a document lettered in one of them renders correctly on any machine; installed script faces are offered alongside them.

To keep one label in its own font regardless of the look, select it and check Keep this font in every look on the Text or Leader tab. See Text & Leaders.

Shadows and Sun

Control	What it does
Shadows	None, Hard (a crisp offset silhouette, as in marker and ink renderings) or Soft (a blurred penumbra, for watercolor and realistic).
Sun direction	The direction shadows fall, in degrees. One sun for the whole sheet, so trees, buildings and shrubs all agree.
Shadow length	The offset distance, in inches on the sheet. The same value reads the same on a millimeter document.
Depth shading	0 to 1. Adds inner edge shading to filled surfaces, spherical shading to tree canopies and shrubs on the side away from the sun, and a sheen on water. Realistic ships with it on; the other looks start flat.

Look shadows apply to library symbols, filled circles (shrubs and plant symbols) and Building and Roof surfaces. A shadow you set on a specific style always wins over the look's sun, so one object can be treated differently without turning the global sun off.

Depth shading takes its light direction from the sun, so shading and shadows are consistent with one another; move the sun and both follow.

Paper

Control	What it does
Paper	None, White, Trace, Vellum, Watercolor Paper or Kraft. Each has its own tone and grain, from the faint tooth of trace to the heavy texture of kraft.
Paper grain	0 to 2, scaling the paper's own grain strength. 0 is smooth, 1 is the paper's default, and above 1 exaggerates it.

Paper is applied over the finished drawing as one pass across the whole sheet, which is why a layer set to Render as plain CAD still sits on the same paper as everything else. On screen the grain is drawn quickly; exports render it filtered, so it is smoother in the output than on the canvas.

Materials...

Materials... opens the material table for the current look: the texture, tile scale, strength and default color every material is drawn with. It is the one control in this dialog that reaches beyond the open document; the table is an office setting, stored per user and shared by every drawing on the machine. See Materials for what the built-in table does and how to change it.

Reset to Preset

Reset to Preset returns every setting to the current look's defaults, the fastest way back after experimenting. It resets the look's settings only; nothing about your layers, colors or materials is touched.