AutoCAD Isolate Object Command
by James Turner
(Mena, AR, U.S.A.)
I do quite a bit of 3D work and one of the handiest tools I've found if you have a lot of congestion where you are working is the isolate object tool in AutoCAD.
This tool was available in Autodesk Viz for several versions before being added to AutoCAD a few versions ago.
It's located in the lower right corner of the screen just above the command window.
It looks like a light bulb. Here's how it works.
If you are working on one or several objects that are intermingled with a lot of other objects you can choose the ones you want to isolate and click on the light bulb to isolate these objects.
It doesn't matter what layer they are on because they are isolated by object, not layer.