you're wasting your time with your Autocad hatches. hi there I'm Irving but you
might know me as the lazy Arquitecto for time-saving autocad tutorials and
tools for architect. today I'll share with you that the techniques I use to work
faster with Autocad hatches, I'll start by explaining some useful commands
following by some system variables that control the behavior of hatches. once you
implement these techniques that I am about to show you you definitely will
speed up your workflow in autocad. are you ready? so let's start with the
technique number one. here for this example, I want to copy a couple of these
lights above this hatch that is representing an ACT ceiling grid. you can
see this is a hatch and look what happens if I just copy this over here. as you can
see I cannot place the light exactly because it doesn't allow me to
snap on the hatch. so to change this behavior let's use the snap hatch system
variable and let's set it to one, once you do that you can see that now you can
snap on any hatch
so let's quickly go to the technique number two. let's change to this
elevation drawing and let me zoom over here and if I use a hatch to hatch this
area with a CMU and accept that using enter you can see that the hatch is
going outside the area that I wanted to hatch it. so let me undo that and one of
the reasons why this is happening is because the area to be hatch is
probably opened somewhere but in order to speed up the hatching process and not
waste time trying to find what is the issue or the gap let's use a system
variable that's going to help you hatch this, even though has certain gaps
somewhere so for this let's use the HPGAPTOL system variable and as you can
see right now it's set to 0 that means
any area that you were going to hatch needs to be closed but if we
set it up to one or two, I will set it up to one and try again the hatch command by
typing the H shortcut you can see there, it says continue and your hatch is
now showing correctly. so you press ENTER. you can see
that your hatch is now showing correctly just to show you what really happen is
that this area has a gap of about one inch
so this is the technique I use to hatch any area even though it might have a
small or tiny gap so use it let me know in the comments if you found is useful too.
so let's go now with the technique
number three. as you can see on this example this hatch or CMU hatch origin
point is not showing correctly most of the time in architecture you want to
start your CMU blocks having an entire CMU block from the
bottom and all the way up but this case is not showing like that. this one is
not showing correctly, so let me show you how to always have your origin point on
the right place. for this let me go to this other area to
show you that this origin point always shows incorrectly let me use the hatch
command again and as you can see it's showing half of the CMU block at the
bottom so in order to avoid this issue let me show you the technique I use to
always have your origin point starting from the bottom all the way up so let me
remove this, and for this, we're going to use the system variable ORIGINMODE, so
basically these will control the origin point for your hatches so if I set it to two
now I use the hatch command again you can see that now you see a cmu block
shows an entire block here from the bottom left corner .so that's how I
always like to show it. so that's good let me fix the other one over here.
again if you use hatch and continue you can see that also in showing the origin point
for the hatch correctly this time. so again the system variable to control
the origin point on hatches is HPORIGINMODE and just to show you if I
press f1, you can have these values over here from 0 to 5 so you can pick the
origin that you need for your hatches. so let me share with you now the
Autocad hatch technique number 4 and this would be the HPLAYER so if you can see here
the hatches that we were doing are coming in the wrong layer as you can see
this hatch is on layer 0 as well as these other one so HPLAYER will help
you set any default layer for any of your new hatches in AutoCAD. let me show
you how it works let me remove this and let's type HPLAYER
now you can specify a layer. so for this case or
this example I'm going to use the EX-hatch layer and now the next time I hatch
something you can see that it will come on EX-hatch layer. in the same way
you can also set up a color for your hatch using the HP-COLOR system variable
so we use hatch command again. Autocad hatch tip number five. as you can see here I
have some objects that are behind this hatch and I could just use the draw
order command to send this hatch to the back but I want to send all of the
hatches to the back at once so for this there is a handy command
related to hatching that it's called hatchtoback command and we can use it
by using the shortcut HB so if you type HB and press ENTER you can see that all
of your hatches are sent to the back automatically. Autocad hatch technique
number six let me share with you how to create quick custom hatches in AutoCAD
so let me get rid of this hatch now and I'm going to draw a circle now I'm going
to make this circle a block
and specify any basepoint. so once you have your block
you can get rid of it and let's use the SUPERHATCH command. click block and use the
block that you just created in this case circle and if I place it over here for a
factor would be one, rotation zero, is this placement correct yes and now
specify the first corner of the block, so I'll click here and over here
now we can press ENTER and if we follow the instructions is saying specify the
internal point I'll click over here and press Enter
are you sure you want to do this yes and you can see that now your area was hatched
using the BLOCK that you just created. Autocad hatch tip number seven. let me
share with you the most useful technique I use to manage and use hatches in AutoCAD
and this will be the tool palette. open it by using control 3 and
as you can see somewhere here so I'm gonna lock it and basically if you add
any hatch to this tool palette you can set it up with any settings
that you like. for example, if I remove this and go to this elevation. let's say I
wanna use this brick hatch. if I click on, you can see that it automatically
comes in the layer that I want. in this case in ex-hatch as well as the correct
scale, the correct origin point, and so on and this is all set up here by using the
right-click on it and choose properties. you can see that you can set the default
options for this specific hatch so you can set angle, scale, and so on
remember that you can add any hatch to your tool palette by simply selecting it
left-click on it, and dragging it to your tool palette. you can then click and
rename it as well as change the properties that you like to use.
remember that I did an entire tutorial related to tool palettes
and all of the techniques I use to save time in your Autocad workflow
so let me know in the comments if you knew any of these Autocad hatching techniques