AutoCAD Hatch Patterns – ACAD Tutorial

What are hatch patterns and how to they work?

Hatch patterns have been around since the beginning of AutoCAD. By launching the HATCH (or BH) in the command line and selecting an enclosed object or boundary, you can quickly fill an area in your drawing with a repeating pattern. The pattern simply fills the area and then stops when it reaches the perimeter of the boundary to be hatched.

Hatch Patterns can also be associative, meaning the hatch is dynamically updated as you change the outlining boundary. Every hatched area created with the HATCH command are associative by default until you decide to explode it.

It is preferable to keep the hatch pattern intact (unexploded), this way the AutoCAD hatch pattern is treated just like a block. You can easily move, erase and copy them as though it were one entity. Associative hatch patterns can also be stretch and the hatch will update itself automatically to the new shape.

Resources for Hatch Patterns

Hatch patterns run and install just the same whether you have AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT. We offer these hatching programs right here at SimpleCAD:

• 365 Hatch Patterns For AutoCAD – custom patterns
• Hatch Manager (library also included)
• Wood & Stone Hatch Patterns

Feel free to explore our AutoCAD Hatch Patterns to either create your own hatch pattern or choose from hundreds of other already made for you.

How to customize and create your own AutoCAD Hatch Pattern

Hatch patterns are made up of lines, line segments, dots, and gaps between each object. To create or customize a repeating pattern, you define various x and y values in a text file (called the acad.pat file) and then specify an offset and angle of each hatch object in the pattern.

Note: If you are not a programmer or don’t want to take time to create your own hatch pattern, we highly recommend this AutoCAD hatch manager to create hatch patterns using existing objects in your drawing file.

Locating and Installing Hatch Patterns

When installing our wood or stone hatch patterns for AutoCAD or any raw hatch pattern code you actually copy and paste the hatch pattern code (text file) into your existing .pat file mentioned above. You may also need to add a search path to the file is required if you have more than one .pat file which takes a minute or so to do.

Your AutoCAD hatch pattern definitions are located within your acad.pat file. This file is usually located in program files under \autocad\ support or \autocad\UserDataCache\support. Note that the UserDataCache folder is a hidden folder and cannot be seen without changing a couple settings in Windows.

At SimpleCAD we also offer free support on all our hatch patterns installations. Contact us today for more.