hatching Autocad

archistud

Hi,

so I have a problem, that I want to hatch quite a few closed areas (polyline) but I can't do it somewhat fast.
I'm working on this project and it is pretty big so whenever I take command HATCH, everything just blocks..

My question is: is there a faster way to select multiple closed areas than 'pick points'?

Michael Mayer

For me it works in v19 Mac.

In the large "Hatch" Settings Dialog there is a green "+"
called "Pick Points in Boundary".
With that I can repeated "fill bucket" Hatches into closed
2D Elements or even in Areas where multiple objects overlap.

Anthony Apostolaros

I hatch by pick points almost exclusively. Before hatching, I turn off layers such as Grid, Dimensions, and Notes -- layers whose objects I don't want defining hatch boundaries. I even have a special layer for that purpose, called Detail, for objects that aren't distinguished in one of those other ways but are nevertheless in the middle of what I know will become a hatch area.

Roy Klein Gebbinck

Anthony's approach is one way to improve the performance of the _Hatch command. It also helps to zoom in first as the _Hatch command only analyzes on-screen entities when you pick points. But IMO closed polylines should be hatched by using the 'Select boundary entities' option, which is always faster than the 'Pick points in boundaries' option.

Anthony Apostolaros

Actually, with Detail and those other layers off, I almost never use more than one pick point per hatch entity.

But looking again at the original post, which did say that the hatched areas are already enclosed in polylines, and the problem is just that there are so many of them -- I think what archistud needs is a custom command that filters a selection set for polylines and then executes a hatch-by-Select-boundary-entities on each one. That would take me all day to write, but Roy probably sees the required code in his mind as he's reading my post.

Roy Klein Gebbinck

Writing Lisp code for this purpose is possible. But don't forget you can use Quick Select to preselect and filter entities.

Hans De Backer

Structure Browser panel is also very helpful to hide/unhide entities
Slow boundary detection can occur when very large xrefs or blocks are involved: if not required, hide them.

Enabling BoundaryDetection while hovering entities (set SelectionModes=4) combined with using the Quad cursor-menu, allows very fast creation of hatches.
Just hover the desired closed area: while the area boundary is highlighted, select the Add Hatch tool from the Draw tab of the Quad.
A hatch is created using the pattern with the name stored in the HPNAME setting: normally this variable holds the name of the most recently used Hatch Pattern.

After creating this first hatch, the Add Hatch command is memorized by the Quad as the most recently used command applied to a hovered boundary, so from now on, it suffices to hover a closed area and right-click to trigger this most recently used Quad command: Add Hatch.
In practice it means you can create like one hatch per second by simply moving the mouse over the next area and right-clicking it when it highlights.

Anthony Apostolaros

@Roy Klein Gebbinck said:
..... But don't forget you can use Quick Select to preselect and filter entities.

Yes, that's all archistud needs. I couldn't get the Hatch command to accept the results of a Quick Select made during the Hatch command itself, but if you pre-select all the polylines and then start the Hatch command and choose the "Select boundary entities" method, it uses the pre-selected set.