WIPEOUT – This by many forgotten command can save you a lot of time and effort.

A Wipeout is an image type object. Most commonly it is used to “mask” part of a drawing for clarity.

I’ve rediscovered it recently and found it useful when creating louvers. With hundreds of them I didn’t need to cut and trim additional few hundreds lines of windows behind them. And reposition of them was so easy. I also used it for window tags and handles in elevation view.

The Wipeout command can be used for 3 different operations.

It can be used to draw a Wipeout object, as you might expect (only without arcs), but it can also be used to convert an existing closed Polyline (only without arcs) into a Wipeout. Additionaly it can be used to control the visibility of Wipeout frames.

You can also change Wipeout frames directly from WIPEOUTFRAME system variable. The result of available value is below.

Value no.2 exist since AutoCAD 2013.

Personally I use value.1 to not duplicate the lines and when I need to make a particular frame unvisitable I change it line type to thin doted line with a big scale (like 1000). Only corners then are visible as dots. I use this method to create hollow objects like window frame.