AutoCAD® 2009 & AutoCAD LT® 2009 All-in-One Desk Reference for Dummies®

Chapter 3. Hatching Your Drawings

In this chapter, you discover hatch patterns and fills and how to create and edit them. Hatch patterns and fills are used to communicate section cuts of a design, represent construction materials, and add depth to a drawing so it doesn't look flat. AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT offer two types of hatches: hatch patterns and solid fills. Hatch patterns are made up of line segments that are stored in pattern files, whereas solid fills are a single color and are not made up of line segments. AutoCAD offers an additional hatch type called gradient fills.

A gradient fill is similar to a solid fill except it's a blend of one color with a tint, or two colors, to give the illusion of depth and realism to a 2D drawing. Hatching allows you to quickly add a visual representation of floor tiles, shingles, or shakes on a roof for an architectural drawing. For a mechanical drawing, you might use a hatch pattern that creates diagonal lines to represent the part of a model that's shown cut through for a section view.

Hatch objects are created by default as a single object and are associative like dimensions. Hatch objects are created associative to the objects that form the closed boundary in which the hatch object is created. Keeping a hatch object associative allows it to be automatically updated when the boundary changes. Hatch objects can also be created nonassociative, which keeps the hatch object from being updated when the boundary changes. Hatch objects can be exploded ...