Browse Learn topics

Learn/Design/Layers & color

Palette-driven layers

At a glance

  • Bottom color palette assigns shapes to layers—pick a swatch with parts selected to recolor and regroup
  • Layers appear as soon as shapes use them; rename inline or from the context menu
  • Eye toggles for visibility; mesh fill preview respects nested regions when enabled

Design layers are driven by color, not by a layer manager. A palette of twenty swatches sits along the bottom of the viewport, and every layer is simply "the shapes wearing this color" — the same convention the Laser workspace uses to map colors to operations, so a design organized here drops straight into cut assignments.

How assignment works

Select shapes and click a swatch: they recolor and move to that color's layer, which is created on the spot if it doesn't exist yet. Click a swatch with nothing selected and you arm that color for the next shapes you draw — the palette highlight follows it, but no empty layer is created. There is no "+ Layer" button and no empty rows to clean up: a layer row appears when the first shape uses it and disappears automatically when the last shape leaves it.

Managing layers

Layer rows live in the browser panel with eye toggles for visibility on the right. Double-click a name (or right-click → Rename Layer) to rename inline — every layer sharing the old name renames together. Click a row's color swatch for a swatch-grid popover to recolor the whole layer, and right-click for Export Layer as DXF / SVG when one color needs to become its own file.

Mesh fill preview

With Meshes enabled, closed shapes on a layer fill with alternating parity: outers fill, shapes directly inside them punch holes, islands inside those holes fill again, and so on down. That gives an accurate cut-part preview of nested artwork — letters show their counters, washers show their bores — instead of a stack of opaque blobs.