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Layers

The Layers zone is the middle of the left panel, and it is the stack as you view it: which stack the viewport is showing, where the design is anchored in it, how far it is exploded, and one row per layer. Adding a layer and setting its thickness, material or process is the Stack window’s job; this zone holds the controls you reach for while drawing.

The first three controls are pinned above the rows, because their subject is the stack rather than any one layer.

The stack group

stack names the stack driving the viewport, and picking another one makes it the active stack: the design rebuilds against its thicknesses, materials and processes. That is a design edit and one undo step, not a view setting. The pencil beside it opens the Stack window.

base layer is the layer of that stack the design anchors at — its own layer 0 sits there. It is a design edit too, and the viewport always shows the design at that anchor, so what you see is what fabricates. The row is absent while the stack has no layers.

Explode opens a gap between the layers, from 0 — the stack as it bonds — up to 5000 µm. The gap runs along the stack axis, so the 3D view is where it shows, and the camera pulls back as you drag so the taller stack stays framed. Slabs are drawn opaque, which is what makes explode the way to see a buried layer. Like the grid pitch it is a preference: outside the design, outside undo, and kept between sessions (Settings).

The layer rows

One row per layer of the active stack, an empty layer included — it has nothing to show, but it can be made active and drawn on. A stack with no layers reads (no layers).

The swatch is the layer’s color in the viewport, shaded by the layer’s default face and muted while the layer is not the active one, so the row reads as the geometry does.

Layer N is the pick: clicking the label makes that layer active, which is where a newly placed child lands and which layer is drawn vividly against the muted rest. It changes nothing in the design and costs no undo step. There is always exactly one active layer, so a click on the active row does nothing.

The checkbox at the end of the row hides the layer. A slab carrying features on both of its faces gets two toggles instead, tagged T and B, and an empty layer gets none — there is nothing there to show or hide.

Hiding is a view state and never an edit: nothing is deleted, and an export is unaffected. What it does change is what the pointer can reach — you cannot select a shape on a hidden layer, and a region you draw will not weld to one, since you cannot join to what you cannot see. Visibility resets when you open another component (Components & Libraries); nothing else disturbs it.

See also