From the course: AutoCAD 2024 Essential Training

Using the Hatch command - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2024 Essential Training

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Using the Hatch command

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- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now, and we're going to take a look at hatching and gradient fills in AutoCAD. And we've got a new drawing for you, it's called MetalPlate_001.dwg. So you know the drill by now, download the drawing from the library, open it up in AutoCAD, and make sure you are in the model tab for this particular video. Now we are zoomed into a section view and a side view of a metal plate. So the side view is fine, we don't need any hatching or gradient fills on that, we're looking at the side of the metal plate and the green dash lines represent the hidden detail, so there's some holes going through the plate. Now the section view on the other hand, has some solid lines here, which indicate basically a break in the section. If I zoom out slightly, you'll see a plan view and you'll notice here there is a slotted hole in the center of the metal plate. You'll also notice there's an extra hole there in the plan view, and we'll talk about that later, when we're editing our gradient fill and our hatching. What I'd like you to do is pop over to the nav bar now and just do a zoom previous, and do another zoom previous again. So click there and that'll take you back to your section and side view. On the home tab, on the ribbon, in the layers panel, go to your layer dropdown and make sure you're using the hatching layer, like so, so that's our current drafting layer. And then what we're going to do, we're going to jump into the draw panel here, click on the fly out and select hatch. Now the hatch that we're going to use is a very simple hatch, it's this one here, ANSI31, ANSI stands for American National Standards Institute, and it's just a standard crosshatch, so that's our ANSI31 crosshatch. Now you'll notice we've got various methods of selecting our hatch select pick points, and if you hover now, can you see that our hatching is coming in nicely with a little preview every time I hover over a possible internal point. Now what we're going to do is we're going to hatch the area that is cutting through the metal plate, so where the slotted hole is, it won't be hatched. So we're going to pick this point here, one, this point here, two, this point here, three. We're then going to move across here and do the same again, one, and two, and three, then you can press enter to finish or pop up to close hatch creation on the contextual hatch creation ribbon tab. So we've got our hatching in place, like so, so that's how we generate our hatching. Now obviously hatching is pretty easy to set up, we've set all of that up, it's on the right layer and so on. But here's the clever thing, if I hover over this, can you see there that each hatch pattern that we've put in each of those boundaries is a separate hatch. If I go back to the hatch command, you need to go to this options fly out here on the hatch creation tab, and notice create separate hatches has been set, like so, so that's on when I'm creating the hatching, so it's creating separate hatches each time, which might be something that you don't want. So just hit escape a couple of times to cancel the hatch command, and what we'll do, we'll select the hatches, click on each one, you'll notice you get some weird sort of messages pop up about non-associative hatch boundary grips, you can ignore those, so we're selecting the hatches like that and we're just going to delete them, so it's a right click and erase on the shortcut menu. We then go back to the hatch command, like so, and we pick the internal point again, make sure you're using ANSI31, but make sure you go here to the options and turn off create separate hatches, it is normally on by default. Now the reason I want you to turn it off is I want the hatch pattern just to be one object. So I'm going to click here again, one, two, three, and then click here again, one, two, and three. Press enter to finish or click on close hatch creation, and when you click on the hatch this time, can you see it's all one object and that's what you want, You want one hatch pattern in this particular case. Just hit escape a couple of times and that's pretty much how you place a hatch pattern in AutoCAD.

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