AutoCAD Hatch Problems & Tips - Boundary Errors + Time Saving Tricks | 2 Minute Tuesday

hey everybody brandon here from cad intentions and in today's two minute tuesday we're gonna be taking a look at the hatch command including a bunch of issues and common problems with hatching

as well as a few tips and tricks that are gonna save you time in the long run before we jump into the new video i want to thank today's sponsor

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and up above now let's jump right into today's video [Music] all right so as i mentioned we're gonna

be taking a look at the hatch command so for those of you who have not used it much you can simply type in hatch down at the command line and hit enter to bring it up or you can choose this

bottom on the home ribbon tab under the draw box called hatch this is going to activate the hatch creation ribbon bar and from here you've got a few options

but one of the most common issues and problems that you're going to run into when hatching is not having a closed polygon or boundary to hatch your

objects so you can see this odd shape up here i'd like to hatch it so i'm just going to choose pick points and click inside now you can see that it's alerted

me with an error calling for a closed boundary that cannot be determined so what it's doing is it's looking for a closed box to hatch and since i don't

have a fully closed hatched box you can see that it's shown me an error here and by hitting enter we're going to just exit that command so when we select our lines you can see

that they're broken apart so we've got a gap here which is pretty minor and we've got one it looks like over here which is pretty small as well now on more complicated

drawings say floor plans or site plans it's going to be hard to always find these little issues but the red circles that appear are going to help you track them down so you have two options you

can close those so simply connecting them up and or joining the lines is going to fix that issue most of the time now if you still can't find

those broken sections you can activate the hatch command once again here and go to the options fly out to the right now there's an a section and an option here

called gap tolerance you can crank this up a bit and it's going to allow for gaps to be filled automatically by the hatch command now you don't want to turn it up too much

but you're going to need to know roughly the scale of your drawing and the size of those gaps it doesn't hurt to start big but you could end up hatching further than you would like i've turned mine up now let's click on

the pick points option again and click inside here and you can see that it has automatically hatched even though we do still have this gap over here between these two

lines so you can see it's broken but it's filled that in and hatched the area perfectly so that's the first issue and how you can fix that you can either use

those red circles and close your polygons or lines or you can use the gap tolerance option and turn that up a bit to make up for it now i wouldn't always

leave that turned on because it is nice to know if you have a broken polygon so i like to get that alert and then adjust it and i'll usually go back to a low or minimal gap tolerance

now another thing that comes up often with hatching is how do you break apart or separate separate or multiple areas that are part of one hatch so i'm going to show you that right now

we're going to type hatch and we're just going to click here and here and here so you can see that this has all become one hatch we'll change our color oh sorry over

here we'll change our color so it's a little bit more visible and you can see we have all of those three areas selected but they're acting as a single hatch so if we hit enter you can see

it's hatched all of those areas together but say i want to have each area as a separate color now you could hatch each one individually or you can simply go up to the options fly out here and separate

your hatches now this is going to break them up by closed area so each closed area now has its own hatch we can now go and change out those colors pretty quickly and easily here saving

you a ton of time with your hatching you can simply go through and click all of your areas that you're interested in and i'm going to show you that again down here so we're going to bring up our hatch command again

we're going to pick points and we're just going to go around here and choose a bunch of areas now once again it's going to combine all of these to an

individual or a single one individual hatch and hitting that options button separate hatches has now split up each closed area to make it

easy for us to change out these colors later or perhaps simply delete one here or there now lastly what do you do if you've lost

the boundaries or deleted them by accident from your hatch and you need to make changes or maybe you want to re-hatch or adjust the boundaries you can bring those back by simply

selecting any hatch and you can see here that we don't have any lines along the outside so if i move my hatch all of my poly lines are gone but if you

select it right click and choose generate boundary it's going to recreate that outer boundary line so that you can make changes and

re-hatch if necessary so same goes for this one over here i can delete this outer line all i've got is the hatch but by right clicking and generating a

boundary it's recreated the line that is used as the outer boundary for our hatch this can be super useful if you need to make changes later on in the process maybe those lines accidentally got

deleted or maybe you wanted to you can always bring them back as long as you've got that hatch to generate the boundary from alright so i hope you guys enjoyed today's video again i want to remind you

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