ARES Commander brings a new selection method to save time. Use the lasso selection method to specify entities within an irregularly formed contour specified by dragging the cursor.

Selecting a drawing using ARES CAD Software

ARES Commander offers us tools that will allow us to quickly and easily make a selection of entities in a drawing. As you already know, if we click on the drawing area and move the pointer to the left, we geta”Capture selection window” which color is green. All those entities that are included or touching its border, will be selected when a second click is made. On the other hand, if we click and move the mouse to the right we make a “Window selection” which color is blue. This option is only capable of selecting those entities that are entirely inside the area, excluding the entities that are crossed and not fully inside.

Additionally, we found now in ARES Commander a new LASSO selection method that you have to hold down the left mouse button and keep dragging your mouse to draw an irregular shape. Just like with the windows selection method you may do this from right to left or left to right. Again, doing a lasso selection to the left will show a green color and this will capture the entities that are only crossing the border as well as that inside. Then, we may, for example, delete the selected entities.

Likewise, if we leave the pointer pressed and move it to the right, we would also be using LASSO but we see a blue color and only the entities entirely inside the blue selection area will be kept. Note that the System variable “PICK AUTO” has to be at “5” for the selection named “LASSO” to work. It should not be forgotten that from OPTIONS, all of the program parameters can be controlled. To do this, from USER PREFERENCES, in the DRAFTING OPTIONS section, we select ENTITY SELECTION to finally find SELECTION SETTINGS where you can see the option that allows you to activate LASSO. If we disable it…… Then even if we hold down the pointer, LASSO will not work. In turn, if we enter the system variable “PICK AUTO” we can verify that it has another value, in this case, “1”.And as we said before, it has to be at “5”.

Activating Lasso Selection directly

We can activate it directly, writing the value, or from OPTIONS as we saw before. With all these selection options, we could combine them and make a selection of the”WINDOW” type, a selection of the”CROSSING” type, or of the”LASSO” type (either way). As of course, an individual selection. Multiple selection methods that do not end here, because, from the Properties Palette, we have more options, using the selected filters. In any case, by doing a quick review of these icons, we can say that it is used to select elements with some of the options that we saw earlier.

After pressing enter after selecting, all the categories of the selected entities appear in the dropdown of the properties palette. The first of the icons can deactivate the selection. Look at the following icon, it has 2 positions. When displayed with a single arrow, it means that with each new selection, it deselects the previous one. Look, we make a selection, and then we are going to select a new group.

The first elements are automatically deselected. Instead, when the icon shows several arrows, we can select more entities that will accumulate to the previous selections. by pressing Escapewe can cancel all the selections. Likewise, if we make a selection of elements in general. Note that in the Properties Palette it says “ALL”, because there is more than one category selected, in addition to indicating the number of selected entities.

When deploying it, we can choose for example the “BLOCKS”.Thus the properties palette will show us the properties of these particular objects. If we change to”LINE”, the type of properties shown will also change. Now pay attention to this other icon. This is the SMART SELECT. Where we will be able to search for elements in the entire drawing, or in a specific group with this icon. Note that we can combine here different conditions. First, let’s determine the type of entities. In this case, we want to select only blocks.

Defining properties by Layer

Now we define some properties, in this case it says that the color of the lines is equal to the layer color, that is, “ByLayer”.We could search for blocks with attributes, and specify a specific attribute. For example, find all the blocks from the same manufacturer. Or perhaps a product code to identify the furniture. In this example, we are going to tell it to be equal to this code. We could also tell it to be instead different from that particular code, in order to exclude one in particular.

With all these options, we will be able to do an intelligent search for objects in the whole drawing, or in a part of the drawing. We leave it as it was at the beginning and click OK. This will select the 25 blocks that appear in this part of the drawing. We go back to the smart SELECTION, we choose the BLOCKS again, and more will appear because now we defined to search in all the drawing. Learn more about the new features in ARES Commander.