The Boundary Hatch and Fill dialog box (temporarily) disappears, and your drawing reappears with the following prompt at the command line:
Select internal point:
8. Select a point inside the boundary within which you want to hatch by clicking it with the mouse.
AutoCAD analyzes the drawing and decides which boundaries to use. In a complex drawing, this analysis can take several seconds. AutoCAD highlights the boundary that it finds.
If AutoCAD highlights the wrong boundary, right-click, choose Clear All from the cursor menu, and try again.
9. Right-click anywhere in the drawing area and choose Enter from the cursor menu to indicate that you’re finished selecting points.
The Boundary Hatch and Fill dialog box reappears.
10. Click the Preview button to preview the hatch.
The Boundary Hatch and Fill dialog box (temporarily) disappears again, and AutoCAD shows you what the hatch will look like.
Pick or press Esc to return to dialog or
<Right-click to accept hatch>:
11. Click anywhere in the drawing area to return to the Boundary Hatch and Fill dialog box.
12. Adjust any settings and preview again until you’re satisfied with the hatch.
13. Click OK.
AutoCAD hatches the area inside the boundary. If you modify the boundary, the hatch automatically resizes to fill the resized area.
Occasionally, AutoCAD gets confused and doesn’t resize a hatch after you resize the boundary. If that happens, erase and then re-create the hatch in the resized area.
Pushing the Boundary (of) Hatch
The remainder of this chapter shows you how to refine the techniques presented in the preceding section. I describe how to copy existing hatching, take advantage of the various options in the Boundary Hatch and Fill dialog box, and choose more complicated hatching boundaries.
One slick way to hatch is by using the Inherit Properties button in the Boundary Hatch and Fill dialog box to copy hatch properties from an existing hatch object. Think of it as point and shoot hatching. If someone — such as you — added some hatching in the past that’s just like what you want to use now, click the Inherit Properties button and pick the existing hatching.
Inherit Properties updates the hatch pattern settings in the Boundary Hatch and Fill dialog box to make them the same as the existing hatch pattern object that you picked. You can use the cloned hatch pattern specifications as is or modify them by making changes in the Boundary Hatch and Fill dialog box.
Consistency is a good thing in drafting, especially in computer-aided drafting, in which some or all your drawing may be used for a long time. Thus it’s good to use the same hatch patterns, scales, and angles for the same purposes in all your drawings. Find out whether your project, office, company, or profession has hatching standards that apply to your work.
You can use predefined, user-defined, or custom hatch patterns. Most of the time, you’ll choose either predefined or user-defined hatch patterns, unless some generous soul gives you a custom pattern. The next four sections describe the hatch pattern type choices.
To use AutoCAD’s
? If you know the name of the hatch pattern, select it from the Pattern dropdown list. The list is alphabetical, except that SOLID (that is, a solid fill) is at the very beginning.
? If you don’t know the pattern’s name, or you prefer the visual approach, click the Pattern button (the tiny button with the ellipsis [three dots] to the right of the Pattern prompt and pattern name) to display the Hatch Pattern Palette with pattern previews and names.
AutoCAD has about 80 predefined hatch patterns from which to choose. The list includes ANSI (American National Standards Institute) and ISO (International Standards Organization) standard hatch patterns. Figure 11-3 shows the Other Predefined hatch patterns, which cover everything from Earth to Escher to Stars. Hatch patterns whose names begins with AR-are intended for architectural and related industries.
Figure 11-3: Plenty of hatch patterns.
After you’ve selected a pattern, specify angle and scale, as I describe in the section “Getting it right: Hatch angle and scale,” in this chapter.
Although you may not guess it, AutoCAD treats filling an area with a solid color as a type of hatching. Simply choose Solid from the top of the Pattern drop-down list.
Like any other object, a solid hatch takes on the current object color — or the current layer’s color if you leave color set to ByLayer. Therefore, check whether the current object layer and color are set appropriately before you use the Solid hatching option (see Chapter 4 for details).
You can create the effect of a solid fill in AutoCAD in several other ways:
? If you want a filled-in circle or donut, use the DOnut command and specify an inside diameter of 0.
? If you want one or more line segments with either uniform or tapered widths, use the PLine command’s Width option. (Chapter 5 discusses the DOnut and PLine commands.)
? If you want a pattern that starts out solid but then fades away (or transitions to a different color) in one or more directions, use the Gradient tab on the Boundary Hatch and Fill dialog box. This option creates a gradient fill. You can control the color(s), direction(s), and angle of the gradient.
Solid and gradient fills are a good way to mimic poche — an old hand-drafting technique in which you shade areas with a lighter colored pencil (usually red) to make those areas appear lightly shaded on blueline prints. The figure shows some examples of solid and gradient fills.
A
Predefined and custom hatch patterns require that you enter the angle and scale for AutoCAD to generate the hatching. You usually won’t have any trouble deciding on an appropriate angle, but a suitable scale can be tricky.
