Hatch

Hatch is an important command in CAD drawing, with Hatch, we can easily fill an enclosed area.

In mechanical and design industry, we usually need Hatch command to show the interior of some spare parts; In the engineering and design industry, we also need Hatch command to show some special materials or landform.

1.Find and click the “Hatch” button, as shown in the following picture, or you can enter H and then press Enter to start this command.

The shortcut key for Hatch command is H, which says pretty much about how frequently it’s used.

After executing the Hatch command, the following dialog box would pop up.

There are three parameters that are most commonly used:

* Pattern, which lists available predefined hatch.

* Angle and scale, which specifies an angle for the hatch pattern relative to the X axis of the current UCS and expands or contracts a predefined or custom pattern. The Scale option is available only when Type is set to Predefined or Custom.

* Boundaries, which determines a boundary from selected objects that form an enclosed area.

The key lies in how to set a proper scale for the Hatch, otherwise, it might be too dense, or not dense enough.

2. Click the “Add: Pick points” on the upper right corner, and then click the area 1 and area 2 in the following picture to make them fill areas.

3. Press Space or Enter to confirm your hatch and the CAD system will automatically pop up again the “Hatch and Gradient” dialog box, click “OK” to finish your hatch.

If you’d like to modify the parameters for the Hatch command, for example, if you want to have bigger hatch scale or another hatch pattern, just double click the fill object to open the Hatch Edit dialog box, as shown in the following picture, and change the parameters in the dialog box.

There are many options for the Hatch command, click the arrow in the lower right corner to show more options, as shown in the following picture.

We can see more options such as Islands, Boundary retention, Boundary set, Gap tolerance, Inherit options, etc.

What’s more, there is the Gradient tab in this dialog box, where you can create one color or two color gradient. But what matters most for a beginner is the basic operations about Hatch: how to choose a pattern, how to set the scale, how to choose the boundary.