Hatch basics

- There comes a time in drafting where you need to display the material of an object, whether siding on an architectural elevation or the materials of an assembly section like steel or aluminum. Instead of drawing patterns of lines by hand, AutoCAD allows us to fill closed areas with a hatch pattern. We'll find the hatch tool here and are immediately presented with a hatch visor and the request to pick an internal point. Think of this as pouring a bucket of paint into the enclosed area.

The pattern will spread to fill the area you select so the area must be completely closed. I'm gonna click the inside the area here and I'm immediately given a visual preview of the pattern. I can move up to the hatch visor and select the pattern I wanna use, either from the dropdown here or by clicking on the swatch directly here. There's a rather extensive list of different hatch patterns that comes shipped with AutoCad for Mac. Fortunately, if I know the pattern I'm looking for I can search for it here on the bottom.

I'll select it, and I get another visual preview of what my hatch is gonna look like. I'm gonna close the hatch library and let's move from left to right and take a look at some of the options. I can change the angle of my hatch pattern, as well as adjusting the overall scale. Right now, my gravel looks a little small so I'm gonna scale it up by a factor of four. Much better. Next, moving left to right, I have some other options here including creating separated hatches.

If I click multiple hatch areas that are not connected, AutoCAD will still link this two together and consider them one hatch object. This is helpful if I go to update the hatch pattern later but it can also be a drawback if I need to change the hatch pattern of one section versus the other. Fortunately, I can adjust this here by creating separated hatch patterns. The eyedropper allows me to match the hatch properties or essentially use the eyedropper to pick an existing hatch pattern to set my new hatch too.

As I mentioned earlier, the area where hatching must be closed or AutoCAD will not know where to end the pattern. If the area you pick is not closed, like this rectangle here, AutoCAD will display an error letting me know that a closed boundary cannot be determined. AutoCAD also shows me where the most likely gap is using two red circles here. Once your hatch pattern is created you can click on it to edit it and that visor will reappear. You can also right-click after selecting the hatch object and change a few additional parameters like the set origin option here.

This allows me to change the origin of the hatch pattern. This is very useful if you're using a pattern to show something like ceiling tiles, floor tiles or brick so you can start the pattern at a specific point so it's centered. Hatching is also very useful and that it is intelligent and will react to the objects that created the original hatch boundaries. In this case, I have a circle here that was inside of my hatch object. If I adjust the circle, the hatch pattern contracts and expands to fill the space.

I can do the same with the circle here and the hatch pattern is intelligent enough to recognize the objects that originally created the pattern. Hatches make creating a fill or texture a simple task so you don't spend your time drawing lines or copying shapes to denote materials or surfaces.