From the course: AutoCAD 2021 Essential Training

Using the Hatch command - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2021 Essential Training

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Using the Hatch command

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- We're starting a new chapter now in our course and we're looking at hatching and gradients in our AutoCAD drawings. We've got a new drawing for you. It's called HatchingGradients.dwg and you can download it from the library to follow along with the videos as per usual. You will recognize the drawing, it's the floor plan of the office that we used in the previous chapter. And what we're going to zoon into is the conference tables that we created, in the bottom, left board room of the building. So they're just down here, so let's get those nice and central on the screen, first, using a bit of zooming and panning like so. You want them nice and big like that so that you can see what's going on with your hatching and your gradients. Then what we're going to do is we're going to make sure that we're on the A hatching layer. So on the layer drop down here, make sure you're using A hatching. That layer there. And the reason you put your hatching on a separate layer, it allows you to freeze it, turn it off, work on some geometry, and then perhaps put it back into the drawing again. Just allows you to see the wood for the trees and I can't stress that enough with layers in AutoCAD. Create new layers, so that you can turn them on and off whenever you need to. So we're going to look at the left-hand table, the one with the filleted corners, first of all. And we need the hatch command so we're going to go up to the draw panel on the home tab on the ribbon, click on this fly out here, which you'll recognize from where we used the boundary command previously, and we're going to select hatch. And what happens is, you get prompted to pick an internal point on the crosshair and we get another contextual ribbon tab called Hatch Creation. Now, we want to make sure that we're using Pick Point, here. Which we are, which is why it's asking us to pick an internal point. And then moving across the ribbon, we want to use a hatch pattern. Now there's lots of different patterns available. The default is ANSI31, American National Standards Institute, 31. And it's just a regular cross hatch. You can see it there on the little, sort of swatch there that it shows you in the menu. As we come down though, you can see there's lots of different styles of hatching available to you. You've got things like brick, and sand, and clay, and so on. And as we go down we've got earth, we've got ESCHER patterns if you want to put those in, and then we start coming down to the gradient patterns which we'll use later. And then as we keep going further down, you've got gravel, you've got hexagons, you can add lots of different types of hatch patterns, as you can see. And as you work your way down, all the way down to the bottom, you can actually create user defined ones as well. Now, I'm just going to go back up to the top. So we'll just quickly click all the way back up again, like so. And I'm going to use the default one, the ANSI31 here like so. Now, before we place it in our left-hand conference table, it's always worth upping the scale here, the hatch scale. Now, bear in mind, we're working in a metric millimeters drawing. So that little 1.0 there represents one unit between each line of the hatch. So it would look very dense, it would almost look solid. So let's take that up to say, 500. Just to give it a nice large number and press enter. Then, you'll see when we hover over here, you can see that we get a nice hatch pattern and it stands out, it's obvious, it's highlighting the conference table and it's really simple. You just click and your hatch pattern is now applied to that boundary, that polyline that forms the table. We can then close Hatch Creation, like so, and we've got a nice hatch pattern there highlighting our conference table in our AutoCAD drawing. And hatching is that simple. It's a really, really simple function and the whole idea of hatching is the ability to highlight elements in your AutoCAD drawings, which we've just done with our left-hand conference table. What we'll look at in the next video is the gradient fills that we can use, which are similar to hatching, but they use color instead. And we'll use the gradient fills on the right-hand conference table.

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