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Templet Hatches (Red Resources)


Matt Overton

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The hatch editing is to be kind gangly and hard to use. Still, it does allow some fairly complex hatches to be made by people with patience far exceeding mine.

Maybe that is the problem as 90% of the hatches we use are fair simple in set up and follow some basic patterns.  We need to adjust these all the time in many projects. i.e. Herringbone is always far harder to get right and breaks very quickly from the origin if not accurate. 

 

Could there be a simpler version of hatches that say can be built with a couple of simple settings? 

 

So all the standard tile patterns would just need us to set tile length and width and boom accurate hatch ready to use.

Maybe they could be driven by a Python script.

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I agree that the Hatch interface is "gangly and hard to use." Have you tried using Tile fills instead? They function quite similarly but are exponentially easier to make since you just draw the geometry.

 

Here's a herringbone Tile I made in about 30 seconds:

TileFillExample.vwx

 

 

The only drawback I'm aware of (and a fairly major one) is that you can't use Tile fills as Surface Hatches for textures. Hence this request:

 


 

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Personally, I don't think Tile fills are the solution as there are some reports that they don't consistently export to DWG.

 

The hatch interface has been complained about for over 15 years. This post from 2001 outlines one idea for how it *should* work:

Apparently some localized versions included a menu script that created hatches from any repetive linework:

 

Edited by rDesign
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No problem with tiles (other than issues noted) although I'm thinking an interface which is easier still and more procedural.

 

It's not just about making it easy It's also about making class or material definition something more expressive.  In that, a procedural hatches variables would be what is most important about that pattern and could form part of schedules.

 

 

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And here I am, three years later, with a computer science degree and a reasonably high skill level at Vectorworks, searching the forums and trying to make sense of the bloody hatch editor! They are such a fundamental part of the software - the basic fill for objects in so many applications - that it's insane there is not an easier way to customise and create them.

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I agree the hatch editor is not very user friendly (to put in mildly).

 

It's not the answer but if all you want to do is scale or rotate an existing hatch then a cool trick is to first use the attribute mapping tool to get it looking right then right click on it and choose "New hatch from locally mapped hatch..."

 

Very quick

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3 hours ago, Boh said:

 

It's not the answer but if all you want to do is scale or rotate an existing hatch then a cool trick is to first use the attribute mapping tool to get it looking right then right click on it and choose "New hatch from locally mapped hatch..."

 

That I can (just about!) manage! What I'm trying to do is create a herringbone hatch based on different dimensions to the Herringbone Parquet one I'm basing it off. My issue is that I just can't work out what the numbers mean! Their modules appear to be 51 x 202, so the repeat is 2 x 202 and the start on Level 2 is about 51, but I have no idea what the dash factor is, or the offset and how it's reached.

 

Spent ages looking for a tutorial to spell it out like I'm five, but no luck! I've resorted to tweaking the numbers and seeing what happens! 

image.thumb.png.fa1685d4d089d8cb4bcecd444c80e700.pngimage.thumb.png.3639c4c3c1ca54f37cad7ae12d7042e3.png

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If you hover over the numbers you don't understand then there is an explanation of it at the bottom of the dialogue box (which is not always very helpful).

 

For the dash factor:

image.thumb.png.e763c065e4779b5a018d6b1354b183c6.png

For the herringbone hatch the dash factor should be 5/8, i.e (board length + board width) divided 8x board widths). This is 0.625 so I don't know why your hatch says 0.62057898 which I think would make it look odd if the the hatch is too far way from the drawing origin.

 

Note that you can choose to set the numbers either by polar mode (angle + length) or cartesian mode (x length + y length). For this hatch it is simpler to set the offset by cartesian mode in which case both the x and y offsets are just the width of your boards.

 

So for a board A wide x 4A long:

Level 1

Start: X=0, Y=0

Repeat: delta X= 8xA, delta Y= 0

Dash factor = 0.625

Offset: delta X=A, delta Y=A

 

Level 2

Start: X= 0, Y= -A

Repeat: deltaX= 0, deltaY= 8xA

Dash factor = 0.625

Offset: delta X=A, delta Y=A

 

Hope that makes sense!

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