Keep each building or project area on its own drawing layer. Then you can hide what you're not working on and lock what's already settled. Every geometry you create with the drawing tools lives on a drawing layer.

Drawing layers sit in the Layer Palette alongside data layers. They show a pencil icon. Drawing layers hold everything you draw. You can't draw on a data layer.

Drawing layers separate the parts of your design: a project area or a building. Make one layer for Building A and another for Building B, or one for each stage of a staged development. Then you can show, hide, lock, or duplicate a whole building or area in one step.

Keep every geometry for that building or area on the same layer, including footprints, massing, landscape, and roads. Drawing layers in Giraffe work differently from CAD layers. Splitting geometries into layers by object type makes it harder to show, hide, or lock one building on its own.

Drawing layers share these controls with data layers:

Drawing layers also have extra controls:

New geometries go on the active drawing layer. The active layer has a filled circle at the left of its row. Click the circle on another drawing layer to make it active.

Every new project starts with one drawing layer called "default", and it's active when the project opens. You can rename or delete it. If you draw when the project has no drawing layers, Giraffe puts the geometries on a new "default" layer.