Hatch Editing With Grips - 2010 & Later

Here is an AutoCAD^® feature that has been around since the 2010 release, and now that I am using that in the office, I thought it worth a mention, given how easy it makes updating non-associative hatches - even those created in previous releases. Given the problems associative hatches can have when an external reference or an AEC object is part of the boundary (when opening the file, the hatch often tries to resolve itself before all of the bounding objects have been loaded and resolved), I had taken to drawing polyline boundaries on a non-plotting layer and making hatches associative to that, so that I could edit the boundary easily should the area of hatch need to be changed in the future. Having been on the 2004 release for quite some time for production work, I was not able to take advantage of the ability to generate a boundary of an existing, non-associative hatch and make the hatch associative to it. The new grip editing feature makes this additional step unecessary.

To demonstrate the grip editing feature, I have created a square, non-associative hatch (and deleted the original bounding polyline), and drawn another polyline, to which I will extend the hatch, using grip edits.
Selecting the hatch reveals a number of grips. The center grip allows you to move the entire hatch, and was present in releases previous to 2010. The Vertex and Edge grips are new in 2010 (and are also present in 2011). ACA users should be familiar with hovering the cursor over a grip to get a tooltip, possibly listing options, and that technique works here as well.Hovering over a square grip at the perimeter of the hatch (Vertex) reveals that selecting that grip will allow you to initially move the Vertex to a new location, and pressing the CTRL key will cycle to the Remove option, allowing you to delete the Vertex.Hovering over a rectangular Edge grip on a straight segment at the hatch perimeter shows that the intial action on selecting the grip will be to add a new Vertex, and that pressing the CTRL key will cycle to converting that Edge to an arc.Hovering over the rectangular grip of an arc Edge of a hatch indicates that the initial action is to stretch the arc and that you can use the CTRL key to cycle to add a new Vertex and then to convert the arc to a line.

ACA users that have used grip edits on AEC objects will have to remind themselves that the Edge grips can NOT be used to stretch a straight segement, as they can for AEC Polygons.

To make the square hatch fill the drawn polyline with grip editing, use the Move option to relocate the four existing Vertices to Vertices on the polyline.To fill in the remainder, select the Edge grip that is not on a segment of the polyline and use the Add Vertex mode to add a fifth......and sixth Vertex......filling the polyline.
You can, of course, accomplish this simple edit in one step, by selecting the original square hatch, right clicking, choosing Set Boundary from the context menu and then picking the polyline.But in a typical drawing, where you have a lot more linework and, perhaps, several adjoining hatches, and where the linework defining the hatch edges is not a single polyline, I have found grip editing of hatches to be a very useful feature, and one that has virtually eliminated the need to delete an existing hatch and then rehatch the area.

Hatching in 2011

Thanks to a heads up in this post on Steve Bennett's blog, I am now aware that the default setting for island detection has been changed from Normal to Outer, as can be seen on the Hatch Creation contextual ribbon tab, on the flyout of the Options panel, on the Island Detection drop down list.

Outer will only hatch the outermost area, ignoring any "island" areas.

The former default value, Normal, will hatch the outer area, skip the "first" island but then hatch a "second," nested island, and alternate the hatching of additional nested islands, if any.

The default value for island detection is stored in each drawing, and can be changed in several different ways. While in the HATCH or BHATCH command, on the Hatch Creation tab, or on the Hatch Editor contextual ribbon tab when selecting a Hatch object, you can expand the Options panel and use the Island Detection drop down list to choose your preferred value.You can also use the Hatch and Gradient dialog, accessed while in the HATCH or BHATCH command by using the seTtings option or by clicking on the Hatch Settings tool on the Options panel.On first use, the Hatch and Gradient dialog will be collapsed, and the Island Detection options will not be visible.Click on the arrow icon in the lower right corner to expand the dialog and expose the Island Detection area.To set the value directly, set the value of the HPISLANDDETECTION System Variable as desired:
0 = Normal
1 = Outer
2 = Ignore

Reset the default value in your template file(s) if you want the initial value in new files to be something other than Outer.

Architectural Hatches in ACA/ADT

The 2004 release of Autodesk^® Architectural Desktop included a number of additional "architectural" hatch patterns in the acad.pat and acadiso.pat files. There were a number of comments in the Discussion Groups regarding these additional hatches, including that it took the hatch select dialog a long time to load, the large number of added hatches made it difficult to find any one particular hatch and that there were a number of hatches that would never be used, so why waste time wading through them. Being architects, the list of hatches that "had to go" was, of course, different for each person.

The 2005 and later releases still provide those additional hatches (161 of them in 2005-2007; there were 236 in the final beta of 2008), but instead of including them in the main acad.pat/acadiso.pat file and leaving it to the individual user to edit that file, the additional hatches are provided as individual custom hatch pattern files [custom PAT files can only contain one pattern each]. This makes it as easy to control the patterns you have available as moving a file between folders in Windows^® Explorer. But you do have to be aware of two things:

1. The folder[s] in which your custom hatch patterns are kept must be on the AutoCAD search path in order to be available inside ACA/ADT. If you have a standalone installation, using the default folders, the out-of-the-box custom hatch files can be found here:
   C:\Documents and Settings\[yourusername]\Application Data\Autodesk\[ADT version folder]\enu\Support\pats
   where, of course, you would substitute your user name and the folder name for your version of ACA/ADT in the corresponding locations in red.


2. The custom hatches are found on a separate tab, labeled "Custom" [imagine that!], in the Hatch Pattern Palette dialog.

If you needed additional architectural hatches and were unaware that these were available, now you know they are available and how to access them. If you can not find a pattern that meets your needs in the ones that ship with ACA/ADT, you could always make your own custom hatches or search the Internet for additional hatches created by others. The Help has a very good section on how to create custom hatch patterns for those interested in learning.