So next up, we're going to look at hatching.
Hatching can be well, it can look complex, but there's some basic principles to stick to.
And that covers all hatching, really.
So we're going to create a basic rectangle.
Okay.
And I'm just going to do it by eye.
Let's say something like that.
Okay.
And.
And to create a hatch.
We have this icon here under the draw command.
Okay.
And we have some some different options underneath.
For now, we're just going to concentrate on Hatch.
This is the one you'll use most, just this hatch command.
And it can also be done by just typing h return.
That's the kind of shortcut key but that's the icon there.
Hatch Okay.
And now you get a new toolbar with a whole load of options, but they're pretty basic, first of all.
There's these two options to choose a hatched area and you'll use, depending on what your object looks
like and how crowded your drawing is, you might use one or the other, but we'll look at those later.
For now, I'm going to just select.
I'm just going to choose a select command.
Okay.
So here we have a boundary.
So it's a clear boundary.
It's a rectangle, which means it's closed.
Okay.
There's no openings in it.
It's a closed line.
So we we can automatically fill this.
If you imagine it's a bit like the paint bucket tool.
If you've ever used any of things like Photoshop and things, you want to fill this with a pattern or
a color or both.
Okay.
If there's any gaps in this line, then that fill is going to leak out and you're going to get some
if it's going to fail or you're going to get some kind of crazy behavior.
So you want to be always using these closed lines with a hatch.
And we'll look at again, we'll look a bit more about that later.
But for now, let's just create a basic hatch.
So we've got our select command, which means select an object to hatch.
A man.
We can choose our pattern.
So.
You can click this little button here to bring it out a bit more, give you a better view.
AutoCAD comes with all these kind of standard hatches which go back to some of them, the old hand-drawn
days where different things would represent different types of brickwork and blockwork and that kind
of thing.
So it includes all those basic hatches.
And generally these are good enough to get you through most things.
You can have concrete, you can have brick, all that kind of thing.
So if I wanted to make this into just some diagonal lines, we'll choose that one.
Okay.
And we're already on select.
So now I select that object and you'll see if we zoom in, we get all these diagonal lines.
Okay.
The thing is, I know looking at this, it's just going to look like a kind of solid hatch because the
lines are too close together.
So it's no good at the moment.
And that's where our properties panel comes in, which is the next kind of box.
Okay.
And here we have different things.
We've got pattern which will change between this kind of pattern.
So where it says pattern, it means we're using an actual design like this, a diagonal lines.
We could change it to a solid hatch, which is just a full, solid color.
Which is it's also the pattern, but you can change it here or a gradient, which is basically a it
will change.
It will blend gradually from one color to the other.
And you've got different types of gradients.
You can have it going back to the same color.
So you've got these different gradients here.
You could have circular ones.
Okay.
The.
But we're going to stick with pattern at the moment.
And this pull down, really, that's the three main types of hatch.
So you've got solid hatches which are just solid.
You've got the gradients and the patterns and they're all you can just choose them all on here.
Okay, so if we wanted solid, we could have just selected solid instead of a diagonal lines.
If we want to gradients, we could have selected those here.
To be honest, this is the way I usually choose my the pattern.
I want to just select it in this pattern box.
Okay.
And that will be left there.
So we'll go back to these diagonal lines and we've got this pattern here.
And now the next line is a color.
So what color do you want this hatch?
And you've got all these kind of index colors here.
We can click on more colors and you get even more.
You can click on True Colors.
If you know the actual code, you could type that in.
Okay, You've got all different ways of selecting colors.
Generally, I use this index color and there's usually enough here for us.
Okay, It's usually enough for you to choose from.
So let's make this red, okay?
And this option here.
Is the background color.
So by default, the background color is just empty.
It's kind of transparent, it's whatever is in the background.
But we could change that.
So it's a blue kind of solid with red lines.
Again, we can't it's hard to see unless we zoom in because our our lines are too close together.
I don't use that much, to be honest.
I usually have no background.
And the main thing to change for us here is this the distance between the lines and that can be done
using this hatch pattern scale.
Okay, so it's set to one.
And that's too close together.
Let's change that to ten.
And now you can see we're getting nicer kind of pattern which will actually print as a pattern.
It's not too close together.
It won't just merge into one mess.
So you can see these diagonal lines, but supposing we wanted them to run the other way, That's this
option here angle.
If we change that to 90, we can now have them running the other way.
If we wanted to in vertical, we could change it to 45.
Okay, 135 will be horizontal.
So maybe you wanted to represent something like wooden, kind of boring.
You could with a combination of scales and angles.
You can make it look however you want.
Really.
So these are the main two properties are change the angle and the scale.
And the angle is only really on these diagonal lines.
You wouldn't change the angle really on brickwork usually or anything like that.
But scale, certainly every hatch, if it's a pattern, it will require a certain scale and then we've
got transparency.
So.
Let's say we had a solid hatch.
And we had something underneath it.
We wanted to fill in a room, maybe just to show, just to specify that any room highlighted in red
needs a carpet, for instance.
Okay.
But we still want to see the things in the room.
If it was furniture in the room, text in the room, this solid hatch would overpower it.
You won't be able to see well, you can set a transparency, okay?
And that allows you to actually see through the hatch.
So you can use it.
It's more of a kind of indicative reference kind of thing, but it does come in handy.
I do use that.
It can also with solid hashes, there can be a bit overpowering when you print them by putting transparency.
It just kind of blurs them out a bit and makes them less overpowering.
So that's the main options in terms of properties.
Okay.
So.
We will ignore these for a moment.
These are more advanced commands.